Category: GFF strand – FrightFest

I had a sense of trepidation going in to Lords of Chaos. Americans playing Norwegian metal musicians could go very, very wrong. I was delighted to find instead that it was fucking great.

Lords of Chaos, or How To Edgelord Your Way To Insanity And Death, is a dramatisation of the rise and fall of the band Mayhem. This includes suicide, cannibalism, arson and murder.

We were warned before the film began that we may find it gory. This is because the suicide scene is explicit. I wouldn’t describe it as gory because it was not excessive or gratuitous, simply showing the manner in which Dead killed himself in a matter-of-fact way.

One guy in the audience didn’t agree with my assessment of the gore, and vomited and fainted. The film had to be stopped, the house lights brought up, first aiders brought in, and an ambulance called. I can think of no better advertisement for this movie.

What was good about the movie was, while simultaneously carrying you along in the world and attitude of these characters, occasionally puncturing it with reminders that these were actually weans, in their teens and early 20s. They aren’t evil geniuses, in fact quite the opposite. A bunch of showoff little boys with fragile egos and catty cliques.

The central theme of the film is about yearning for authenticity and validation. This is especially difficult in a music culture of reforged identities and false names.

Weirdly funny and surprisingly heartfelt, this movie overcomes the odds to feel like a real achievement. 

Basically Running Man in a house. Utterly dull, nothing to say about it, just RAT-A-TAT! BOOM! roll credits.

A beautiful film about street children running from gangs in Mexico, and escaping into the world of their imagination and the unnoticed magic of the real world. Shades of Pan’s Labyrinth but also The Secret Garden, but set in a reality that’s utterly brutal.

A fun darkly comic seasonal splatstick.

A film about a restaurant owner who snaps during a robbery and decides to kill his assailants, customers and staff. Doesn’t make sense in terms of either character or plot. Gash.

A film about an obnoxious, spoilt teenager dabbling in black magic to resolve her mummy issues and getting her comeuppance. Despite some honking teen dialogue, movie remained watchable in large part, if a little over-stretched.

Something of a children’s fable or a folk story. It’s beautiful and the costuming in it is great, evoking stuff like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. With writhing demons and lost children, it hits somewhere between Legend and Pan’s Labyrinth. Great movement work from the demons too.

A film about a lighthouse and its occupants under seige from fish-people on a remote island. It’s kind like the anti-Shape of Water, because instead of a woman falling in love and saving a fish-man, a guy kidnaps, rapes and beats a fish-woman. This sparks off the conflict, which is represented as a microcosm of the cruelty and futility of war. However this film is barely more than the idea of the premise. The lighthouse being attacked in a neverending seige by those similar but different might be a good image but an image warrants a painting, not a 2 hour film. The entire run time is essentially just that image repeated over and over again, and no amount of narration or recitation of William Blake poetry can disguise the utter absence of a story in this film. The shots are very pretty but, again, unable to compensate for more than the first few minutes of screen time, certainly unable to carry an empty shell of a film.

A solid, quiet but unremarkable French zombie film.

A glorious revelling in the creature feature B-movie.