Frightfest review part one

Britain's biggest horror film festival kicks off in gory style with a day of Romero zombie pics.

Aug 31 2005

Amidst the hysteria of the August bank holiday weekend, in the heart of the West End, dwells the darkest depths of depravity. Mingling with tourists and ticket touts treads a different kind of thrill-seeker, one with an appetite for doom, dystopia, fearmongery and – this year especially – flesh-eaters.

London's Frightfest, mounted this year in Leicester Square's Odeon West End by the perennial 'Trio of Terror' – Paul McEvoy of The Cinema Store, film programmer Ian Ratray and journalist extraordinare Alan Jones – has in six short years become perhaps the country's premier genre event.

And if it hasn't yet reached the dizzy heights of Montreal's Fantasia or Brussel's Festival of Fantastic Films, that can only been down to the event's relative brevity, cramming, as it does, a colossal 21 films, six shorts and other assorted goodies into four short days.

It's a small issue, which pales into insignificance when compared with the tireless dedication of both the organisers and the devoted hundreds of weekend passholders who descend upon a new, exciting and always eclectic crop of genre product each year.

What follows is but a sample of the films on offer. Mere testimony – in addition to describing Frightfest's wealth of invited guests and celebrities, tingling atmosphere and ebullient celebration of spirited spectatorship – could never quite sum up such bizarre experiences as the cursed satellite link-up to director Hideo Nakata in Los Angeles, the bulk of which saw his image flickering erratically on-screen while he was informally quizzed by a particularly chatty tech-head who was micing up the director for the event.

FRIDAY

Dead Day was a fiesta for all things flesh-eating. Partly in tribute to legendary guest of honour George A Romero (hotfoot from a whirlwind UK press tour to promote his eagerly anticipated fourth undead outing, 'Land Of The Dead') and partly to exploit the expectancy of the festival faithful, the organisers cannily programmed a back-to-back screening of Romero's original trilogy: 'Night', 'Dawn' and 'Day Of The Dead'.

Even after 37 years, with its stark black and white imagery, brutally pared-down storytelling and disquietening denouement, 1968's no-budget masterpiece, 'Night Of The Living Dead', effortlessly maintains its reputation as one of the foremost horror paradigms, possessing the power to shock and awe in a fashion few pictures can claim nearly half a century on.

No less masterful, 'Dawn', with its intimate evocation of four characters attempting to maintain notions of society whilst besieged inside the vast consumer haven of the Monroeville Shopping Mall, and 'Day', with its far more stark appropriation of a last military stronghold as a grandly guignol metaphor, represent both an evolution of filmmaking and filmmaker in Pittsburgh's St George.

Bleeding organically outward from the economical beginnings of the series, the characterisation and aesthetic of a nation rapidly under siege from an undead horde, and society's subsequent systematic breakdown, are blurred and mauled to the point where the line between zombie and human, them and us, is both literally and figuratively eradicated. Come 'Day's cynical, bloody climax, Romero has conjured a frighteningly coherent and rational apocalypse.

It can only be his own fault that Romero's bar is set this high as 'Land Of The Dead' shuffles onto the screen with the appropriate fanfare and ghoulish glee, the almost serene septuagenarian marshalling the adulation with self-effacement and genuine appreciation of what is, frankly, a wondrous and long-in-materialising new opportunity.

The picture proves less a culmination of the Dead mythos than the burden of proof needed that, even at 70 plus, Romero is just as capable of a sharp, witty and refreshingly bullshit-free ride into the realms of gruesome social horror as more 'studio-friendly' filmmakers half his age. He delivers a package long on invention, acumen and exuberance and short on the shallow, snappy repartee of some contemporary pretenders.

'A Bittersweet Life' spearheads the forefront of 21st-century Korean neo-noir, a genre populated by the likes of 'Public Enemy', 'Bad Guy' and, most infamously, Park Chan-Wook's superb 'Oldboy'. Kim Ji-Woon's follow-up to his exemplary 'A Tale Of Two Sisters' is another gorgeously lensed, tightly wound coil of brutality, serenity and unctuous character turns, each succumbing to justly earned and spectacularly poetic ends.

Friday's midnight screening was Jake West's long-awaited follow-up to cult/goth favourite 'Razor Blade Smile', the thoroughly festival-friendly 'Evil Aliens'. A genuine marvel of technical ingenuity on such a low budget, it's a profane, gore-soaked caper unfortunately saddled, or perhaps saturated, with far too many spunk gags. It may savagely hone in on its target audience, who needless to say revel in every gloriously puerile moment, but as for the rest of us…

SATURDAY

Day two saw the anxiously awaited (though more to discover whether it was actually going to be any good) arrival of Dario Argento's TV picture of voyeurism and murder, 'Do You Like Hitchcock?' It's hard to begrudge answering in the affirmative though, as, while lackluster and lightweight compared with his classic giallo and horror output, it's a wholly watchable, affectionately rendered confection undernourished with verve, but compensating with a sly wit.

Irish zombie picture 'Dead Meat', produced by fest regular Ed King, trounces 'Evil Aliens' by simple virtue of playing it's delirious premise of a mad cow-inflicted epidemic commendably straight. More 'The Crazies' than 'Night Of The Living Dead', it's a pleasantly frantic and ingenious low-budget gem and includes the best 'death by household appliance' in recent memory.

'The Neighbour In Number 13' belongs to that beyond-oddball subgenre of 'Asian Ghostly Revenge' flicks that includes Thailand's 'Buppah Ratree'. Based on a celebrated underground comic book and featuring a fleeting, gooey cameo from the legendary Takeshi Miike, 'Neighbour' is not quite Nakata and not quite Lynch, but has a cumulative power that is nonetheless effective.

A rare breed in that it isn't 'The Wicker Man', 'Wild Country' is a well-meaning and well-performed Highland horror picture sadly undermined by being essentially a feature-length version of the moors scene in 'An American Werewolf In London', clumsily edited and shot through what appears to be a thick black sock. A sock, incidentally, which seems to double as the titular 'wild' lycanthrope, created by the normally redoubtable F/X talent of Bob Keen, who did the werewolf thing with far greater aplomb in Anthony Hickox's similarly lo-fi 'Waxwork'.

Saturday's prime time slot was for Ti West's aptly constructed 'The Roost'. A grim tale of endurance and hordes of winged beasties, bookended by a kitsch, pitch-perfect Tom Noonan in a throwback to a 50s-style horror host with sinister bite, it's a ferociously strong debut and is exactly how horror pictures used to feel at just the age you were allowed to see them. Fresh, lean and packed with genuine dread, this immaculately scored creature feature could well be the picture of the festival.

For part two, click here.

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