Beaks here...

Major Calm's coverage of the London Frightfest has been spectacular, so he needn't apologize at all for the week delay in between write-ups. As long as we get to post 'em, I'm a most happy fella. Today, he's got a slew of capsule reviews for horror flicks that run the gamut from "extreme" to "tongue-boring-through-cheek". I missed out on JACK BROOKS MONSTER SLAYER when it screened in L.A. a few weeks back, and if it's as fun as Major Calm says it is, I'm regretting the hell out of that. Calm also weighs in on one of Frightfest's buzz movies, MARTYRS.

Let's see what he has to say...

Hi guys



Major Calm here. Apologies for the week-long delay since my coverage of the first three days of London’s Frightfest ( which can be read here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/38127 and here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/38170 ) owing to my slightly hectic schedule. Contrary to my initial intentions – and in the interests of speedier posting - I’ll be dividing my final reviews into two posts covering Day 4 and Day 5 respectively. As with my previous reviews, I will be including the thoughts of my two fellow travellers for any movies they attended, to provide a more well-balanced and demographically-diverse opinion.



So, let’s get going with Day 4...



From Within (USA)



A spate of apparent teenage suicides whips a small religious town into panic and, before long, a witch-hunt is quite literally in full swing. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael’s debut feature as director starts promisingly, with a couple of teenagers’ lakeside romance taking a decidedly downward slide as the guy inexplicably blows his brains out. It’s a jarring moment and sets an awkward, edgy tone for a movie that is, ultimately, anything but. There are so many elements in this horror blender that it becomes almost impossible to focus on what the central theme of the film is. We’ve got murderous dopplegangers, bible-thumping zealots, witches’ curses and, of course, a truckload of teens that must die in order of importance to our plucky heroine, Lindsay (Elizabeth Rice). It’s a shame because the idea of a deeply religious town being under threat not only from a murderous supernatural entity but also a challenge to its belief system could have been dealt with in a far more thoughtful manner than it is here. The religious contingent are the stuff of caricature, from Dylan (Kelly Blatz) the heroine’s jealous zealot boyfriend to Adam Goldberg’s bizarre comic turn as her trucker stepfather, hence it’s almost impossible to empathise with any of them. Surely, it would have been more interesting to have made them more human, so that the heroine’s struggle to decide between the life she knows and the mysterious, broody ‘son-of-a-witch’, Aidan (Thomas Dekker) was more plausible. As it is, it’s impossible not to wish doppelganger death upon all and sundry and, even in this regard we’re short-changed, with the whole endeavour feeling strictly PG-13 across the board. Ultimately what we’re left with is a movie that has an interesting, dark premise beating at its heart - with a pretty strong cast to back it up - that, owing to Brad Keene’s formulaic and confused script, ends up resembling a particularly weak episode of Supernatural without the laughs (the intentional ones at least).



Let The Right One In (Lat den Ratte Komma In) (Sweden)



A bullied, disturbed young boy, living in a small, snow-swept town in northern Sweden, befriends the young girl that has just moved in next door. The pale, thirsty girl next door who only comes out to play at night. Adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel of the same name (or ‘Let Me In’, the curiously inappropriate US title), Let The Right One In stands out as a true original in the already overcrowded vampire subgenre. Choosing to focus on the burgeoning relationship between the two children, able to relate to each other through the shared isolation of their lives, the movie never loses sight of the mythology it must adhere to whilst being careful not to burden the central narrative with it either. This, at once, allows the complex and potentially disturbing relationship of the principal characters the time to develop with appropriate subtlety and, somehow, manages to make its vampiric elements feel completely fresh (and surprisingly vicious). Aided by astonishingly mature performances from both of the young kids, director Tomas Alfredson makes the most of the blank yet ominous surroundings and Johan Soderqvist’s painterly camerawork, to create a melancholy coming-of-age tale of extraordinary lyrical beauty, shot through with an underlying current of menace. Let The Right One In is, quite simply, a modern masterpiece and, in my opinion, is without question the best movie of the year so far. In a year of such unusual cinematic heights, this is no faint praise.



2nd opinion: Neither of my fellow travellers hesitated in calling this by far the best movie of the festival (and the year so far) commending, in particular, the perfectly judged pacing and outstanding performances.



The Broken (UK)



Lena Headey is Gina McVey, a radiologist at a London hospital who notices that some patients’ x-rays show that they are suffering from ‘dextrocardia’ ( a rare condition where the heart is on the wrong side of the body). Shortly thereafter she attends a family dinner at which, for no other reason than to kick-start the 98 minutes of tedium to follow, a mirror shatters in front of them all. The next day, stood at a street corner, she sees herself drive by. Cue lots more shattered mirrors and not much suspense to go with them. Yes, you guessed it, we’re in murderous doppelganger territory again. After last year’s unfortunately named Botched, we’re faced with another movie that has an unfortunately prescient title. Yet it’s worth pointing out that whilst Botched was a nightmarishly dreadful mess of a horror comedy that was neither funny nor scary, The Broken is not a total disaster, it’s just... well, broken - to the point where the only emotion it elicits is ennui. The problem lies, to a fairly hefty degree, with the director, Sean Ellis, a London based fashion photographer whose previous work includes the Oscar nominated short-film Cashback and the far less successful feature of the same name. His focus seems to be so heavily shifted towards making everything look pretty that he seems to have completely overlooked the film’s pacing - often sacrificing efficiency of storytelling for the sake of the visuals. He also seems to be under the misapprehension that he is making something more profound than a standard horror movie but, unless he is confusing the word profound with the word pretentious, he really isn’t. In fact, even worse, the movie plays out as little more than a turgid rehash of Philip Kaufman’s ’78 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, resulting in a ‘twist’ so obvious from word go that I’m not sure it’s the right term to describe it. All that said, Headey and the always dependable Richard Jenkins add a little gravitas to the proceedings and the film never sinks so low as to become totally unwatchable – just generic and very, very boring. Which is a shame as, in more assured hands, it might have been a creepy little movie that evoked the British chillers of the 70’s. It does look pretty though...



Autopsy (USA)



After a ‘crazy time’ at Mardi Gras, five college kids are involved in a car accident after swerving to avoid a body in the road. Then, as if by magic, an ambulance appears out of nowhere to take them back to the ironically named Mercy Hospital, where sinister things await. Now I don’t expect the heroes of destined-for-DVD trash like this to be Mensa candidates, but, if an ambulance you haven’t dialled appears on a stretch of road in the middle of nowhere and takes you to an equally secluded hospital populated by three less-than-savoury staff, that would, personally, have been my cue to get the fuck out of there. If only our five lambs-to-the-slaughter had reacted accordingly, I’d have been spared the utter nonsense that follows. Some audience members referred to Adam Gierasch’s debut feature as a welcome throwback to the straight-to-VHS shockers of the late 80s. I just call it an unwelcome, irritating mess with zero narrative coherence. Some praised the visuals as an homage to vintage 70’s / 80’s Argento. I just call it badly lit with garish colours that have no context within the hospital setting. Some have referred to Robert Patrick’s turn as a deranged surgeon, Dr. Benway, as gloriously over-the-top fun. I just refer to it as the painfully hammy cashing of a paycheck. There’s plenty of gratuitous gore though - including the hilariously dumb ‘organ tree’ - so if that’s your sole criteria for an entertaining movie, you’ll love it. For those who value quality of script, acting, pacing and visuals, however, probably best to avoid.



2nd opinion: Both my fellow travellers hated Autopsy; one highlighting the gratuitous violence as being distasteful and out of context in a movie otherwise played for campy laughs, the other marvelling at how someone as clearly intelligent as Gierasch could create a movie of such startling ineptitude.



Martyrs (France)



Fifteen years after escaping her abductors from a cell in an abandoned warehouse, a twenty-something Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) enters the house of a normal, middle-class family and blasts them all to death with a shotgun. As she and her best friend, Anna (Morjana Alaoui), clear the house of the bodies, they make a grim discovery, thus setting in motion a series of events that will lead them to the extremes of human suffering and depravity. Martyrs is a movie that is very hard to discuss without giving too much away. There’s been a huge amount of controversy surrounding Pascal Laugier’s sophomore feature, aimed primarily at its extreme level of violence and sickening imagery. Yet many have also praised the movie’s haunting beauty and its brutal exploration of religion and the human condition. Whilst I appreciate that it has elicited strong reactions from the few audiences that have seen it – allegedly three people were vomiting outside the Frightfest auditorium – I have to say that this peculiar tale left me a little cold. Whilst unquestionably extreme and disturbing, the violence had far less impact on me than, say, last year’s equally unpleasant – and, in my opinion, infinitely superior Inside (A L’Interieur). The opening sequences of the movie are raw and arresting - and herald Laugier as an assured and, occasionally inspired, talent to watch - but somewhere around the 50 minute mark it makes such a dramatic shift in narrative and tone that it’s hard not to find it all more than a little jarring. Laugier, himself, mentioned that he had tried to avoid the film becoming an exercise in superficial style, wishing to focus more on his heroines’ raw emotional states. His intentions are well justified – the movie’s characters and their surroundings need to be grounded in the real world to make their journeys as disturbing as the script promises - so it’s curious (and maddening) that Laugier would fall prey to the excessive over-styling of the latter half, removing the protagonists from our mundane reality, thus distancing the audience from those same emotions that he tries much too hard to evoke. Martyrs is unquestionably well performed – by Alaoui in particular - and technically very adept. It’s never less than wildly original and its secrets deserve to be discovered by anyone who can stomach some very extreme and disturbing imagery but, ultimately, I came away feeling a little exasperated by an ending that was, to my mind, a little too ambiguously pretentious and comic-book in style, rather than the fitting conclusion to the beautiful and distressing masterpiece that many would have you believe it to be.



2nd opinion: A bit of a difference of opinion on the fellow traveller front. Whilst one of them was almost entirely in agreement with me, the other found the whole movie, and the violence in particular, to be completely ineffective, pretentious and, ultimately, utterly pointless.



Jack Brooks Monster Slayer (Canada)



A couple of decades after witnessing his parents’ death at the hands of a woodland creature, Jack Brooks, a plumber with anger management issues, agrees to look at his night-school professor’s pipes, only to be thrust into combat against a demonic black heart with the destruction of the human race in its sights. You wait nearly two decades for a bit of 80’s-style horror comedy and, all of a sudden, you get two at once. Following Day 3’s awesome Dance of the Dead, Jack Brooks had a lot to live up to and, perhaps surprisingly, it ends up holding its own by comparison. Already in limited release in the US, Jon Knautz’s old school romp is destined as (and clearly designed to be) the start of a franchise featuring the titular character. The central conceit of monster-slaying as the only satisfactory outlet to Brooks’ rage is a funny one and Trevor Matthews makes an engaging hero, always keeping Brooks on the right side of amiable, even when the character is in the middle of one of his numerous hilarious rants. The rest of the cast is also of an unusually high standard for fare of this type, featuring solid work from a number of great character actors. Robert Englund, in particular, seems to be relishing the opportunity to go completely nuts - to great comic effect - as the possessed professor. If there’s one criticism to be made, it would have to be that it’s all over a little too quickly - the climax, in particular, feeling a little too hurried. But it’s all great, fast paced fun full of suitably low-fi effects and unusually sharp one-liners, with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek. Roll on Jack Brooks 2.



2nd opinion: Only one of my fellow travellers lasted to this midnight screening and had a great time with the movie, despite the overwhelming cloud of tiredness engulfing her.



That brings me to the end of what I hope has been an informative look at the films of Frightfest Day 4. I’ll be back in a few more days, as promised, with my final instalment covering Day 5 and all the little previews scattered throughout the festival. I’ll also pick my Top 5 and Bottom 5 of Frightfest 2008 (for those of you who have any interest).



Until then...





Major Calm