FrightFest
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FrightFest 2012: ‘The Victim’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Cult actor Michael Biehn makes his directorial debut with The Victim (2011), screening at this year’s Film4 FrightFest. This weak attempt at grindhouse opens with two local cops taking two strippers into the woods for a ‘private party’. One of the crooked cops gets carried away and ends up murdering one of the strippers…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Stitches’ review
★★★★☆ Writer/director Conor McMahon showcases the cutting-edge humour of edgy British comedian Ross Noble in his feature debut, making Film4 FrightFest entry Stitches (2012) a pleasant surprise in a gross-out, schoolboy fashion. There are certainly a number of marked similarities to that other anarchic jester jape, Funny Man (1994). However, where that slice of infantile…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘V/H/S’ review
★★★★☆ Ensemble effort V/H/S (2012) is just the type of film Amicus Productions would have churned out if they were still active. A portmanteau horror, with a returning narrative thread to string the short films together, V/H/S blends together a series of overly familiar and somewhat tired genre tropes and conventions. As with the Amicus…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Rec 3: Genesis’ review
★★★☆☆ One of the most anticipated films the play at this year’s 13th Film4 FrightFest, [Rec] 3: Genesis (2012) is the third instalment of Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s (on solo directorial duty here) much-admired Spanish zombie franchise. However, traditionalist Rec fans may well be in for a surprise with Plaza’s lone vision, which offers…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Cockneys vs Zombies’ review
★★★☆☆ Matthias Hoene’s zomventure (he dislikes the phrase ‘Zomody’), Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) has the kind of moniker you’d expect to discover whilst rummaging through the bargain bin in a petrol station. Yet whilst this remark may not be entirely inappropriate – Hoene’s homage to London’s East End is undeniably cheap and tacky – behind…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ review
★★★★☆ From the creative mind of Peter Strickland, the director behind 2009’s hugely promising Katlin Varga, comes the long-awaited Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Starring our very own Toby Jones amongst a host of all-Italian talent, Strickland’s Film4 FrightFest entry (having already screened at the revamped Edinburgh Film Festival) is an audiovisual tour-de-force, doing for giallo…
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FrightFest 2011: ‘Tucker & Dale vs Evil’ review
★★★★☆ Comedy and Horror work incredibly well together; scary moments can be funny and vice versa. The problem is that there have been a lot of horror comedies over the years, and the question is “what is left that is original and worth making?” However, my fears were abated when I watched Eli Craig’s directorial…
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Interview: Eli Craig on ‘Tucker & Dale vs Evil’
Eli Craig will not be a name familiar to many of you reading this – yet. His first feature, Film4 FrightFest favourite Tucker & Dale vs Evil (2010), stars Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk in a comical, inverted take on the Hillbilly slasher movie sub-genre. I recently spoke with the director to discuss the project…
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FrightFest 2011: ‘The Dead’ review
★★☆☆☆ Howard J. Ford’s The Dead (2010) – starring Rob Freeman and Prince David Oseia – takes the zombie film to the vast and parched continent of Africa, treading new territory in an attempt to breathe new life into a tired and worn out genre. When the last evacuation flight out of war-torn Africa crashes…
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FrightFest 2011: ‘Kill List’ review
★★★★★ With Kill List (2011), Ben Wheatley (director of the critically acclaimed Down Terrace [2009]) has created this year’s most horrendously violent and bizarrely surreal film by simply amalgamating the generic conventions of a hitman thriller with the eerie iconography of occult horrors such as The Wickerman (1973).Jay (Neil Maskell) hasn’t worked in eight months,…