Martyn Conterio
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FrightFest 2020: A Ghost Waits review
★★★★☆ In Adam Stovall’s necromantic horror film, a lonely blue-collar worker at the end of his tether meets and falls in love with a ghost haunting a property he’s overseeing for renovation. A Ghost Waits is an unexpectedly heartfelt gem of micro-budgeted filmmaking. No matter how many tenants the landlord gets, they don’t last long.…
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FrightFest 2020: Hall review
★★★★☆ Francesco Giannini’s chiller pits a mum and her young child in a fight for their lives after an airborne virus turns their hotel into a gauntlet of diseased, violent fellow occupants. The resulting saga delivers more on its generic-sounding scenario than meets the eye. With Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow and Rob Savage’s Host tapping into coronavirus…
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FrightFest 2020: The Clapboard Jungle review
★★★☆☆ Justin McConnell’s The Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business is an eye-opening and informative documentary all about the rough road countless artists travel on to get films made and seen by audiences. For making a movie is just half the battle. We’ve long known movie making is a brutal, cynical, exploitative business run by those…
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FrightFest 2020: Skull: The Mask review
★★☆☆☆ An inventive setup unfortunately cannot save Skull: The Mask from its poor attributions. Confusing editing, disjointed storytelling, too many subplots which appear to be from completely different films, only the delightfully gruesome special effects and vivid cityscape location shooting leave a positive impression. Horror is all about execution. Aesthetics and craft as much as victims for…
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FrightFest 2020: 12 Hour Shift review
★★★★☆ In Brea Grant’s ghoulish US healthcare farce, 12 Hour Shift, a junkie nurse and her accomplices run a body parts scam for the local mob, only for their secretive operation to come crashing down, when an unreliable courier enters the fray. Mandy (Angela Bettis) works long hours at the local hospital, somewhere in Arkansas. She’s…
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FrightFest 2020: The Columnist review
★★★★☆ In Ivo van Aart’s timely psycho-thriller, The Columnist, a female cultural commentator subjected to an endless stream of misogynistic vitriol by online trolls decides to get her own back, showing these vile men their hateful words have consequences. Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) has earned the wrath of right-wingers who live to ‘own the libs’, all…
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FrightFest 2020: There’s No Such Thing as Vampires review
★★☆☆☆ Brought together at random by a car crash in the middle of the night, twentysomething Ariel (Emma Holzer) is thrown headfirst into a nightmare as she helps a mysterious man named Joshua (Josh Plasse) escape the attentions of a malevolent supernatural being. Logan Thomas’ There’s No Such Thing as Vampires is a movie arguably too…
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FrightFest 2020: Programme highlights
With Covid-19 still a global threat, festival organisers have been pushed to making crucial decisions: Cancel or opt for an online edition? While a few hardy festivals, such as Venice, have announced the show must go on, at least in some form, others have decided the online option is more viable and infinitely safer. FrightFest,…
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Film Review: Young Ahmed
★★★★☆ Going in cold, the Dardenne brothers appearing to tackle the subject of radical Islam and a vulnerable boy falling prey to its teachings might be construed as reactionary and misguided. In their skilled and compassionate hands, however, Young Ahmed is a riveting story of a boy in crisis. “A true Muslim doesn’t shake a…
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Film Review: Bacurau
★★★☆☆ A joint effort between Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, Bacurau is an acid western depicting a ragtag group fighting back against the outsiders who wish to do them harm. Picture Howard Hawks’ classic Rio Bravo, only the heroes are tripping out on ayahuasca. A blood-soaked anti-imperialist fable and intertextual genre movie it most…