August 25th - August 28th

FREAKY FRIDAY aka “The Devil Has Sent Me…Films Of Evil!”

To some August means grotesquely charred barbecue food with family members you’d secretly like to skewer, spending a day at a beach full of screaming sticky-faced kids and pudgy middle aged oddballs in speedos and buying lots of cut-price garden furniture that’ll be in the shed by the autumn.  To a faithful, growing horde of switched-on horror fans, however, it means that another Frightfest is upon us.  Which, in turn, means braving some seriously uncomfortable seats and forsaking conventional sleep patterns to indulge in a wonderful variety of dark-hued movie premieres, short films, vintage trailers and chummy special guests.

    For the seventh time, Alan Jones (the bald one), Paul McEvoy (the one with lots of hair) and Ian Rattray (the relatively quiet Scottish one) were the amiable hosts of an impeccably organised weekend.  Paul’s gradually deteriorating, hangover-beaten appearance provided a reliable reflection of our own visages, worn and weary after around six movies a day, minimal exposure to daylight and lashings of expensive Leicester Square booze.   Goodie bags were filled with the usual array of free oddments, and despite the second consecutive location change (this time to the downstairs screen at the Odeon West End), the fest felt as intimate as ever.  

   Jones asserted early on that the line-up was the best in Frightfest’s impressive history, a bold statement fulfilled by a diverse range of excellent movies, including at least one modern masterpiece.  Day One followed in the shuffling footsteps of 2005’s Romero-tribute Dead Day by kicking off with a trio of Hammer horrors, given an affectionate introduction by The League Of Gentlemen’s Mark Gattis.  

   The first of the three gorgeous new prints of vintage genre flicks was Terence Fisher’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1959), a relative box office failure on its original release that doomed the planned Hammer cycle of Sherlock Holmes movies.  With Peter Cushing making for a marvellous Holmes and Andre Morell a very droll Watson, the movie is a superior adaptation of one of the more famous Conan Doyle mysteries laced with injections of pure Hammer gothic.  While 1959 audiences expecting monster-mashing would have been disappointed by the climactic appearance of a lanky, masked mutt (hardly the hound from hell promised by the typically OTT posters), the movie still features escaped lunatics, pretty girls with heaving bosoms being chased during melodramatic storms and, best of all, a moment in which Christopher Lees tries to look terrified by a bored-looking tarantula on his shoulder.

   Peter Sasdy’s Countess Dracula (1970) holds up less well, a talky and uncharacteristically low key treatment of a lurid premise, notable mostly for the make-up that transforms young, exotic Ingrid Pitt into a warty old hag.  (These days, CGI would be needed to transform warty old Ingrid Pitt into a young, exotic beauty).   In a time of widespread silly-hat wearing and mass cultivation of ridiculous facial hair, ageing widower Pitt gets stiffed by her late husband’s will and is dismissed as “devil woman!” by local peasants even before she discovers that splashing fresh virgin blood over her wrinkles makes her young and pert again.

   In her iconic role, Pitt is expressive and haunting both in and out of make-up, succeeding in avoiding the potential camp of scenes in which she washes her face with a comically over-sized, blood-drenched sponge.   With only fleeting horror, the movie at least has plenty more of those welcome heaving Hammer breasts, plus entirely gratuitous belly dancing and Maurice Denham providing the traditional Doddery Old Man comic relief, a role played to the hilt by Miles Malleson in Hound.

   The final Hammer movie of the fest, John Hough’s Twins Of Evil was evidently made after a large delivery of Extra Extra Low Cut Gowns and, for any pubescent boy who saw it on telly during their sticky-sheet formative years, remains most memorable for the presence of who-cares-which-one-is-which Playboy twins Madeline and Mary Collinson.   They’re both hot, and they both deliver dialogue with all the spark of Stephen Hawking doing an impersonation of Bela Lugosi reading from an autocue.  One of them is seduced by the naughty hairy-chested Dracula-wannabe Count Karnstein and goes on a breast-biting rampage, while their puritanical witch finder uncle Peter Cushing - playing it as an ice-cold combo of Van Helsing and Matthew Hopkins - believes in chopping off heads now, asking questions later.

   It’s Cushing who gets one of the best lines of Hammer dialogue ever -  “The Devil has sent me…(dramatic pause)…Twins Of Evil!” - , a line so good they used it twice in the original trailer (shown later in the weekend as part of Trailer Trash)!  Playing a character whose surname is pronounced “Vile”, he leads an evil-hunting sect named “The Brotherhood” that is almost a parody of the established Hammer angry mob, with their lively, unison chants of “Burn her!”.   Showcasing what could be the most shamelessly overstated phallic imagery in horror history this stirring, full-blooded romp was a grand reminder of just how much fun top-level Hammer was.

    The Frightfest proper was opened this year by a riotously funny, rapturously received spoof of the old “Charley Says” animated public information films.   In this particular outing for the shrill-voiced kid and his reliable, wisdom-dispensing cat, Charley ended up not saying very much because he’d had his head cruelly severed.  Perhaps next year there could be some kind of grisly sketch involving the Green Cross Code Man being horribly squished by a school bus?

   The opening night screening of Pan’s Labyrinth right after would remain the festival highlight for a good portion of the audience, as would the typically entertaining Q&A with director Guillermo Del Toro, in which he touchingly shed light on some of the autobiographical elements of this, his most personal film to date.   He also explained how the eyeball skewering scene in Zombie Flesh Eaters remains a source of joyous inspiration (!) and, on the subject of the film’s not unexpected failure to snag any prizes at Cannes, noted that movies with creatures and special effects would never be taken as seriously as films about “a double amputee who fucks his couch”(!!).

  Reflecting on his movie’s first public screening since its warmly received Cannes showing, Del Toro also remarked that, while it may not be a pure “Frightfest” film, he felt like he belonged more at the ‘fest than he did at Cannes.   A poignant statement though he needn’t have been concerned with the movie’s questionable “horror” status because he has crafted a perfect companion piece to the much-admired The Devil‘s Backbone.  Returning to the key themes of innocence, Fascism and wartime brutality, while using the eponymous fantasy dimension as a rich metaphor for Spain’s 20th century transition, the movie continues the director’s career pattern of following a big budget Hollywood genre film (in this case, Hellboy) with a more personal, independently financed piece in his native language.

   Set at the tail end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth features the remarkable Ivana Baquero as an imaginative young girl who moves to the country after her sickly pregnant mother marries the brutish Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez).   Escaping from the everyday horrors, Baquero takes refuge in an alternate reality peopled by fairies and ancient fauns, where she discovers that she is the estranged princess of the “underworld” and has to carry out three elaborate tasks to discover her true purpose in life.

   Juxtaposing his dark yet comparitively comforting fantasy world against a gritty wartime backdrop of amputations, paranoia and rations, Del Toro has made a movie in which the thing we fear the most is not any of the labyrinth’s outlandish creatures but a person, the callous, unforgiving Vidal.  Brilliantly playing one of the most loathsome characters in recent movie history, Lopez chillingly conveys an icy disregard for human life in a series of upsetting scenes of violence : one early sequence in which he obliterates a guy’s nose with a bottle in several crunching blows jarringly establishes the kind of guy he is.  As his character commits ever more despicable deeds, the constantly inventive script turns him into a physical grotesque worthy of a high-class adult comic book, giving him a facial injury that made much of the hardened horror buff audience wince audibly.

   Representing an outstanding achievement in production design, make-up and digital fx (not to mention the beautiful score by Javier Navarette, built around a winsome recurring lullaby), the movie breathtakingly brings the two contrasting worlds together for an unforgettable finale that is alternatively moving, violent and hopeful for the continued existence of magic in an intensely dark world.   Destined to be remembered as a modern classic, this was a perfect opening flick for a festival that has, in the past, got underway with cinematic jewels like Oldboy, Land of the Dead and, in a rare misstep, the steaming cinematic turd that was Nine Lives.

   Hatchet, which had the unenviable task of following the Del Toro crowd-pleaser, did so in style.  Its teaser poster reassuringly promised “Old School American Horror” and, more satisfyingly, “It’s not a remake.  It’s not a sequel.  And it’s not based on a Japanese one.”  The finished film more than lives up to its promise : a dynamic retro-slasher with unselfconscious humour, no Scream-style “we know we’re in a movie!” gags and unusually likeable, funny characters.

   Pals Joel Moore and Deon Richmond join a pair of bitchy bimbos (“You do know your vibrator goes in your cooch, not your ear, right?!”), an amateur pornographer and an elderly tourist couple for a late-night Mardi Gras “Haunted Swamp Tour” that turns gory when disfigured local legend Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder, also playing Crowley’s father out of make-up) turns out to be real.

   Beyond the in-joke casting of genre icons Robert Englund, Tony Todd and Hodder (plus Blair Witch Project victim Joshua Leonard), the movie is a smart, confident spin on the well-worn theme, with witty asides, unobtrusive movie quotes (“You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me!” - I’ll name that quote in two!) and genuinely suspenseful stalk-and-splat sequences.   John Carl Buechler’s awesome old-school splatter fx give it plenty of oomph, and the climactic riff on the classic closing scene of Friday The 13thTexas Chainsaw-inspired final shot.  The movie is so eager to please that it even gives Buffy fans the opportunity to see Mercedes McNab (playing an almost identical Valley Girl bimbo role to “Harmony” on the show) doff her top throughout.  provides both a 70’s horror-style downbeat sting in the tale and a cool

   Writer-director Adam Green, who pleased many ‘festers by hanging around and watching many of the films throughout the weekend, proved a witty, intelligent guest and looks set to have an impressive career ahead of him.   Enthusiastically revealing that Hatchet has earned itself a well-deserved theatrical release in the States, he revealed his “Fuck you!” - type response to a studio exec’s suggestion that he “alter” the movie for a PG-13 rating and lamented the overkill of creepy Japanese female ghosts in contemporary American horror.  (Anyone fond of them had to wait until Monday’s The Ghost Of Mae-Nak to get their fix).

   Right before the closing movie was the first, and weakest, of a particularly strong bunch of short films.   Frightfest has long been an excellent showcase for burgeoning talent in the realm of short films, and many gems from previous festivals stick in the memory : anyone who saw last year’s The Ten Steps probably still spends several minutes each weekend striving to get the remaining stains out of their soiled trousers.  David Pope’s Gasoline Blood, preceding Frostbite, was a grim no-budget zombie yarn which, like so many films this weekend, took 70’s American horror as its key inspiration, complete with a fake 1979 copyright notice and deliberate scratches and grain to give it the look of that era’s notable genre movies.  Sadly, the neat visual gimmicks were wasted on a drab, routinely plotted yarn involving one-note characters stalked in and around a dilapidated gas station.

   Frostbite, on the other hand, was an unexpected delight from Sweden.  Anders Banke’s Nordic riff on 80’s American teen vampire flicks involves nefarious experiments to cross-breed humans with vampires and a bunch of pill-popping partying teens turned into bloodsucking hybrids.  Cross cutting between a female doctor’s discovery of her new home town’s dark secret, and her teen daughter’s peril at the party, the movie’s breezy, witty script shows a nice line in surrealistic humour : a stand-out sequence features one character’s descent into vampirism during a garlic-enhanced dinner with his girlfriend’s parents that ends with him eating the family bunny.

   An unknown quantity before the screening, the movie won many fans in the late-night audience with its bizarre talking-animal diversions, novel vamp deaths-by-photocopier/garden gnome (“What a totally uncool way to die!”) and a priceless moment with a makeshift crucifix - “You’re holding them like an ‘X’!”.   Watching six movies back to back at the end of a working week is more exhausting than it sounds, and as a result, the midnight audience is  perhaps the hardest to win over - some are drunk, a few asleep and a couple appeared to be dead.  Frostbite, however, was a sparky end to a splendid first day and Frightfesters returned to the all-too-brief comfort of their overpriced/overly small hotel rooms (or, for luckier souls, their own beds with “Lucio Fulci Lives” duvet covers and matching pillow cases) eager to lap up more of the same the next day.

Steven West AKA 'The Savage Intruder'