The Bank Holiday Massacre

Aka Empower Yourself With Cock

Welcome to the end of the line for another Frightfest, an experience that, for the weekend pass holders, has been accurately described as feeling like Christmas is over. It’s the New Year’s Day of the festival weekend, heralding the end of something special and exciting while signalling the return to normality and the unwelcome comeback of 9-5 banality. 

   Frightfest seems to grow in stature each year, its humble beginnings at the Prince Charles Cinema (always a cosy, if crowded venue for this kind of event) now seeming like a different era as the names get bigger and the publicity machine gets more extensive. It’s too bad that a significant amount of the mainstream coverage for the festival veered toward the stereotypical, with one notable article that shall remain nameless painting an embarrassingly inaccurate portrait of the ‘fest as a gathering of uber-geeks and Goths guffawing at uniformly tacky movies full of fake blood and bad acting. Anyone who has ever attended a full Frightfest - or indeed merely attended a handful of this year’s intelligent, complex standout movie -  knows the truth is quite different.

   All of which diverts our attention away from the matter at hand, Day Four of the ‘fest. The weekend concluded on a suitable high with two hugely entertaining crowd-pleasing pics from different continents, preceded by an uneven, if interesting trio of less enthusiastically received movies, one of which was a late replacement for the Pang Brothers’ Recycle which, in a rare festival hiccup, had arrived sans subtitles. (Last year Red Eye proved to be a popular substitute for the AWOL Boo).   Previews scattered throughout the day included the unpromising Transformers, Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia and the potentially good Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Beginning though none received the cheers and applause that had greeted earlier trailers for Hot Fuzz and Tenacious D The Movie.

   Fortunately, the final two shorts of the weekend were both gems.  Missed Call from Mike Dawson was a simple, very tense reworking of the calls-from-inside-the-house stalker gimmick popularised by When A Stranger Calls. While using the power of text to catch her cheating boyfriend in the act, a young woman, alone in the house, receives ominous phone calls from an unknown threat. Enhanced by an omnipresent, discordant musical score, this well done frightener grips right up to its scary resolution without any gore or fancy twists.

   Even better - in fact, the stand-out short of the festival - was stop-motion animator Mike Mort’s live action Deadly Tantrum, which begins on a high by mocking the “true story” tags that had appeared on so many fest films this year. “A true story…based on actual events…that really happened…”. It turns into a frenetic, hilarious and very British slapstick version of the power tool slasher movie, with superb editing, great special effects and at least one fabulous line of dialogue : “That’s Geoffrey, a disgruntled turkey impregnator from Newport!”. A five minute treasure, this one makes you hope that Mort can get funding for his planned feature length version of Deadly Tantrum.

   Four days of almost non-stop movies, even really good ones, can make you exhausted and a little crazy. It’s all-too tempting to take the opportunity for a kip during the slower, less impressive features, a temptation particularly high during Monday’s opening Spanish entry H6 : Diario De Un Asesino.
 

   “The Lord has chosen me for this special task. Now my life has meaning.” So says Fernando Acaso at one point in a voice-over narration variously riffing on moments in the superior American Psycho and Se7en.  It’s familiar serial killer territory, folks, as Acaso, a cold-blooded girlfriend-murdering nut job, returns to society after a 15 year jail sentence and spends his spare time tying hookers to a hardwood table, making them drink piss and dismembering them with a chainsaw. The subtitle stems from the journal he keeps of his actions, designed so that experts can read and understand his mission and intentions.

   Like John Doe in Se7en, Acaso is a self-aggrandising psycho anxious and confident that his “work” will be studied and made into movies (“I will be followed”). Sadly, despite Acaso’s persuasive performance as the Nietzsche-quoting murderer, this plodding Spanish take on subject matter familiar from numerous movies (Henry Portrait Of A Serial Killer to name but one) has nothing fresh to say. The sensationalistic scenes of violence in which Acaso roughly fucks screaming, bound women before cutting them up (coveyed via blood splatter rather than graphic shots of limb-severing) are suitably gruelling but insufficient to enliven a redundant screenplay.

   British director Mark Duffield was on stage to discuss his movie, the late replacement The Ghost Of Mae Nak, a modest hit in its native Thailand, partially due to the renowned Thai legend that inspired its plot. For an audience jaded by far too many Ringu-imitating horrors from both the East and the West, this well crafted movie did itself no favours by recycling the usual scares featuring black-haired, vengeful female ghosts.

   A drippy, if endearing, young couple move into a house once occupied by Mae Nak, a woman who died in childbirth while her beloved was at war, and took revenge on the community she held responsible for coming between her and her husband.  In the present, Mae Nak orchestrates murderous mayhem aimed at eliminating anyone she sees as coming between the newlyweds.

   Mae Nak’s “look” offers a slight variant on the standard Asian ghost girl style (she has a black smile and a yawning black gap in her forehead to match the hair), and the script oddly combines traditional supernatural spookiness with blackly comic Omen / Final Destination - inspired creative deaths. The latter element allows for one spectacular scene in which a hapless supporting character is bisected length-ways by a falling pane of glass, the two halves of his body bloodily falling apart after a brief hiatus. Too bad the rest of the movie is a tad blah.

  For fans of celebrity-spotting, highlight of the final day was the arrival of Nick Moran, Georgina Rylance and David Soul for the premiere of Hadi Hajaig’s ambitious Puritan. Moran was amusing in his public dissing of a recent “shitty” American movie in which he starred, while Hajaig seemed overly proud of a twist ending that, in a movie era where every film bar Brother Bear boasts a highly contrived “Bloody Hell!” - style sting in the tale, didn’t seem all that special. Soul participated in a mildly cringe-worthy singalong designed to celebrate his 98th birthday though, disappointingly given the film’s occult undertones, no one mentioned the audible Satanic phrases that become apparent when you play his 70’s ballad “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby” backward. (For the record, Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” features the same phrase, “Stick It Up My Ass, Your Dark Majesty”, when played at the wrong speed).

   Puritan focuses on reformed alcoholic writer / phoney medium Moran, whose affair with a grieving, unhappily married woman (Rylance) is somehow connected to the regular visits he receives from a mysterious, scarred stranger. Also embroiled in the plot are the corrupt writer of the world’s biggest-selling self help book (Soul) and the dark history of Moran’s house, involving former occupant occultist Alistair Crowley.

   While elegantly crafted and good looking, the movie’s plodding pace - and an excess of dull love scenes - made it fairly heavy-going at this late stage in the ‘fest.

    What was needed was something lively, something inventive and amusing…so, step forward, Scott Glosserman’s Behind The Mask The Rise Of Leslie Vernon!  Initially owing a considerable debt to fairly recent day-in-the-life-of-a-serial-killer satirical faux-documentaries like Man Bites Dog and The Last Horror Movie, this much loved indie developed into a very witty, affectionate send-up of slasher movie clichés, archetypes and narrative mechanics. The fake-documentary format is used for the first hour before the final reels unexpectedly give the audience a bonafide third person slasher flick, albeit one in which established conventions are subverted, dismissed and adapted.

   In the picture postcard town of Glen Echo, USA, a film crew is following the life of Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel), a young man who believes himself to be the “heir apparent to the throne of terror”. He is planning an elaborate rampage modelled on the killing sprees famously committed in the communities of Haddonfield, Elm Street and Camp Crystal Lake (Jason movie veteran Kane Hodder plays an Elm Street resident in one of the more fan boyish references). His rigorous pre-planning period involves learning about sleight of hand and escape tricks, while becoming able to slow his breathing and heart rate so as to appear dead. Another, essential trait of a successful maniac is being able to “run like a fuckin’ gazelle” and perfecting the art of making it look like he is walking while everyone else is running their asses off. And then there is the matter of honing in on a “target group” for victimisation, and the selection process of finding the right, virginal “survivor girl” who will prove a worthy adversary.

   Deftly incorporating in-jokes varying from the subtle to the more obvious reverential naming of characters (“Wes”, “Kelly Curtis”, “Doc Halloran”), Glosserman’s winning movie avoids becoming a smug Scream-like slasher movie centred on condescending other slasher movies, because he clearly has a guilty-pleasure fondness for the genre he is satirising. The cameos are great fun : diminutive Poltergeist star Zelda Rubinstein keeps her tongue firmly in cheek as an exposition-spouting librarian, while Robert Englund is hilarious, if underused, as the Ahab / Doctor Loomis figure on a relentless quest to end Vernon’s reign of terror.

   Best of all is newcomer Baesel, who’s terrific as a cheery bloke yearning to emulate “legends” like “Jason, Freddy and Mike” (“They changed the whole business!”) while subtly mocking the slasher genre’s unspoken code of ethics (“The closet is a sacred place”).

   Behind The Mask proved to be among the most crowd-pleasing movies of the whole weekend, though the final film, the UK premiere of The Host won a substantial army of fans as soon as its impressive bounding CGI monster-tadpole burst onto the screen a few minutes in. An intelligent, if admittedly overlong, monster movie combining refreshingly straight-faced creature action with  a rich vein of unforced humour, this South Korean hit looks set for worldwide theatrical and DVD success.

   Formaldehyde dumped into a Seoul river in the early 21st century has come back to bite the citizens in the ass, literally. A deadly mutation rises from the water to munch on the locals and kidnap a schoolgirl (Ko Ah-Sung), taking her back to its sewer-lair for fun games such as the ever-popular “Let’s Vomit Bones All Over The Terrified Child”.  As the government panics about the apparent “virus” unleashed by the creature’s emergence, Sung’s determined, if buffoonish father sets out to rescue her.

   In between the exciting monster stuff is an amusing portrayal of the intrusive U.S. government - overly eager to enforce the ominous “Agent Yellow” and lobotomise alleged carriers of a virus no one has proved actually exists - and a very funny visual joke at the expense of the over-hyped SARS crisis. The sub-plots sometimes get in the way of the genuine suspense generated by the creature’s presence, though there’s no faulting the action sequences, and the movie bows out with a stirring climax and a delightfully low-key coda.

   The hardiest members of the audience drowned their end-of-Frightfest sorrows by joining Alan and co for booze and fun at a nearby club, though some of us had trains to catch and homes to get to, damnit! For fans of dark, subversive cinema, the ‘fest has become the most essential weekend of the year, and the 2006 edition did not disappoint. There is, however, no need to despair too much as we all head back to our “Chesty Morgan” box sets and Caroline Munro posters…keep watching the net for forthcoming announcements of a Frighfest Halloween special in the city very soon!

Steven West AKA 'The Savage Intruder'