So Frightfest officially kicked off with the UK premiere of ‘Black Sheep’, which i’ve already seen so I skipped it (My one line review: fun, is enjoyable but takes itself a little too seriously) choosing instead to turn up at 9. From 9pm there was a talk with Andrew Macdonald (quite a big UK producer) mainly promoting the release of ‘28 weeks later’ on dvd. The audience got to see some deleted scenes from the film, which like most deleted scenes, were deleted with good reason, and a couple of featurettes. It was interesting enough but I think people really just wanted the film to kick in.

So ‘Black Water’, the low budget giant crocodile movie from australia. I’m a big fan of giant animal ‘X’ attacks teenagers and/or idiots in remote location, (Razorback, Alligator, Bats, Annaconda…Lake Placid, oh yes.) but ‘Black Water’ just doesn’t deliver the goods. The plot is beyond standard; three aussies go out on the river, get attacked by a croc, then sit in a tree for and hour and a half, gradually getting picked off. When one of the first lines in the film is.. “where shall we go tomorrow?”, “let’s go to that crocodile place” you know you’re in trouble.

‘Black Water’s biggest crime is just that it’s criminally boring, especially for the first hour of the film, they should heve renamed the movie ‘People sitting in trees’. Welcome to dullsville population: Frightfest audience.

All of this being said The film had a couple of ok moments, as brief as they were; when the lead girl starts to slap the water (to test for crocs) with a severed arm, and a couple of the attack scenes were decent for a low budget film. As I said though it’s main problem was just that not enough happened, and due to this lack of action in the script the director obviously decided to let the actors ‘act’ through the quiet points. big mistake. I wouldn’t recommend ‘Black Water’ unless you want something to put you to sleep.

I think people need to subscribe to the Mario Bava school of low budget filmmaking; If you can’t make it great, at least make it entertaining, (something that Wrong Turn 2 scored well with, but i’ll get back to that in a minute).

So Blackwater finished and what was supposed to follow was the trailer for Neil Marshall’s ‘Doomsday’, there was some issue with it (that involved Marshall racing back to the editing suite in soho) so the Frightfest boys killed time on stage by chatting with the audience and talking about what else was coming up over the weekend until Marshall came running back into the theatre looking hot and bothered.

Ther trailer played (obviously from a dvd) in black and white (Doh!) but still looked utterly amazing. Marshall said it was the trailer that he cut, and that he wanted to show at Comicon in San Diego but they wouldn’t let him as it was too violent. There was a lot of footage crammed into that 2 minute trailer, very much a teaser not really showing any scenes in length. Quite honestly it was so quick It’s difficult to describe much of what I saw. It looked very much like ‘Escape from New York’ in places with a couple of Chase sequences on roads that were straight out of the Road Warrior. Oh and I also saw at least two decapitations.. always a plus.

The only problem I have is I’m just not hardcore enough for the whole Frightfest festival (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday… mid-morning until past midnight everyday) .. and i’m too busy. So I have to pick and choose what I really want to see. I wanted to check out ‘The Signal’ on Friday but had to work so I settled for checking out ‘Wrong Turn 2 : Dead End’ and New Zealand Stuntman comedy ‘The Devil Dared me too’ both on Saturday.

That report will be arriving soon (AKA when I can be bothered to type it up )