Abertoir Highlights Day 3

This year's traditional Abertoir off-site screening (which ended up back onsite after 92mph gales put an end to any ideas of showing a film anywhere other than inside a reinforced concrete bunker) was John Carpenter's THE FOG, which I decided to miss because I'd seen it on the big screen earlier this year during the Bristol Watershed's Carpenter retrospective. Other highlights of the day included Gavin Baddeley's talk on Sin Cities (which Mrs Probert and I attended) and the midnight premiere of KARATE KILL (which we didn't, the option of getting a good night's sleep before tomorrow's marathon being preferable). Which leaves these, the movie highlights of Abertoir Day 3:

DEAREST SISTER

A film from Laos that gave us plenty of background on Laotian culture and a woman's place in it. Unfortunately it's also staggeringly slow and has precious little to really warrant calling it a horror film. Twenty-something Nok gets sent by her family to look after the similarly-aged Ana in the big city. Ana is losing her eyesight, has an incompetent Estonian husband (which is where I think half the budget for this one came from, with some of the rest from a Laotian brewery) and can (possibly) see the spirits of the dead every now and then who give her lottery numbers. I'm not sure why. Nok uses the lottery numbers to buy a nice phone and a hairstyle. The servants in the house are not very nice. Nothing much happens for long periods. Then very close to the end something does. A bit. DEAREST SISTER will probably do well on the art cinema circuit but I think it will be a mistake if they market it as a horror film. As such I can't honestly recommend this one.


CREEPY

This was much more like it. The latest film from KAIRO and JOURNEY TO THE SHORE director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. CREEPY isn't like either of those, but it would be spoiling it if I told you much about it. Suffice to say the film is all about identity, and manages a terrific atmosphere of insidious building dread as the movie progresses. It's getting a limited cinema release from Eureka from next week and will be turning up on Blu-ray after that. I may even give the disc a fuller write up on here then.

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD

David Durston's rabid hippy zombie picture shown as part of the Abertoir retrospective strand. I've reviewed this one before so if you fancy reading my thoughts on it click here.