Survive (2024)

"Well Executed French Post-Apocalypse Science Fiction"

After its UK premiere at this year's Frightfest, Frederic Jardin's really rather good French post-apocalypse movie gets a Digital release from Signature Entertainment.

Tom (Andreas Pietschmann) and his family are enjoying an ocean holiday on their boat when a worldwide apocalypse occurs. The magnetic poles are reversed causing all sea water to shift onto land and leaving the ocean beds as dry terrain. Marooned their one hope is to reach the bathysphere of oceanographer Nao (Olivier Ho Hio Hen) before, according to his instruments, the poles are to reverse again and the waters will come flooding back to their original position.

Don't worry too much about the science in SURVIVE. Instead just go with it because this is actually a very decent race against time post apocalypse thriller with some surprises along the way (which I'm not going to spoil). The landscape vistas are impressive and probably looked even more so on a cinema screen. 

It's a French movie, of course, so there's going to be urinating and nihilism but this is still a very good mashup of SF ideas, mainly riffing on Charles Eric Maine's fantastically bleak British SF novel The Tide Went Out. In fact SURVIVE is positively cheery compared with that so perhaps the nihilism comment is a bit excessive. But you can rely on there being some unexpected shocks along the way.

SURVIVE is an impressive piece of post-apocalypse cinema, so much so that it wouldn't be at all surprising if an American remake is in the works. By the time you get to the end you can imagine Roland Emmerich taking out his phone to contact Universal. Let's have a trailer:

Frederic Jardin's SURVIVE is out on Digital from Signature Entertainment on Monday 30th September 2024

Saint Clare (2024)

Director Mitzi Peirone's latest gets its UK premiere at Frightfest prior to a digital release by 101 Films later in the year.

Clare (Bella Thorne) lives in a small town in the US with her grandparents. When she was young she fought and killed a large bearded man who threatened her camping trip. Now she possesses an ability that allows her to identify other men with the same intentions and kill them. She's aided by the ghost of a mailman (Frank Whaley) who died in front of her in the woods.

She attends a party where there's a police raid, and finds herself in the bedroom of the boy who invited her where she discovers a set of compromising photographs, including one of a girl who has recently disappeared. It turns out that she is only the latest of a staggering 53 young women to have vanished in the same town over a period of years. 

SAINT CLARE is the second feature from Mitzi Peirone who's first film, BRAID, also received its UK premiere at Frightfest. At the time I suggested that film probably needed a bit more thinking through so as not to come across solely as a load of pretentious old bollocks. With SAINT CLARE there's more of a plot, the art direction and location work is gorgeous, and the acting's not bad, including turns from Rebecca De Mornay and Ryan Phillippe.

Sadly, however, the direction is ghastly, with the result the film reeks of 'immature sixth form film student project' in its overwhelming and frequently nauseating Dutch camera angles and wobbly hand held shots, none of which help the film and many of which actually hinder it. It's a slight step up from BRAID but at this rate it's going to be a while before Peirone comes up with something watchable. 

SAINT CLARE will be getting a Digital release from 101 Films

Schlitter: Evil in the Woods (2024)

"Like a SAW film if John Kramer was a French Lumberjack"

Pierre Mouchet's highly entertaining, gory, revenge-driven horror thriller gets a deserved UK release on Digital from Signature Entertainment.

When he was a boy, Lucas was witness to his brutal lumberjack father accidentally running over Lucas' best friend Matthieu. Years later he is summoned back to the family home after a fire has destroyed it and two charred corpses were found within. Matthieu's father never found out how the boy died and he seems overly willing to help Lucas and his friends. Is he as friendly as he seems? Is he actually wheelchair-bound? And doesn't he seem to have an unnatural penchant for designing complex animal traps?

The title smacks of comedy but schlitting apparently refers to the lumberjack practice of shifting logs using a sledge. That said, while SCHLITTER is played dead serious, if you're the kind of person who can chuckle at the cheekily outrageous excesses of a SAW film this is going to be right up your alley. In fact while SAW has Jigsaw, Schlitter's villain could perhaps be nicknamed Bandsaw.

If there's one quibble to be had it's that the ending is a little abrupt and could have done with a bit more wit and a little less grimness, but seeing as this is modern French horror we're talking about here, this is still the lightest and most entertaining genre piece to come out of the country for many years. A real treat. Let's have a trailer:

SCHLITTER: EVIL IN THE WOODS is out on Digital from Signature Entertainment on Monday 26th August 2024

Frightfest 2023 Day Five - Monday

 My Mother's Eyes

Combining mad science, maternal guilt and cellos, the latest film from the director of WOMAN OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS feels like the next natural step in what is promising to become a fascinating oeuvre. A woman suffering from retinitis pigmentosa is going slowly blind. During an episode of blindness she crashes her car and renders her young daughter paralysed from the neck down. A revolutionary new contact lens allows her to see again, and linking it to a VR headset allows her daughter to live through her eyes. But the scientist has his own reasons for having created the device. Perhaps needless to say, none of this ends well, Stylish, moving and (eventually) blood drenched, this is one that's going to reward repeat viewings.

Good Boy

The old-fashioned tale of girl meets boy, girl discovers boy is millionaire, girl goes out with millionaire is given a gleefully perverse spin in GOOD BOY, another (along with THE KNOCKING) of this year's Frightfest offerings from Finland. Sigrid believes she's met the perfect man in rich, handsome young Christian, except for one thing: his dog Frank, or rather the fact that Frank is actually a man in a dog costume who, according to Christian, wants to be treated as a dog at all times. There's more going on, of course, but it's unlikely you'll guess exactly where this one is going by the decidedly kinky and over the top climax. A bit like a lengthy and especially odd episode of Inside No.9, (they could have called it Furry Shades of Grey - thanks Mrs Probert!) GOOD BOY is the kind of off-kilter, disturbing, well-made low budget horror fare that Frightfest was designed to showcase. After the end credits have rolled you'll still be wondering about the horrible possible reasons for the final shot.

GOOD BOY will be getting a release from Blue Finch films on Monday 11th September 2023

Minore

Somewhere on the coast of Greece, a small community is beset by monsters paving the way for 'The Great Devourer' after a mysterious island rises from the sea. Soon it's down to a group of disparate individuals to fight for the future of the earth with bouzouki music, but will they be able to get the amplifiers to work in time?

MINORE suffers from serious pacing problems, taking ages to get going and with a climax that's somewhat lacking in the sense of urgency that all the best giant monster movies have. That said, the effects are good, the characters are endearing, and overall the film is an enthusiastic attempt to do a Greek version of movies like TREMORS by way of Peter Jackson's early gore comedies. It doesn't really work but certainly marks director Konstantinos Koutsoliotas as a talent to watch. 

Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives

An unwieldy title (presumably to help distinguish it from the plethora of other HOME SWEET HOME movies out there) for a film that turned out to be an unexpected highlight of the festival. Shot in one take, that was actually something of an unnecessary gimmick in the telling of a supremely creepy ghost story. As the sun sets a pregnant woman arrives at the remote country house of her husband's family. It's deserted and as she starts to wander round she discovers a secret room filled with African artefacts and a diary that describes a terrible event in the past. Some great scary moments as well as a gradually building atmosphere of dread and inevitability leading to a final shot that's just right all made this one a winner.

The Exorcist

A 50th anniversary screening of this on the IMAX screen, meaning we got some nice freebies and an introduction and post-film Q&A from Mark Kermode. For someone who is not THE EXORCIST's biggest fan (I personally find THE OMEN far scarier) this looked fantastic on the big screen and perhaps the greatest revelation this time around was the sound mix, a combination of supremely unnerving noises and music that added greatly to the overall effect. Oh to have been able to watch this in 1974 (when it came out in the UK) and experience all those marvellous effects when they were fresh. Mind you, they still hold up extremely well, even on a screen 60 feet high.

Frightfest 2023 Day Four - Sunday

The Piper

MUTE WITNESS director Anthony Waller (who also gave us AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS) delivers up a prime slice of modern EuroTrash with this highly entertaining take on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. After Something Bad Happens That Will Be Revealed Later, English-accented Elizabeth Hurley has to relocate to the German town of Hamelin (aha!) with her American-accented daughter only to be plagued with visions of rats while her daughter is bitten by imaginary insects and falls in love with a Scottish-accented Romanian gypsy who May Not Be All He Seems. 

Like many of the EuroHorrors of old the acting in THE PIPER is variable (although Tara Fitzgerald does a fantastic Maria Ouspenskaya - you keep expecting her to bang on about werewolves and have a son named Bela) and the dubbing is dodgy, but the locations are fantastic, as is the architecture, and every now and then Waller offers us some nuggets of visual compositions that will be all EuroHorror fiends will need to keep them going until the end of this one. Jess Franco could have done some bits better but the mere fact a modern horror film had me thinking of him gives this one points. 

THE PIPER is out on digital from 101 Films on Monday 16th October 2023

Rec: Terror Sin Pausa

An excellent documentary on a 21st century classic of the genre, here we get a series of excellent interviews detailing the conception, execution and reception of the film [REC]. Directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza are filmed in conversation with each other about the movie, while we also get interviews with producer Julio Fernandez and cast and crew. 15 years after it was made it's clear everyone involved had a wonderful time making it and still harbour very fond memories. Highlights for this reviewer included all the things Balaguero and Plaza made up in interviews when they got bored, the original review in Variety that trashed it, and, over the end credits, the videotape record of Paco Plaza pitching the plot of REC: GENESIS to Fernandez while Balaguero chips in with some scenes that didn't make it into the film but would have been fantastic if they could have managed them.

Cold Meat

If you're a serial killer with your latest potential victim trussed up in your boot you probably don't think things could get any worse than your car getting stuck in a snowstorm. But what if there's some kind of creature stalking outside? And what if your victim manages to get out of the trunk and into the car? COLD MEAT stretches its premise of 'two people trapped in a car in the freezing cold' such that it feels the story would have been better suited to a short subject, but the acting is fine and the only real disappointment is how little the promised 'creature' features in the actual story. 

COLD MEAT will be released by Signature Entertainment on Digital platforms in 2024

Enter The Clones of Bruce

This excellent documentary from Severin Films kicks off with behind the scenes footage from Hammer's LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (not that it's identified as such but fans will spot it straight away), before giving us a pre-credits potted history of the short life and career of Bruce Lee before his untimely death. "The world markets wanted more Bruce Lee films," says one film-maker. "We told them he was dead and they said they didn't care, they wanted more Bruce Lee films." And so the 'clones' of Bruce were born, or rather discovered at Hong Kong martial arts schools, Korea, and anywhere else someone who could impersonate the king of Kung Fu could be found. A good set of interviews with some of the surviving directors and actors who worked at Golden Harvest (including "Bruce Li" and "Dragon Lee") means this is the usual excellent work from Severin on a topic that you're unlikely to know that much about unless you're a martial arts obsessive. And I never realised Bruce Lee himself was the one who set the trend of making 'Kung Fu noises' when he was about to fight.

The Blue Rose

A bold and bravura first feature effort from its 18 year old writer, director, co-composer and star? Or a load of pretentious old twaddle that disappears up its own nether regions about halfway through, never to return? I have to confess I find myself veering towards the latter opinion with THE BLUE ROSE, a film that very much feels like someone who has seen THE LOVE WITCH and a lot of David Lynch and wanted to make something similarly stylish and impenetrable but fascinating. Well they managed the impenetrable part. In a DayGlo-noir version of Hollywood a murder is committed and this film's version of Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence are despatched to investigate. After that I honestly had no idea what was happening and more importantly I found I could not summon the energy to care very much. There's a style and vigour to the proceedings that suggests George Baron, the young auteur behind this, may well make a great film one day, but he's not quite there yet.

Mancunian Man

The latest documentary from Jake West and Severin Films is all about Cliff Twemlow, a name few will be familiar with and the work he produced perhaps even less so, because Mr Twemlow, along with being a body builder, nightclub bouncer, author and composer was a low budget movie maker. The problem is that he was based in Manchester in the 1980s and (from what one takes away from this two hour plus film of him and his life) most of the films he made were either never released or received limited distribution.

There's a resurgence of interest in fearless independent British movie mavericks at the moment, though, with Indicator's massive boxset of the movies of Michael J Murphy leading the way, such that one wonders if Severin is preparing a similar package of Twemlow movies (perhaps with a couple of CDs of the DeWolfe library music he composed by humming tunes into a tape recorder and getting other people to arrange them). Maybe such unsung shot on video 'classics' such as GBH (1983), TARGET EVE ISLAND (1983), IBIZA CONNECTION (1984) and PREDATOR: THE QUIETUS (1988) will finally get to be seen by a wider audience. If not then there's still this very comprehensive documentary that, like so many of its type, details the ups and downs and frequently ramshackle and chaotic approach to independent moviemaking. It's very well put together, and filled with interviews and clips from the films themselves, which will give you a good idea of if you'd like to seek them out or steer well clear.

Sympathy for the Devil

Expectant father Joel Kinnaman is on the way to the hospital where his wife has gone into labour when, out of the shadows of the hospital car park appears Nicolas Cage, wielding a gun and resplendent in red jacket and hair. Cage orders Kinnaman to drive. How far and whether or not they get to the intended destination is just a small part of this tense, well shot, well acted piece of neon noir. It's pretty much a two hander between the leads but the movie wisely opens up the scenario so it's not just two men shouting at each other in a car. Kinnaman is nicely restrained and provides an excellent counterpart to his co-star who goes Full Cage in this one. Don't let that put you off, though. SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is a taut, suspenseful, decent little thriller and definitely a Frightfest highlight. 

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL will be released on Digital platforms by Signature Entertainment on Monday 8th September 2023

Frightfest 2023 Day Three - Saturday

Monolith

A fine science fiction piece from Australia, set in a single location and with only a single actress (Lily Sullivan from EVIL DEAD RISE) onscreen. A disgraced reporter chances across a story regarding something people can only describe as a black brick. A few telephone calls and interviews later and it sounds as if various people across the world have received mysterious black bricks that have changed their lives. Then it's revealed that internal scans of the bricks' structures have revealed mysterious symbols folded in on themselves, each different for every brick / person. Combining a strong allegory for how we deal with guilt with a mounting sense of dread, cosmic horror & possible alien invasion, MONOLITH is a riveting and fascinating watch.

Cobweb

Two parts BBC Children's teatime serial and one part BEAST IN THE CELLAR (I'm not giving anything away that the poster up there isn't) COBWEB is really very good until it suddenly isn't. A little bullied boy lives with his mad parents (good performances from Antony Starr and especially Lizzy Caplan) in a creepy old house. One night he hears knocking behind a wall, followed by whispering. After a good atmospheric buildup, if you want to get the best effect out of this one leave / switch it off once the boy unlocks the tiny door and you get the first, subtle, terrifying glimpse of what's behind it. Then leave, because then it all goes a bit disappointingly generic US mainstream horror. 

To Fire You Come At Last

There aren't enough Sean Hogan films in the world and even if TO FIRE YOU COME AT LAST is only 43 minutes long it's still better than us having nothing from him at all. There's a strong sense of both the BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas and other fine TV adaptations to this story of four men carrying the coffin of the local Squire's son to his final resting place. Shot in black in white, this one starts off with brooding shots of the landscape before funnelling down into increasingly claustrophobic terror. The monochrome photography also contributes immensely to a standout performance from James Swanton whose face would have perfectly suited the kind of 1940s Monogram Gothic the actor John Carradine was such a highlight of.

Herd

Couple-in-relationship-trouble Jamie and Alex go on a canoeing holiday to hopefully sort out their problems. While there Alex sustains an injury so minor that when she's revealed to have sustained a compound fracture of the tibia the main thing anyone should be wondering is if she has brittle bone disease. She also exhibits remarkable levels of pain tolerance and is able to hobble around on a completely fractured lower limb and engage in serious deep meaningful discussions with her partner as if all she has suffered is a small gnat bite. Meanwhile there's a zombie plague going on. HERD is a sloppy, awkward mixture of shouty relationship drama and low-budget zombie flick that obviously has aspirations to be thought of as more than 'just another zombie film'. Unfortunately there's just not the skill here to make any of this work, coupled with a lack of attention to detail that is initially distracting but swiftly becomes irritating. 

HERD will be released on Digital by High Fliers on Monday 23rd October 2023

Transmission

From Mike Hurst, the man who gave the world MANSQUITO and a host of other movies nobody owned up to having seen at this screening. "If you've been watching TV at 2am you've probably seen my work, for about fifteen minutes" said the cheerfully self-detracting director. His latest, and self-funded, effort is considerably more interesting and original than his usual sequel and direct to SyFy fodder. Taking the form of channel surfing late at night where all the different channels visit eventually form a single cohesive story, TRANSMISSION tells its tale well, especially considering the ambitious concept. What happened to occult-obsessed movie director Franklin T Roth (Vernon Wells)? And why has his final film never been seen? Why are there frequent news reports of suicides and a mysterious symbol drawn everywhere in Santa Mira? It all gets explained and it's all rather fun into the bargain.

Frightfest 2023 Day Two - Friday

The J-Horror Virus

Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp's excellent documentary charts the rise and cultural significance of the phenomenon now known as J-Horror, the term used to describe the sub-genre that includes movies such as the RINGU and JU-ON series of films. Starting off with Japanese literary antecedents that feature elements prominent in these films (vengeful women, long black hair) and detailing the films that led up to Hideo Nakata's RINGU becoming a worldwide phenomenon, THE J-HORROR VIRUS is a thorough academic study filled with clips of the relevant films and packed with as many interviews as the directors could manage. And classic British fantasy author Arthur Machen got a namecheck in the Q&A and I didn't have to do it (it was Jasper Sharp, although I did ask the question that produced it). Excellent stuff.

The Knocking

Here's a decent folk horror piece from Finland, with some seriously creepy sequences that make up for a plot that leaves some head-scratching loose ends if you think about them too much. 

Three siblings whose father died many years ago and whose mother disappeared and has finally been declared dead meet up to sell the creepy old house in the forest where they grew up. We already know from an opening sequence that all was not well during their childhood, which seems to have included a cage the youngest of them was found in by police after the father's death. The plan is to not just sell the house but the surrounding forest as well, but as night falls it looks as if something in the woods is determined to stop them from doing that.

THE KNOCKING isn't bad at all, professionally made and acted and, as noted above, with a genuine sense of creepiness and unease, especially as the film nears its climax. Certain key elements of the plot remain curiously unresolved but even so this is an impressive piece of low budget horror cinema from co-directors Max Seeck and Joonas Pajunen. Let's hope we see more from them. 

THE KNOCKING will be released on digital platforms by Blue Finch Releasing on Monday 4th September 2023

Dr Jekyll

Eddie Izzard is Nina Jekyll, except when they're Rachel Hyde. Not that you'll be able to tell who is who and when as Izzard doesn't really possess the acting skills to play one role never mind the two required here. It did, however, make me appreciate all the more Heather Graham's performance of body-swapping antics in SUITABLE FLESG. Add in a script in which little happens for most of the running time and then spends the last ten minutes chucking a plethora of daftness at the audience in the hope that some of it will stick and what little has gone before will suddenly take on new relevance and DOCTOR JEKYLL, for all its gothic trappings and absurdly overblown score, is a dull waste of time. A candidate for worst of the festival so far.

That's A Wrap

Oh but here's the latest film from the director of BLIND. In all fairness Marcel Walz is improving as a film-maker. He's still not terribly good, but the opening of this is pretty decently executed, as is the actress who suffers at the hands of the masked lunatic who sets about a cast of pretty young things at a wrap party. Some of the murders show an energy and glee that holds the attention but dialogue and acting are still pretty basic. This is a bit like if Herschell Gordon Lewis had directed CRYSTAL EYES or the kind of movie Dario Argento might have made in the 1970s if he had no artistic flair whatsoever, which makes it all the more surprising that for all its faults IT'S A WRAP is actually exceedingly entertaining. DOCTOR JEKYLL, you're still in the number one slot for worst film at the moment.