CARL’S TOP FIVE

1. F. Searingly contemporary and stylishly low-key, F has all of the makings of a modern-day classic. Johannes Roberts skilfully mines several of society’s tremor lines and weaves their content together to produce a taut, gritty and utterly engaging film. The travails of Robert Anderson’s character – masterfully portrayed by David Schofield in perhaps the performance of his career – adds real emotional depth to what is a relatively simple plot, as does the flawless supporting cast. In the Q&A afterwards Roberts revealed that he tinkered with the script for around two years, crafting a credible explanation for how such a horrific scenario could play out a school environment. He entirely succeeds, and it’s a joy to behold.

2. The Pack. Franck Richard set the bar high in his stunning debut feature, and in wrestling Madame La Spack offered up perhaps the most memorable character of the Festival and a new horror icon. Part black-comedy, part road-horror, part zombie apocalypse, its macabre richness is utterly enveloping. Richard successfully builds upon the grimy, rustic tradition of French horror of the Grapes of Death school by adding a humour that propels The Pack to a new level, particularly in La Spack (the mesmerising Yolande Moreau was born for the role) and Sherrif Chinaski. A director to keep an eye on.

3. The Dead. Any concerns I had that the African backdrop heralded a gimmicky return to the Caribbean voodoo zombies of the 1940s were swiftly dispelled, and The Dead proved to be one of the best entries to the genre we’ve seen in recent years. Thankfully, the Ford brothers used the zombie format for what it does best – providing a horrific canvass on which to sketch a wider, distinct human story, striking gold in the chemistry between Rob Freeman and Prince David Osei. Visually beautiful, the utterly bleak has rarely been delivered with such heart.

4. Dream Home. It can’t have been easy to pitch a film predicated on the sub-prime mortgage meltdown to developers, but thank goodness Ho-Cheung Pang did. The utterly bonkers premise is delivered with such gung-ho passion by Josie Ho that you can’t help but buy into her bloody quest to get on the property ladder. Kill Bill meets Falling Down, in Hong Kong. A thoroughly enjoyable piece of silliness.

5. The Loved Ones. Taking the clichés of teen horror that one step further, The Loved Ones continued a strong year for Australia. Sean Bryne stylishly and adeptly dances between macabre black comedy and savage brute horror, and for all of the parallels with Misery creates something that feels fresh and inventive. Robin McLeavly’s portrayal of the cosseted Lola is the real show-stealer though.

Honourable mention: Red Hill. As linear and predictable as it is, Red Hill is nevertheless a hugely enjoyable return to the themes of High Plains Drifter, Assault on Precinct 13, Rambo and the like. Ryan Kwanten, Christopher David and Steve Bisley pitch their performances at a suitably pantomimic level, and as a result it’s easy to be swept along for the ride. A marvellous modern Western, and look out for a great appearance by Kevin ‘David Bishop’ Harrington.

Wooden Spoon: The Tortured. There’s no denying that this dross had a measure of sincerity about it. Sadly, it lacked any of the other composite parts of an even average film. Script = laughable (“Imagine the worst pain you’ve ever experienced…this will be worse”). Cast = equal to the script. Plot = As ambitious as the script and cast allow. The cartoon-like kidnap scene is indicative of the respect Robert Lieberman has for his audience and, combined with the primary-school level morality debates Elise and Craig, helps to smash out any wider resonance the scenario might have. One to avoid.

MATT’S TOP FIVE

1. F. Maybe it was just a sense of relief after seeing two abysmal British films on the first two days of the festival, but F really is a phenomenal achievement. A tense and stylish exercise in efficiently mining all the possibilities for terror that existing in a deserted school at night, Johannes Roberts’ film is absolutely watertight – there are no leaps of logic, no illogical actions by characters, no gaping holes. As such, it’s not only a worthy homage to Assault on Precinct 13, but marks out Roberts as a worthy successor to Carpenter in the making.

2. The Pack. This bizarre genre hybrid’s expert blend of black comedy and the macabre reminds you what an exhilaratingly oddball experience French indie cinema at its best can be. The nutty characters and bizarre, twisting plot are a delight, but the real highlight is a truly iconic performance from Yolande Moreau as Mme Le Spack. Deserves as big an audience as any of Jeunet & Caro’s best work.

3. Monsters. Perhaps a brave choice for Frightfest, and certainly one that divided the audience. But whilst the decision to downplay all the supernatural and fantasy elements in favour of a love story didn’t go down so well with some of the more hardened genre nuts, it’s still a charming piece that elicits the same sense of innocent wonder from the natural world as it does its sci-fi elements. Only rarely does Monsters ever become more than the sum of its parts (and certain aspects of the design and dialogue wear their influences prominently on their sleeves), but it’s still a beguiling and lovely way to spend a couple of hours.

4. Bedevilled. Proof that the Koreans are still indisputably masters of the revenge flick. This story of a horrid domestic situation turning into an all-out bloodbath is at times agonisingly slow (it’s a good 70 minutes until anyone gets the chop) and is a good deal less flashy than some of its more celebrated countrymen. Yet it remains incredibly affecting and jumps effortlessly from internal human drama to baroque slasher pic. A low-key triumph.

5. Red Hill. Superior Western that builds its tension the old-fashioned way and is all the better for it. A lot of films were in contention for fifth place, but Red Hill just pips them on account of a single, blissful, wordless scene towards the end that is both utterly unexpected and utterly beautiful. You’ll know the one I mean when you see it.

Honourable Mention: Cherry Tree Lane. This was potentially the biggest letdown of the festival, in that it started so well and finished so poorly. This story of a middle-class couple held hostage in their own home by a gang of youths starts off with a winning mixture of tension and black comedy, boasting some terrific well-observed and nuanced interplay between the gang members as they deconstruct both their own lives and those of their victims. Two thirds of the way though, however, director Paul Andrew Williams remembers he needs to wrap up the plot, and the whole film fizzles out unmemorably, leaving a lingering sense that there’s really not much more mileage in this British ‘middle class nightmares’ movement short of dramatising a copy of the Daily Mail. A shame, because it could have been so much better.

Wooden Spoon: Damned By Dawn. It’s hard not to feel like a bastard when you’re slating a film that was obviously a low-budget labour of love, but it’s also incredibly rare to see a film that manages to get everything so totally wrong. The dialogue is risible, the shocks signposted, the acting amateurish and the lighting gives the whole endeavour the air of a school disco. To cap it all, almost every shot is infected by terrible cheap CGI that ranges from being simply excessive to unintentionally hilarious. Obviously intended as a homage to Evil Dead, it’s worth remembering that Raimi made a far more visually arresting film simply by attaching a camera to a piece of wood and running round a forest. A total car crash of a film.

Eisner (no offence) has no such reputational straightjacket to escape, and undoubtedly uses this freedom to greater effect than Romero. In place of the rambling nature of the original, he delivers a taut and effective case-study on the utter disintegration of a society brought down from within. Though sticking faithfully to the premise – a small town endangered by the crash-landing of military plane transporting a top-secret nerve agent – he pares back most of the loose ends and inconsistencies left by Romero and in so doing gives the film an efficient focus and engaging narrative. It’s a narrative effectively framed by his small-town setting, with Ogden County being sufficiently claustrophobic whilst avoiding veering too far into the twee. As events unfold, the genuine feeling of neighbourliness and community adds to the premise a heightened sense of terror. The eerily horrific encounter during the school baseball game sets the tone and pace nicely. In this context the overhead satellite image sequences are rather clunky and counter-productive, but not fatal to the atmospheric unravelling of the town.

Shorn of most of its social and political commentary baggage, the remake is palpably less ambitious than the original. That is not derogatory of the end product though, as the narrower focus is interesting, inventive and delivered with panache. There is no suitably or doubt about the government’s motives or actions in containing TRIXIE; indeed, the most successful element of Eisner’s remake is his discarding of the duel-narrative of the civilian and military perspective. It means we’re left to confront a force exhibiting none of the self-doubt or humanity of, for example, Colonel Peckem, which gives Eisner’s treatment a welcome relentlessness and enough momentum to overcome what quickly settles into a series of interconnected set-piece action sequences.

That said, the slim-line narrative does have less to sustain it as the inevitability of the town’s fate becomes obvious. Then bleakness approaches perilously close to boredom, and the scenario reveals seem less like steps integral to the plot and more like padding. Though probably 15 minutes or so too long, Timothy Olyphant’s superb performance as Sherriff Dutten is just about sufficient to the task of carrying the plot on his shoulders, and hues closer to the successful leading men of the NOTLD series than we’ve seen in many of Romero’s own recent efforts. All in all, the overall product is that rare thing – a remake that is at least equal to (and perhaps better than) the original.

The Dead was a real treat, the kind of slow, deliberate, contemplative zombie movie we’d given up hope of ever seeing again. The story of an American military engineer stranded in Africa during a zombie plague, it boasts some understated and touching performances as well as some magnificent photography, and easily manages to better Romero’s recent work in this field. One of the highlights of the festival.

Up next was Bedevilled, a Korean revenge film that eschews the baroque theatrics of some of its more famous countrymen in favour of a quiet desperation that spills over into bloodshed. Interestingly, the story is more or less the same as I Spit On Your Grave, but is about a million times more effective here, being told with both dignity and humanity.

Red White & Blue seemed to split the audience somewhat. The tale of Erica, a promiscuous woman who gains an unlikely guardian angel in the form of Iraq veteran Nate, it’s shot entirely on cheap looking video and appears almost unpalatably raw and unpolished. At times the apparently slapdash aesthetics work against it, but at others it’s utterly harrowing and unflinching, as one of Erica’s sexual encounters comes back to haunt her in the worst possible way. Noah Taylor gives an extraordinary performance as Nate, and as the whole unpleasant situation spirals out of control in the second half the film becomes one of the most gruelling experiences of the weekend.

The festival closed with the Eli Roth-produced The Last Exorcism, which has already been doing enormous business at the US box office. It’s an unabashedly mainstream film, and doesn’t really do anything with the faux-documentary style that we haven’t seen countless times in the last few years, but it’s all good clean fun and boasts a charismatic central performance by Patrick Fabian as a former exorcist seeking to debunk his craft. The conclusion is super-silly, which depending on your point of view either totally ruins it or takes the whole piece to a dumb next level. For my money, The Last Exorcism couldn’t hold a candle to some of the better films we saw this weekend, but it’s a superior popcorn flick that delivers enough spooky nonsense to be worth a look.

We’ll be summing up our thoughts on Frightfest 2010 later this week, but overall we had an absolutely brilliant time – enormous thanks to the organisers (especially Alan Jones, Paul McEvoy, Ian Rattray and Greg Day) for putting on such a fantastic event. See you next year!

We opted to head for the pub for a few hours so we missed the quiz and the short film showcase, but we were back in for We Are What We Are, a sober portrayal of a family of inner-city cannibals struggling to come to terms with the death of their father. The story is fascinating and there’s plenty of terrific performances here, but the tone is just a little too bleak to elicit any real sympathy for the central characters which undermines the film slightly; nevertheless, it’s a very respectable piece of work.

Damned By Dawn was up next, a micro-budget Australian homage to Sam Raimi that was introduced as Evil Dead 4. Unfortunately it’s nothing of the sort; it’s hugely ambitious, but fails in pretty much every area: the design is straight out of He-Man, the lighting makes everything look like a school disco, the acting and dialogue are risible, and most ruinously of all, almost every single shot it filled with appalling cheap CGI that makes the whole endeavour look like an episode of Knightmare. The film runs to a slender 81 minutes, but feels double. A disaster.

The notorious A Serbian Film was due to be shown next; however, a last minute intervention from Westminster City Council meant that the film couldn’t be shown uncut, so rather than offer up a butchered version the organisers instead opted to pull it and screened Buried in its place, a film that’s already created an enormous buzz on the festival circuit. Told in real-time, it features Ryan Reynolds as a truck driver who wakes up in a wooden coffin buried somewhere under the Iraqi desert after an insurgent attack. The occasionally impressionistic photography means that the film never feels quite as claustrophobic as it should, but it’s still enormous fun, packed with increasingly ludicrous twists and delivering an intense ending. Despite being 90 minutes of a man in a box, it’s never dull – a terrific achievement and an inspired piece of last minute scheduling.

Australian teen horror The Loved Ones ended the night on a strong note. An inspired medley of John Hughes teen awkwardness and Saw-esque torture, this fantastically trashy confection tells the story of Lola Smart, who after being jilted by her crush before the high school dance, opts to kidnap him and stage a grotesque prom at home with the help of her doting dad. There’s plenty to like here, but the cornerstone of the film is a knockout, off-the-hook, utterly demented performance by Robin McLeavy as Lola, a future genre icon in the Kathy Bates mould. Marvellous fun.

One day left – as ever, we’re on @blacklagoon and @mattnida providing live micro-reviews throughout the day!

The Tortured was undoubtedly the worst film we’ve seen this weekend so far. A nasty piece of mainstream US dreck about a couple who capture and torture the man who kidnapped and murdered their young son, it aspires to sense of social realism and relevance but contains some of the most paper thin characters and contrived plot devices we’ve seen in a while – and worse, sings completely from the Daily Mail songsheet in its lessons on child safety and criminal justice. Offensively poor.

We found the prospect of a pint more palatable than British flick 13 Hours, but we were back for the remake of I Spit On Your Grave. Whilst undoubtedly directed with more flair, and containing some fairly inventive Saw-style setpieces in the second half, the film is hobbled by the same problematic moral agenda as the original, most notably the apparent suggestion that rape (particularly a rape as brutal as the one featured here) can be empowering.

Monsters had the most pre-festival buzz of any film at Frightfest, but it ultimately split us. Matt felt that Gareth Edwards’ love story/road film/monster movie was a charming endeavour, but Carl found it tedious and somewhat derivative. The view amongst the sold-out crowd (overheard in the toilet at least) seemed similarly mixed, but the film seems destined for Distrinct 9-style crossover success – an impressive achievement for what is effectively a low-budget one-man production.

We finished with the utterly mad but hugely enjoyable Dream Home, a film from Hong Kong that has the distinction of being possibly the first horror movie about the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Following a woman who unleashes an orgy of killing in order to secure a flat in her dream apartment block, the non-linear story manages to be simultaneously touching, funny and brutal, sometimes within the same scene. An excellent end to the day.

Two days to go – as ever, follow @blacklagoon or @mattnida on Twitter for on-the-spot reactions.

Next up was Brit flick Isle of Dogs, another tedious piece of gangster nonsense featuring cockneys, strip clubs and brutal violence. The OTT ending left a few raised eyebrows, but for the most part this stinker groaned under the weight of its own self-importance and forced ‘grit’.

Much, much better was F, introduced by the director (an incredibly nervous Johannes Roberts) and probably the film of the festival so far. Roberts has essentially transplanted Assault on Precinct 13 into a British secondary school beseiged by hoodies at night; the film is both inventive in its efficient mining of every possibility for terror in a school, and tooth-grindingly tense, enhanced by admirably restrained acting and direction all round. Sensational.

Probably the best received film of the day was Australian neo-western Red Hill, which features an escaped convict returning to his home town with revenge on his mind. We were slightly split by this one; Matt loved it but Carl was distracted by similarities to High Plains Drifter, though he found it well-crafted.

Final film of the night was the predictably bonkers Alien vs Ninja, a shot-on-video runaround featuring some highly skilled ninjas on the trail of a bizarre rubber alien with holes in his head. As one might expect, total nonsense but enjoyably kinetic, with some surprisingly well-realised CGI-enhanced action.

Don’t forget, for live reports throughout the weekend follow @blacklagoon or @mattnida on Twitter!

[edit: corrected Johannes Roberts' name. If he's reading this, apologies for the error!]

First up was Adam Green’s Hatchet II, introduced by the director himself. A worthy sequel to 2006′s terrific mutant-with-a-well-equipped-toolshed flick Hatchet, it boasts a brilliant, camp-as-tits lead performance from Tony Todd and enough inventive and audacious gore to satisfy the Frightfest crowd. Whilst it’s a little slower to get started than its predecessor and perhaps lacks the outright laughs that defined the original, it was a great opener.

Up next was Australian creature movie Primal, an enjoyable enough piece of nonsense, but derivative as hell, mashing up The Descent, 28 Days Later and Evil Dead amongst others. Characters and dialogue clunk away with pointless exchanges designed to set up later twists, but the action was well directed and overall the whole film pretty passable.

The last film of the day was the world premiere of terrible British gangster/vampire crossover Dead Cert. Its tedious obsession with ‘glamourous’ gangsters and sub-Eastenders attempts at London grit already make it feel terribly dated, and the shoestring budget, risible cockney dialogue and woeful editing add an air of unintentional hilarity. Danny Dyer shows up at the end for an ‘iconic’ cameo, which sort of shows the level this film is pitching at.

Overall, though, a hugely enjoyable start – onto day 2!

We’ll be covering the festival in a variety of ways. Keep checking this site blog for short reports and wrap-ups each day throughout the weekend. We’ll also be putting our thoughts about the various films and events on Twitter, so make sure you’re following us on @blacklagoon (for horror stuff!) and @mattnida (for general banter!). In the weeks following the festival, we’ll also be adding detailed reviews of some of the highlights (and lowlights) to our archive.

If you’re at the festival, do say hello – and even if you’re not, let us know what you think about this year’s line-up either via the comments below, email or Twitter. Look forward to meeting some of you there!

Perhaps the film’s strongest asset is its story. A pre-Dempsey & Makepeace Michael Brandon plays Roberto Tobias, a drummer in a rock band who’s spent the last week being stalked by a mysterious stranger. Confronting the man in an abandoned theatre, Roberto accidentally ends up killing him, and is photographed doing so by a figure wearing a bizarre puppet mask. Roberto flees the scene, but in the coming weeks receives regular reminders of his actions from the photographer, in the form of pictures and other unsettling communications. This is a terrific premise, and Argento milks it for all its paranoid possibilities; in one scene, Roberto is rifling through a pile of records at a party only to discover a photo of himself holding a bloody knife between two LPs. Aside from Roberto’s curiously unsympathetic wife Nina, most of the other characters are ineffectual oddballs, which serves to emphasise his increased isolation and introspection. The world Argento presents is a cold one which yields little in the way of clues; the stark cinematography, which frequently establishes environments by languidly cutting between static shots of locations, drives home how far Roberto’s situation has removed him from home comforts.

There are some brilliant set piece moments as well. The opening sequence, where Roberto is bothered by a fly during band rehearsal, is dazzling. Equally successful is the scene where hapless private investigator Arrioso is pursuing a suspect on the metro; Argento’s economical, unflashy but perfectly framed direction makes this one of the tense high points of the whole movie. Other scenes are less successful; the killer’s pursuit of Roberto’s maid Amelia in the park, for example, is let down by some rather gimmicky jump-cuts that seem out of keeping with the restraint Argento shows elsewhere.

The film’s real problem lies in the rather leaden pacing. At 100 minutes, Four Flies could hardly be considered overlong, but there’s a fair amount of filler material that serves to slow the whole film down without adding much to the overall experience. Godfrey and The Professor are two fairly irritating characters who contribute little, and some of the chat at Roberto’s parties is pretty excruciating. Elsewhere, there’s some rather early-70s attitudes and conventions on display that haven’t exactly aged well; Argento’s portrayal of Arrioso’s homosexuality is fairly embarrassing by modern standards, and the occasional lapses into beatnik dialogue (“Hey man, what’s your trip?”) occasionally add some unintentional hilarity.

In classic Argento style, the story is brought to its endgame by a whacking great plot contrivance that seems at once ludicrous but also fairly in keeping with the bizarre, illogical world he portrays. I won’t blow the twist here, but suffice it to say it involves a hugely unlikely forensic discovery and some of the most revolting jewellery I’ve ever seen in a film. The murder scenes themselves, as well as the climactic final shot, are fairly exciting but feel a little flat compared to the baroque extremes some of Argento’s later films would go to. In many ways, this is Four Flies in a nutshell; like its predecessor, Cat o’ Nine Tails, it’s a solid and entertaining thriller that shows plenty of directorial flair, yet you’re waiting for Argento to slip his leash and show you something extraordinary. Declaring the giallo dead, Argento’s next film was historical comedy The Five Days; but when that bombed in Italy, he returned with Deep Red, which kicked off an astonishing fifteen-year fun of genre defining masterpieces. Four Flies on Grey Velvet isn’t a bad film, but as history proved, Dario Argento was capable of a lot more.

Normally this is the kind of butchery that would have most sane film lovers up in arms, but the results are actually astonishingly good. The reason for this lies in both the quality of the original material and the care and attention that Houston lavished on the project. Whilst cut to make the film as exciting as possible, it retains the series’ emotional core, that of the fully-rounded but understated relationship between the ronin Itto and his three-year old son Daigoro. Similarly, the dubbing is some of the most effective I’ve ever seen on a foreign language movie; Houston apparently enlisted the help of lip-readers to assist him with the script, meaning that occasionally the English dialogue genuinely seems to be spoken by the Japanese actors. And the new music score is a blinder – perhaps anachronistic or inappropriate for the setting, but the humming synths and ambient washes interact well with the hyper-stylised visuals.

It is, however, Kenji Misumi’s original direction that is the star here. The episodic, Western-esque narrative simply demands that Itto fights off different sets of ninjas sent by the eponymous Shogun (who ordered the murder of Itto and his wife) in a variety of locations. This results in some of the most eye-poppingly enjoyable swordplay and bloodshed I’ve ever seen in a film; Misumi continually surprises with new ways of severing limbs, heads and other body parts, and the make-up department really go to town with some of the reddest blood I’ve seen outside of an Italian movie. The backdrops are stupendous as well, with each confrontation taking place in a setting more dazzling than the last; the epic climax sees Itto take on an entire army atop a desert dune, no less. There’s a tremendous sense of fun here, as well; Daigoro’s customised babycart, which allows him to see of a few ninjas himself, is a terrific touch, and the clan of female assassins are great villains.

Anchoring the film are two knockout performances from Tomisaburo Wakayama as Itto and Akihiro Tomikawa as Daigoro. Wakayama economically but subtly conveys both sadness and rage at the fugitive lifestyle he is forced to lead and the deep love for his son, whilst Tomikawa delivers one of the best performances I’ve seen from a child actor in a long time; if you’re left untouched by the scene where Daigoro gathers water from a river to revive an unconscious Itto, you’re a colder person than me. Whilst Houston’s primary interest is in the action, he retains enough character moments like this to allow a depth and warmth to permeate the gore, adding a couple of much needed respites to the frenzied action elsewhere.

Shogun Assassin would go on to cast a long shadow over many subsequent martial arts movies; in particular, it found renewed currency when Quentin Tarantino declared it the primary inspiration behind Kill Bill. Whilst the original Lone Wolf & Cub films probably more fully realised as pieces of film-making, this doesn’t stop Shogun Assassin being both a terrific genre piece and a hugely enjoyable piece of cinema in its own right. By turns touching, tense, beautiful and enormously exciting, it stands alone as possibly one of the unlikeliest artistic triumphs of the grindhouse era.