The fourth day was an interesting one for me, largely because I hadn’t bothered with bed following the afterparty at the Phoenix bar the night before! That was the first time I’d been there after a Frightfest evening, and it was great to mingle with the regulars, along with the likes of David Hess and Joe Lynch who’d decided to go there as well. I think I’ll attempt a few more evenings there next year, though the only other night I made it there on this occasion was the insanely packed do after the final day.
However, for various reasons, the night meant that I missed Dead Snow (I ended up doing other things as I wasn’t sure of my ability to stay awake among other things, as well as the fact that the DVD release was the following day), as well as starting to drop off during Black. So, bear in mind with the following reviews that the Dead Snow review is from a DVD rather than the actual screening, so my opinion may be somewhat subdued compared to if I’d been with the crowd. Also, I can’t give a 100% accurate review of Black in the interest of fairness, as I’d been awake for over 36 hours at that point and the comfortable cinema seat was working against me.
It also means that my memories of any surprises are a little hazy. IIRC, this day was the one where we saw advance screening footage from Adam Green’s new movie Frozen. We mainly saw the trailer, which shows a lot of what happens in the movie – three skiiers get stuck on a ski lift in mid-air after it’s shut down for the weekend, and have to escape before they freeze to death. In addition, there was another excellent Douche Brothers short from Green and Joe Lynch – all of the shorts can now be viewed online here.
The other “surprise” of the night (although everyone knew about it) was a presentation of John Landis’ other horror landmark, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, along with the making of the video. The music video itself was as entertaining as ever, despite being shown on a dodgy transfer. However, the documentary really dragged. I remember enjoying this back in the day, but the editing is actually atrocious. If someone happens to mention something else from Michael Jackson’s career, we get a 2-3 minute clip, sometimes the who video or performance! It’s unnecessary and really made the evening start to drag.
Movies of the day reviews after the jump – Dead Snow, Human Centipede, Coffin Rock, Night Of The Demons, Dread and Black. No Discovery screen reviews again – I didn’t see them!
The 3rd day of the fest was a memorable day for various reasons. Some of these were personal (such as a friend coming over for the day for his first Frightfest, which eventually turned into a drinking session at the Phoenix and zero sleep). Some were part of the festival itself (such as the crowd reaction to Giallo and David Hess’ live blues playing on stage after the first movie).
But, the movies were the important thing, of course. I not only missed all of the movies at the smaller Discovery screen (a deliberate decision for the whole event as I mentioned yesterday), but also missed the main screen movie Millennium: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I’ve heard good things about this movie, but at 150 minutes it was just too long for my state of mind at that point in time, so I went for a few pints instead! I’ll track it down and review below whenever I get chance to see it.
Other than that, there were a few surprises but nothing spectacular. George A. Romero recorded a special message including an exclusive clip from his new movie Survival Of The Dead. It looks OK, certainly miles ahead of Diary Of The Dead, but we’ll reserve judgement. The clip showed a guy fishing, the twist being that it turns out he’s fishing for zombies rather than fish. I liked the reveal, and I’m guardedly anticipating the full movie. Other than that, I don’t remember there being any other exclusives shown, but my notes went missing and my memory’s fuzzy!
Reviews of the movies after the jump. These were: Smash Cut, Hierro, Giallo, Trick ‘r Treat, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl and the final short of the weekend, Sad Case.
Maybe I’m just a little slow on the uptake, but here goes. Parallel to the recent announcement that YouTube will be trialling paid-for movie rentals in the near future, it came to my attention that they have a page here that lets you stream full movies for free. They’re of variable quality and have the usual idiotic regional restrictions attached, but there’s a wide and varied selection. Movies available to me currently include Slave Of The Cannibal God (a.k.a. Mountain of The Cannibal God, where ex-Bond girl Ursula Andress gets stripped naked and smeared with the putrefied flesh of her long-dead husband), Pigs! (a rare grindhouse feature, covered in the excellent Nightmare USA book), Just Before Dawn, Ghost Galleon (the third movie in the Tombs Of The Blind Dead series) and infamous “video nasty” Driller Killer, among the usual public domain titles like House On Haunted Hill and Attack of The Giant Leeches.
It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already, especially as it’s not clear whether this freebie service will continue once the paid-for rentals go live.
The second day of Frightfest was the first full day of the festival – starting at 11am and going well past 1.30am the next morning! As ever, the crowd was friendly, with lots going on. I managed to chat with a few of the people I’ve seen there in previous years including the Mondo Movie guys Ben and Dan, It was also a great time to get to know everybody sitting around me (hi, Sarah!) as well as to develop some in-jokes and camaraderie with the crowd in general – for example, the digitally projected warning to turn off mobile phones often had an image of the mouse cursor left on the screen. People would try to guess where it would appear next, and there was a hilariously audible groan whenever it failed to make an appearance!
There were a few interesting extras to the proceedings on this day. The most notable was Vincenzo (Cube) Natali introducing an exclusive clip of his upcoming new movie Splice, starring Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody. The movie seems to be about scientists working on creating brand new forms of life through genetic experimentation, but getting too emotionally involved with the results. The scene played showed a newly formed specimen escaping from an incubator, and Polley and Brody disagreeing on whether to treat it as hostile while stopping its attempts to escape from the lab. The CGI on the creature was very good (and unusual, given that Natali has made his name with minimalistic movies), and reminded me a little of the escape scene from Species – though admittedly much better.
On top of that, we had another hilarious in-jokey Douche Brothers clip from Adam Green and Joe Lynch, the brand new trailer for Universal’s remake of The Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro (which looks good, though the constant delays are a concern) and a trailer for Charlie (The Fast Show) Higson’s new horror novel The Enemy.
Now, the problem with this year’s fest is that for the first time there were 2 screens. The main screen was massive, but the “Discovery Screen” was only able to hold a fraction of even the weekend pass holders. On top of that, movies often clashed – some discovery showing clashed with two main screen showings! Given that this was my first full weekend at Frightfest, and given the fact that there really wasn’t anything I was absolutely hyped to see at the second screen (and the fact that nothing looked utterly terrible upfront on the main screen), I decided not to bother. Rather than risk choosing the wrong movie, I decided to treat it as though the second screen didn’t exist.
So, no reviews of the Discovery Screen showing here, though I may edit these reports when those movies appear on DVD. Reviews of the movies played in the main screen follow after the jump: The Horseman, Beware The Moon, An American Werewolf In London, Shadow, The Horde and Macabre, as well as the short movie Paris By Night Of The Living Dead.
Annoyingly, I had started to write reviews of each day at Frightfest but my iPod Touch Wordpress app messed up when it tried to get online partway through writing the posts and refused to work until I was on a wifi connection. So, here we are a couple of days later and I hope I don’t miss anything!
Frightfest 2009 is the third Frightfest I’ve been to, and the first I’ve attended the whole event. It’s definitely a different, much better, atmosphere when you go for the full festival, and I highly recommend it to anybody. As usual, most of the movies had some kind of added extra, be it a Q&A with the director or cast & crew, sneak previews of upcoming movies like Vincenzo (Cube) Natali’s Splice or T-shirt giveaways. There was also the return of Adam Green & Joe Lynch’s (a.k.a. The Douche Brothers) Road To Frightfest shorts, this time utilising footage from An American Werewolf In London to hilarious effect. The crowd were friendly as ever, and it’s great to be in the same seat for the whole fest, especially as you really get to know the people around you for that length of time.
As with last year, there was a goodie bag given away to all weekend pass holders and it was fantastically full of decent stuff. I got 2 t-shirts (one of which I gave away as it was too small for me!), 4 DVDs ( a trailer disc, B.T.K., 20th Century Boys and the Children Of The Corn trilogy box set!), as well as various leaflets posters and other things. Great stuff, though the bag itself seemed of lower quality than last year I can’t really complain.
The Empire was an excellent location for the movies to be shown – massive screen, and it seemed easier to movie in and out of the screenings than it was before. Thanks to the way things were scheduled, and the fact that there wasn’t anything I was massively excited about watching on the Discovery screen, I stuck to the main screen. This meant that I only missed 2 of the movies being shown, making a total of 24! The movies I missed were Dead Snow and Millennium: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I should have a review of Dead Snow by the time I upload my reviews of Day Four, since it’s out on DVD now.
As it’s the first day, there were only 3 movies shown (Triangle, The Hills Run Red and Infestation), along with the short film Deadwalkers. Reviews after the jump.
For whatever reason, Full Moon Pictures have made a compilation of their themes available on the free music site Jamendo – that is, it’s free and legal. It’s a meaty 29 tracks, including tracks from 80s classics Trancers, The Pit And The Pendulum and Seed People, along with themes from later movies such as the Puppet Master movies and Subspecies. Well worth a download – haven’t listened to it yet, but I expect lots of Richard Band Psycho rip-offs among others…
There may not be any further updates until after I’ve attended this year’s Frightfest, after which I’ll be running a day-by-day rundown of what’s happened, who and what I’ve seen and anything else that goes on.
In the meantime, I’ve also discovered that there’s a September horror film festival in Estepona, close to where I currently live. If I can, I’ll check that out to. It’s not as big as the London fest, obviously, with few exclusives. Some of the movies are already available on DVD (such as the well-reviewed slasher flick Laid To Rest), but I haven’t personally seen any of the 10 movies being shown, all free of charge and not dubbed (rare in Spain), so I’ll do my best to get there. Guests confirmed are quintessential direct-to-video bad guy Richard Lynch (from many movies including Alligator 2: The Mutation, Invasion USA and Scanner Cop), and director Jorge Grau (best known for the sublime The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue).
Star of the festival is bound to be special prize recipient Lamberto Bava, director of such Italian classics as Macabre, A Blade In The Dark and the Demons trilogy. I really want to try and get there to see him, but I’m not sure if I’ll get there on the day due to work commitments. I’ll follow up after the day.
Director: Dominick Brascia Written by: Steven Baio & Dominick Brascia Music by: David Shapiro Starring: Steven Baio, Tony Griffin, Kim McKamy (Ashlyn Gere), Jody Gibson, Jerold Pearson, Myles O’Brien, Howard Weiss, Karyn O’Bryan, Susan Grant
Tagline: “Ten years ago something terrible happened in this house… This weekend it’s about to happen AGAIN.”
“Martin’s back and he’ll scare you… TO DEATH!” Continue reading Evil Laugh (1988)
So, here we are exactly 3 weeks before Frightfest 2009 opens its doors. I’ve have my full weekend ticket, flights and accommodation booked and raring to go. I’m not 100% convinced my seat isn’t too close to the screen (B27), but at least that means that I’ll get a good view of the guests! Those guests have also now been confirmed, so let’s see what I think so far, after the jump:
I’m of two minds about the upcoming remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street. On the one hand, the original is a bonafide classic of 80s horror cinema and something that’s held up extremely well with age. However, the franchise really is due for a new makeover, and Freddy deserves a return to his scary boogeyman roots rather than his stand-up comic routines in some of the later sequels. With Freddy vs. Jason’s much talked-about sequel not appearing any time soon, I don’t see why a reboot is necessarily a bad thing.
(see more, plus pictures from the remake after the jump)
