So, the final day of Frightfest, and it was as enjoyable as ever though as always it was slightly depressing that I’d be travelling back home the following day with no further movies! The day started with the Video Nasties documentary followed by a Q&A with some of the cast of the doc (and a slightly bemused looking Tobe Hooper, who I thought had left already!). I missed one film on this day, the fairly well received Bedevilled. What can I say, a few more beers at the pub was more inviting than a 2+ hour Korean movie at that point! Eli Roth was on hand for a short appearance for The Last Exorcism, overshadowing the presence of the movie’s actual director Daniel Stamm.

Overall, a decent finale to a decent festival that managed to entertain despite setbacks and restrictions. Looking forward, as ever, to next year and hopefully the Glasgow event in February if I can make it again.

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Well, here we are on the Sunday and it was an interesting experience. Everything ended up being a little messy, in part because of Westminster Council’s decision to try to block the showing of A Serbian Movie by enforcing a BBFC certificate for the first time in the festival’s history. This led to last-minute rushes on the part organisers to get a certificate for the movie (which had been shown uncut at various other festivals in the past), and ultimately to it being dropped. Rumours abounded as to what might replace it – one girl behind the counter at FOPP was apparently telling everybody it would be Robert Rodriguez’s Machete – but the replacement turned out to be the fairly decent Buried.

That was already the second film to be replaced after the original announcement of the line-up (Gregg Araki controversially pulled his latest movie Kaboom!, although the exact details are still debated – and replaced with Damned By Dawn), so this day looked like it might become the event’s darkest moments. Luckily, we ended up with a mostly decent line-up of films, including my personal favourite of the festival. We were also treated to some behind the scenes shots of the upcoming sequel to Human Centipede: First Centipede, which looks to be shaping up quite well as director Tom Six promised up at last year’s première.

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Day 2 of Frightfest was the typically exciting day for the most part, the first full day of the festival. The morning, however, left a sadly disappointing impression on me in some ways. I opted to watch Eggshells instead of the tiger movie Burning Bright – partly to complete my Tobe Hooper filmography, and partly as the latter movie would be out on DVD shortly afterwards. I can’t say that I was totally disappointed with Eggshells, but it was exactly what I thought it would be, leaving me with a “meh” impression overall. The rest of the Hooper retrospective left me feeling a little underwhelmed – Texas Chainsaw is a little too familiar to me at this point in my life, while the Q&A was also disappointing.

I then apparently dodged a bullet by going to watch Wound instead of Isle Of Dogs, the latter getting terrible feedback from those I spoke to, but Wound itself was also pretty bad. The shining silver lining there, however, was the fact that I got to share a couple of beers with a group of people waiting for that film to finish – one of whom was Kane Hodder!

By this point in the festival, I also got the idea that technical problems that were plaguing the festival (it took 2 attempts to get Eggshells to start properly) were beginning to eat into bonus features. That is, while we still got some nice surprises, there didn’t see to be quite as many as last year. Oh well, it was still a great day either way! Full reviews after the jump.

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So, a week on, and it’s time to recap my newly digested experience at this year’s Frightfest.

Ah, it’s never long enough, even though the festival consists of 4 1/2 days of solid movies! The busiest year so far, apparently, and it was the usual mix of friendly old and new faces with lots of good times to be had. As ever, the crowd were highly responsive to most of the movies, never afraid to state their opinion negatively or positively, and the regular staff & guests were on top form.

Sadly, this year featured a few mishaps. Most notably, Westminster Council decided that they could not allow the controversial A Serbian Film to be shown without a BBFC certificate, for which nearly 4 minutes of cuts would be required with no guarantee that the cut version would be passed in time. A shame, as I’m sure that it will do nothing to stop people seeing the film (we all have the internet, morons, and telling a horror fan they can’t handle something is like telling them they have to!) and will actually help marketing the film as it can now be claimed to have been “banned in the UK” even if that’s not strictly true. In place of that film, we saw the Ryan-Reynolds-in-a-box movie Buried.

Technical problems seemed to plague the festival this year as well. Fortunately, this didn’t affect any of the main films too badly (although it was a close call with Eggshells) but there did seem to be a little bit less of the exclusive footage & previews we often get shown so I wonder how bad it was behind the scenes.

Goody bags were also given out again, not a bad haul. The bag itself was branded with the Fanboys logo, and was of better quality than the rather flimsy Dawn of the Dead bag from last year. Inside, we had a copy of the most recent magazine from sponsors Total Film, a couple of DVDs (mine were Days of Darkness and Catacombs) and various bits of advertising. One leaflet that stood out for me was a previous of “Demons 3″, a comic book in 2 parts that will be given away inside Arrow Films’ upcoming re-release of Demons & Demons 2. Arrow’s discs are usually of high quality, so I might buy them even though I have the movies already from Poundland! No T-shirts this year, but we did get a mug for the upcoming TV series The Walking Dead.

There were a few guests, but it was mainly the Hatchet 2 crowd that impressed, with Adam Green’s usual full festival attendance joined by Tony Todd and Kane Hodder. Danielle Harris was also there, but had to fly off in a few hours, while Green and Hodder managed to stay for the whole thing! Tobe Hooper was a little bit of a let down, especially after last year’s sterling performance from the hyperactive John Landis. The Q&A was rather dry, and I’d honestly thought he’d gone until I bumped into him just before the Q&A for the Video Nasties documentary a few days later…

Anyway, more of that later. I’ll run a format of reviews here, day by day with the official daily videos. Sadly, I can’t find the typically excellent Road To Frightfest shorts to link individually, but you can find them here under the shorts section.

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