FrightFest Diary 2019: Days 3, 4 and 5.
Saturday
I overslept. Every year this happens and you’d think I’d be better prepared for it by now, but no. This means that I missed found footage DEATH OF A VLOGGER which I was really looking forward to, and to make matters worse I hear it was actually proper scary as well.
Oh well, maybe the first film of the day will make up for it.
GHOST KILLERS VS. BLOODY MARY
It did not.
This Brazilian horror comedy had a premise I could get behind; YouTube fame chasing ghost hunters who fake all their footage encounter a real ghost. It sounded like a more comedic Grave Encounters and I love that movie. Unfortunately the kind of humour was exactly not my kind of thing; mean, crude, and stupid. Sure, I enjoyed some of the ridiculous OTT blood splatter, and the face ripping off looked amazing and practical, but on the whole it’s just watching arseholes be idiots for an hour and 40 minutes and juvenile grossness with zombie foetus attacking and jacking off, and the fat guy going to the toilet getting attacked by a possessed piece of poo. There were some stabs at meta-humour, some which landed and some which didn’t, but when a character comments that “this movie could have been 20 minutes long” it was all I could do not to yell out “well why wasn’t it then?”.
Yeah, to say this was not my thing is a bit of an understatement. The best part was the credits, and I’m not being sassy when I say that, there genuinely is something pretty funny and clever at the end of the credits.
1/5
FEEDBACK
This was an interesting one. A radio host is held hostage during his show and made to confess to a crime he claims he has nothing to do with. A radio station is an interesting setting for a horror story, it’s claustrophobic but at the same time there’s a sense of connection to the outside world. Also, in cases of stories like Pontypool it allows for a reactionary story where we get to see wider chaos in microcosm. Here it certainly adds to the tension as the characters feel very trapped. Eddie Marsan is a great actor and here he gives us this genuinely ambiguous character that you just don’t know whether he’s telling the truth about anything. The problem, and I’m trying not to give too much away here, is that in the nature of the story you wish that certain characters had more of a comeuppance. It works making a point about the way that people in certain positions of power will be rewarded for bad behaviour, but personally I feel like there is a way you can tell that and still leave things in a more morally satisfying way.
3/5
HALLOWEEN PARTY
Cheesy plot, basically Ring but with a Halloween themed pop up that means you get killed by your worst fear. Daft, yes, but the kind of daft I tend to enjoy. I know all the beats of where this is going, but it’s fun to see how they do it, and in this case it’s low budget but still entertaining. A girl investigates the pop up after her best friend’s death, which leads her to a dark history. Said dark history is a group of deformed children mad at the world at large, and this was an element I didn’t enjoy. It’s ableist to continue to use the disabled/deformed=evil trope and we should be over it. Still, most of it was solid and the final scene was enjoyably over the top and the better version of that one scene on a plane in Rings.
2.5/5
Sunday
Today was significantly shorter for me. No, I didn’t sleep in again, I just had work. But I finished in time to catch what was the film of the Fest for me.
READY OR NOT
Rich people, man. They suck. Samara Weaving, FrightFest fave after Mayhem a couple of years back, plays Grace, who is marrying into a prestigious and filthy rich board game empire family. Unfortunately they have some deadly traditions and sacrifices must be made, and what follows is a madcap, bloody, funny, and enjoyable time. The cast are all great with special mention to Weaving and Adam Brody, it delivers gore, tension, and still a lot of laughs, and it has one of the best DGAF old ladies in a horror movie I’ve seen for some time. You can read my full review here but it’s one of those films that I like too much to say a lot about it, so you just have to watch it because it’s great.
I also now need to have a double feature of this and You’re Next.
5/5
THE LEGEND OF THE STARDUST BROTHERS
Well it was the only Japanese film in the festival, I HAD to see it. And it’s certainly a…….unique experience. Okay, so in the 1980s Makoto Tezuka, son of the “Father of Manga” Osamu Tezuka, as a film student met musician Haruo Chicada who had made a soundtrack to a film that didn’t exist, so Tezuka made a movie to fit that soundtrack. The end result is a bonkers and destined for cult status movie about the rise and fall of a hapless musical act. Much of the film is told through music videos for their, actually quite catchy, songs, and this is one where words cannot adequately describe the weirdness. Digs are made at the manufactured nature of J-Pop idols, still relevant today as in the 80s, pop culture, business, politics, and just about everything and anything. It does run a little long, but I can honestly say I haven’t seen anything else quite like it.
4/5
Monday
Last day blues got me down, but a lot of films still to go.
SATANIC PANIC
Rich people and cults, super in this year. Can’t think why.
A pizza delivery girl who is too nice for her own good has to escape the clutched of a cult who need her for a sacrifice when she delivers to an affluent neighbourhood. This is written by horror writer Grady Hendrix, and if you’re familiar with his work his flair for character is certainly here, but also is his tendency to draw out a plot. It’s still decent fun, and Rebecca Romijn as the cult leader is clearly having a great time in the role. It’s nothing new or special, but it’s a good time.
3/5
THE BANANA SPLITS MOVIE
Oh my poor childhood. We had a VHS tape of The Banana Splits that I, and my brothers, would watch on repeat as very small little ones, and I have fond memories of the Hanna-Barbera children’s show. So naturally now it’s been reborn as a slasher movie with killer robots. Okay then. I think some of this movie’s creation stems from Warner Bros. having and then losing the rights to make a movie based on the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s games, so just decided to essentially make a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie but with different characters. So the Splits are now animatronics with code that has gone rogue and they will do anything to make sure the show doesn’t end……EVER. This is of course bad news for the Banana Splits super-fan and his family who are there for his birthday, as well as other victims- I mean characters, who range from tolerable to annoying. The film is basically a below-average slasher that gets some novelty value from using children’s show characters in an ultraviolent setting. How well it does or does not work for you, therefore, will depend on how far the novelty value goes with you, and for me it goes pretty far. I enjoyed every stupid minute of this film. The kills, the jokes, the characters, I was able to just switch off and have fun with it, and sometimes you need a movie like that.
4/5
HERE COMES HELL
Rich people, AGAIN? Well to be fair they’re not in a cult this time, but I’m still going to blame them. This is going for kind of an Agatha Christie cast of characters in an Evil Dead situation with a group having a social gathering with a little séance and demons descending, and as a concept it works. Also, the film is clearly something everyone involved worked hard on, I just didn’t love it the way I wanted to. It just didn’t seem to have enough ideas to justify being a full movie, and the characters were a little too comedic to really care about what happens to them. A solid effort, but didn’t live up to potential for me
2.5/5
So that is the end of it all for another year. Nothing that really counted in the ballpark of “scary” for me, but still lots of horror fun to be had. And hey, I got a new favourite t-shirt out of it.
My top five of the fest:
5. SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK- A cheat, I know, but it was still technically part of the Fest so it counts.
4. BLISS- Not my usual thing, but I’m glad I watched it.
3. THE WIND- My kinda creepy.
2. THE BANANA SPLITS MOVIE- Nostalgia for the win. And the kill.
1. READY OR NOT- A literally bloody good time.
So until next time.
Happy Watching.