Film Freak Central

FrightFest '18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

FrightFest '18: Terrified + Luciferina

Aterrados
***½/****
starring Maxi Ghione, Elvira Onetto, Norberto Gonzalo, George Lewis
written and directed by Demián Rugna

LUCIFERINA
***/****
starring Sofía Del Tuffo, Marta Lubos, Pedro Merlo, Victoria Carreras
written and directed by Gonzalo Calzada

by Walter Chaw Demián Rugna's Terrified is as if the ghost-hunter sequence in Poltergeist were the entire movie and instead of the one house, the entire street were haunted. It is, in other words, a lot of fun. The picture opens, as these things must, with paranormal shenanigans, which in this case involve spectral voices coming out of the kitchen pipes, leading to one of the great shock reveals in recent memory. Really. It's a kill so radically cool and unexpected that it's at once horrible and deliciously uncanny. Simultaneously, a next-door neighbour seems to have gone missing and in flashback we see what's been happening to him. Then the son of poor single mom Alicia (Julieta Vallina) gets run down in the street before showing up a few days later, black from rot and stinking of the grave, to sit quietly at the dinner table. I love the image of this horrible corpse seated in a sunny dining room while everyone stares at it. You can see the gears turning. And then its milk spills and I almost stood up and left. These abominations trigger the ex-cop living with Alicia, Funes (Maxi Ghione), to join forces with a trio of elderly academics--Jano (Norberto Gonzalo), Albreck (Elvira Onetto), and Rosentok (George Lewis)--to stake out the three houses in the hope of figuring out what's plaguing this quiet suburban street.

FrightFest '18: He's Out There + Hell Is Where the Home Is

HE'S OUT THERE
**/****
starring Yvonne Strahovski, Anna Pniowsky, Abigail Pniowsky, Ryan McDonald
written by Mike Scannell
directed by Quinn Lasher

HELL IS WHERE THE HOME IS
***/****
starring Angela Trimbur, Janel Parrish, Jonathan Howard, Fairuza Balk
written by Corey Deshon
directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw Centring on the manipulation of a mysterious and sinister children's book, Babadook-style, Quinn Lasher's sleek, technically proficient home-invasion/slasher flick He's Out There takes another page out of that film's playbook by putting kids (sisters Anna and Abigail Pniowsky) uncompromisingly and repeatedly in mortal peril. The set-up is a wilderness retreat to the lake house in the woods, where mom Laura (Yvonne Strahovski) is headed with her moppets in tow, her workaholic hubby Owen (Julian Bailey) promising to meet up with them later. This leaves our heroine alone with her kids and that creepy kids' book along with a story told by yokel Shawn (Justin Bruening) about horrific happenings at the ol' house, plus a missing kid (Ryan McDonald) who never was found, now that you mention it.

FrightFest '18: Pimped

***/****
starring Ella Scott Lynch, Benedict Samuel, Heather Mitchell, Lewis Fitzgerald
screenplay by David Barker and Lou Mentor
directed by David Barker

by Walter Chaw David Barker's hyphenate debut Pimped reminds of Danny Boyle's feature debut Shallow Grave in that both are twisty, twisted chamber pieces revolving around bad behaviour that spins, mortally, out of control. It's sexy and sleek, shot every bit like an Adrian Lyne film obsessed with the mating rituals of the rich and beautiful. Opening in a lurid party scored to Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away," it intimates that what's to follow will be a bacchanal, unbridled in its indulgence in earthly delights. And it very nearly delivers on that. Worth noting that Pimped is just one of several of this year's films that seems invested in the conversation about women's empowerment and men's proclivities towards violence, sexual or otherwise. What's interesting about this conversation in horror is that it's a fairly common one. Of all the things it's on the vanguard of, horror has always been aware of the imbalance of sexual politics. With the topic now in the mainstream, small wonder that this genre, so often derided by even its more opportunistic creators (Danny Boyle among them, as it happens), has gained some measure of popular esteem. The more ignorant cultural critics have even been emboldened to opine that horror is not horror. Those who know, know that horror was always more likely to have these difficult midnight chats.

FrightFest '18: Seeds

*/****
written by Owen Long & Steven Weisman
directed by Owen Long

by Walter Chaw Owen Long's Seeds aims for the bleachers, for which it should get some credit. It's a navel-gazing exercise in which Marcus Milton (Trevor Long), an aging Aschenbach with very particular appetites, returns to the family reserve one eternal twilight to act as babysitter to niece Lily (Andrea Chen--disastrously uneven) and her little brother Spencer (Garr Long). There, he pops pills and sees tentacles the film presents as a metaphor for the repressed sexual dysfunction he nurses within what appears to be an Asian fetish, what with the hooker he kills in the prologue montage and now his niece, who does her level best to seduce dear Uncle. Where to begin? For starters, there are way too many "waking from a nightmare" stings in this thing; and then there's that long seduction sequence in the middle where Chen tries to laugh on cue and ends up just demonstrating a different way to scowl. She's so badly outmatched by Long that it has the same effect as Sofia Coppola's performance in The Godfather III: namely, that everything gets fucked up because no one believes for a second that someone could be romantically interested in this construct. (Director Long does Chen no favours by letting this take through. Someone, at some point, should have said something.) In flashback, we see a young Lily bringing a shell with some mysterious tentacle creature inside it into the house, where, we presume, it's been gestating in the basement. Jungians will identify that all of this is the product of someone who skimmed the texts. Milton believes that his sick impulses are growing inside him like the Elder God is growing in the boiler, escalating to a few final moments in which all that repression leads to an explosion of his unexamined Shadow projection. What I'm trying to say is that Seeds is that roommate you got freshman year who has a man-bun, rock climbs, and is majoring in Cosmology. Give it this: the cinematography of Rhode Island looks great, and if you're going to fail, do it spectacularly.

FrightFest '18: Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years

**/****
directed by Marcus Hearn

by Walter Chaw An affectionate if standard talking heads-plus-clips documentary covering those last years of the hale British studio's run as they tried, from the late-'60s on, to compete with the new era of permissiveness and transgression in film, Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years, from Hammer authority Marcus Hearn (who's published multiple volumes on the subject), is lockstep, even dry alas, but indisputably informative. I was most interested in the revelation that Hammer had wanted to work with director Michael Reeves post-Witchfinder General but that Reeves died prematurely, leaving the very weird Hitchcock riff Crescendo as the relic of a lost collaboration. Anecdotes like how Madeline Smith from 1970's Taste the Blood of Dracula was a "complete virgin" fresh from convent school and thus badly-equipped to deal with that film's brothel scene and its accompanying male "naughty bits" are interesting-verging-on-appalling. Actually appalling are the recollections of the same movie's John Carson, who tells the story of how someone else on set hysterically went over the line and sexually harassed a co-star. There's another bit about the late addition of a rape to sex things up in the rapidly-changing social environment that is frankly unforgivable. The rest of it plays a lot like a Spinal Tap sort of thing where an increasingly desperate studio does a hippie movie with aged thirty-somethings (Dracula A.D. 1972) and allies itself with Run Run Shaw. All to capture zeitgeist in a bottle--to no avail. Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years is a nice piece as far as it goes, though as it's about curiosities that only the most die-hard fans will have seen, it feels like it should be a special feature in a comprehensive DVD box set rather than a standalone documentary.

FrightFest '18: Ravers

*½/****
screenplay by Luke Foster
directed by Bernhard Pucher

by Walter Chaw Bernhard Pucher's Ravers features a couple of nice kills, a couple of funny scenes, and a few underdeveloped character things that sap its momentum, robbing it of both a beginning and an end. Germaphobe Becky (Georgia Hirst) is a cub reporter for a no-nonsense editor (Natasha Henstridge) who tells her that in order for Becky to be taken seriously as a reporter for/by this no-nonsense editor, she has to get her hands dirty. Which is a problem for a germaphobe. Becky visits a toxic facility first and dons a hazmat suit for it while affable Ozzy (Danny Kirrane) risks it in T-shirt and lab coat. She's that kind of irritating. This leads to an invitation to a sick rave where, the prologue tells us, an experimental energy drink packed with testosterone is handed out to the participants. As long as the music is banging, there's not much of a problem. As soon as the music stops (or is Toto), watch out. A black drug dealer (Kamal Angelo Bolden) takes advantage of the 'roided-out raver zombies to work as his customers and muscle; he also tries to kill a cop and is basically irredeemable, which is sort of a problem. Also at issue is a subplot where it turns out that Becky is a lesbian, I guess, and she tries to save her poisoned girlfriend, Hannah (Manpreet Bambra), when shit gets real. It's an issue in the sense that it's raised for no reason, really, and represents one of two avenues (the other being toxic masculinity, of course) that are there in the text but unexplored once the killing starts. The Toto joke is good, the special effects are good, and some of the set-pieces are neat (I do like the bit about needing to play music to keep the monsters distracted), but long about the time twin epilogues drop--one about Becky writing it all up as a local newspaper scoop, the other about more bottles of the rage drink making its way into middle-America--you get the distinct impression it all would've been better had they just played it straight. Ravers outsmarts itself. I wish it hadn't.

FrightFest '18: "It's Alive!" - FFC Interviews 'Frankenstein's Creature' Filmmakers Sam Ashurst & James Swanton

by Walter Chaw Sam Ashurst's film of James Swanton's play "Frankenstein's Creature" is the best film of its kind since Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia. It solves the problem of shooting a static, one-set, one-man show with graceful, inventive technique. It's smart about what it does and an act of extraordinary brinkmanship that happens to pay off in spades. Both based in the UK, Messrs. Ashurst and Swanton were kind enough to chat with us from amidst the whirl and fury of London's FrightFest, where Frankenstein's Creature had its debut this past August. We started by talking about Mary Shelley's novel on the 200^th anniversary of its publication:

FrightFest '18: Frankenstein's Creature

***½/****
written by James Swanton
directed by Sam Ashurst

by Walter Chaw Of all the remembrances and resurrections marking the 200^th birthday of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, perhaps the most innovative is Sam Ashurst's document of James Swanton's one-man stage play Frankenstein's Creature, featuring Swanton as the monster on a single dilapidated set, delivering a ninety-minute tour de force monologue that zeroes in on the most-forgotten aspect of Shelley's novel: its wit. Swanton is by turns needling and pathetic, demanding attention and then declaring that he knows he's ugly...but look closer. He takes delight in his part in his "maker's" downfall, gleefully reenacting the execution of an innocent woman blamed for his misdeeds and portraying a side of the monster all but silenced since its most iconic popular cultural representation. Kenneth Branagh's version did its best to touch on the creature's eloquence yet saddled itself, inexplicably, with Robert De Niro's mean streets brogue. Here, Swanton presents a sensitive, fractured intelligence discovering rain for the first time, rivers, the beauty of a nature to which he is an abomination, and loving relationships from which he will eternally be rejected. He's like a murderous Oscar Wilde. It jibes with my memory of Shelley's monster, immortalized in a book that for the first years of its existence was thought to be the product of bad boy Romanticist poet Percy Shelley, Mary's husband. Ashurst, with subtle and not-so-subtle double-exposures and spare camera movements, creates something that recalls, but is utterly distinct from, Jonathan Demme's document of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. It's the best movie of its kind since. At its end, what's been represented is a voracious mind fed on Goethe and Milton, all of that failing to civilize the portion brutalized by the creature's rejection from his "father." The subtitle of Shelley's novel is "Or, the modern Prometheus"--and if the connection follows, this monster, the god's creation, is each of us. We shore fragments against our ruins, and as Swanton deconstructs himself, ripping his vestments from himself stitch-by-stolen-stitch, he reveals that we're broken. Beyond repair, I think.

FrightFest '18: A Young Man with High Potential

***/****
starring Adam Ild Rohweder, Paulina Galazka, Pit Bukowski, Amanda Plummer
written by Anna de Paoli & Linus de Paoli
directed by Linus de Paoli

by Walter Chaw The storyline goes like this: Rey, the young woman in the new Star Wars trilogy, is a "Mary Sue"--a term used to describe a female character who is born fully-formed and, therefore, undeserving of her status as the hero of the story, any story. It's an argument made by mediocre men, usually mediocre white men, who have gathered together over social media to share their frustrations about how, essentially, their own worthiness has never been recognized by a world designed, now, to overlook and disdain them. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The parallel storyline is that women are usually murdered by men they know--ex-lovers or spurned would-be lovers--and that the best indicator for murderous gun violence is a history of domestic violence. We hold these truths now to be self-evident. And suddenly these mediocre men who used to get pushed into lockers and demeaned for their solitary interests are the masters of our culture, our industry, our government. There were warnings about this in films like The Last American Virgin and Revenge of the Nerds, remembering that the triumphant happy ending of the latter entailed one of the nerd heroes raping the girlfriend of the lead jock...and the girlfriend liking it a lot. Masculinity has always been this mash of the tragic and the toxic. It's irresolvable, though at least there can be better awareness.

FrightFest '18: "'Night' Moves" - FFC Interviews 'The Night Sitter' Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn & John Rocco

by Walter Chaw The Night Sitter is awesome indeed. Partially crowdfunded via Kickstarter, it represents the feature debut of writing-directing duo Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco and their filmmaking collective Roller Disco Massacre. Just a couple of guys who love '80s horror and know how to use it in a sentence, Bruhn and Rocco were kind enough in the heat of this year's FrightFest to answer a few pressing questions. We started off talking about practical details of shooting The Night Sitter:

FrightFest '18: The Night Sitter

***/****
starring Elyse Dufour, Jack Champion, Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum
written and directed by John Rocco and Abiel Bruhn

by Walter Chaw From the first synth chords of Rob Himebaugh's awesome '80s-inspired score; from the first glimpse of DP Scotty G. Field's gorgeous, neon-soaked lighting schemes; from the first look at world-weary heroine Amber (Elyse Dufour), herself a feat of lighting and colour coordination, The Night Sitter announces itself to be a major player. Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco's feature debut, it covers one really bad night in the life of poor, terrified Kevin (Jack Champion). His dad (Joe Walz) a wannabe reality-show host of one of those paranormal shows, hires Amber to sit for him and his girlfriend's (Deanna Meske) horrible kid, Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), leaving them alone with a locked door, behind which are all the demonic artifacts dad's been hoarding throughout his misspent career. That he's a loser is never a question (he times his reel to "accidentally" play for the benefit of pretty Amber), but he's a rich loser--meaning that as soon as dad is gone on his date, Amber calls her friends (Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum, J. Benedict Larmore) to come help her loot the place. Unfortunately, Ronnie has found where dad keeps the key to the demon room.

FrightFest '18: The Golem

***½/****
starring Hani Furstenberg, Ishai Golan, Brynie Furstenberg, Lenny Ravich
written by Ariel Cohen
directed by Doron Paz & Yoav Paz

by Walter Chaw Hanna (Hani Furstenberg, The Loneliest Planet) is listening in while a council of elders gives her husband Benjamin (Ishai Golan) the option of leaving her for being unable to provide a son for years after the loss of their child. It's 1673 Lithuania. There's a plague, so there's a lot of death, and there's palpable fear in the air. Fear, among the other things it attracts, is irresistible to religion, and one day in this small Jewish community in the middle of a wilderness, the villagers discover that the plague has returned to the countryside and is encroaching on their isolation. Naturally, they retreat into religion. Ted Chiang has a short story called "The Seventy-Two Letters". It takes Hebrew mythology and wonders what it would be like if religion were treated as science. (And maybe, you know, it is.) The seventy-two letters are the name of God. You write them on a small piece of paper and roll that tightly into a little scroll. Insert it in the mouth of a mud effigy to infuse it with life. What materializes is a guardian, a protector, a golem that can be guided to the extent your id can be guided. Dario Argento played with a version of this in Phenomena; George Romero did, too, with Monkey Shines. The Golem is the true fana.

FrightFest '18: Secret Santa

*/****
screenplay by Adam Marcus & Debra Sullivan
directed by Adam Marcus

by Walter Chaw There's a line between homage and rip-off and I think you cross it when you quote lines in their entirety, without a lot of irony, from better movies. The "insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase" from Raising Arizona, the entreaty to be untied from a chair lest they spend the winter there from Carpenter's The Thing, dropped from the mouths of a terrible family drugged with an id-freeing cocktail during Christmas dinner as punchlines and, I think, probably, in-jokes for the everyones who catch them. It's a Shrek thing--instant gratification for a basic grasp of common cultural references. And it's still not the worst thing about Adam Marcus's Secret Santa. No, the worst thing is probably how even the most mundane dialogue sequences are overcut--to a reaction from the listener, to a reaction from a non-listener, to a closer shot of the speaker, to an arm, to the table, now the camera's moving in a slow arc, now it's revolving. Also bad is how much time the movie spends establishing itself to be woke about body issues, race, and sexuality, only to have the fat sister (Ryan Leigh Seaton) be first comic relief when she chokes on the food she's forking into her mouth, then the aggrieved monster likely responsible for the whole mess. Said mess being that the family is a disaster and during the course of an awful evening, they decide to kill each other in obnoxious ways. Co-screenwriter Debra Sullivan is very good as the matriarch of the clan, suggesting that between her performance and the (sadly) wasted idea that everything seems to be getting really hot, there's an interesting film in here somewhere. As is, Secret Santa is just Noises Off! with stabbings, shovel decapitations (The Evil Dead!), skull-fucking, a trio of blowjobs, a funny reference to Jocasta that is alas instantly explained, and about fifty thousand edits.

FrightFest '18: Incident in a Ghostland

Ghostland
**½/****
starring Crystal Reed, Anastasia Phillips, Emilia Jones
written and directed by Pascal Laugier

by Walter Chaw Pascal Laugier, if he had made no other film than Martyrs, would still have made Martyrs: the cornerstone picture of the short-lived New French Extremity and one of the most startling (and nigh-unwatchable) films about faith ever made. It would be remarkable as the second half of a double-feature with Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc--maybe as part of a trilogy with Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Mad Mel's Passion of the Christ would fit in there, too. Make a weekend of it with Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew--martyrdom and ecstasy and the cinematic arts. Laugier's follow-up, The Tall Man, failed in comparison to Martyrs, as it must. He was briefly attached to a Hellraiser reboot with Clive Barker's blessing (of course with Barker's blessing: Martyrs is a film made by a Cenobite), but the franchise is cursed and it fell through. Folks have been waiting for Laugier to make another masterpiece. Incident in a Ghostland isn't it, but like The Tall Man it's a strong, technically-proficient genre exercise that deals in an interesting space with at-times striking images. Laugier is one of the only filmmakers who makes me queasy. His films aren't kidding around.

FrightFest '18: The Dark

**½/****
written and directed by Justin P. Lange

by Walter Chaw What Justin P. Lange's hyphenate debut The Dark, a variation on Let the Right One In, lacks in freshness it makes up for in look and vibe. Better, probably, as a short film, it opens strong with a bad man on the run, Josef (Karl Markovics), stopping at a convenience store, where he gets the usual warning about going into the woods. Lange subverts convention immediately, and then goes to the remote house in the wood where the monster lives. Said monster, a little-girl ghoul named Mina (Nadia Alexander), has been murdering the wayward and eating them for some time--but she stops short of harvesting Josef's young ward, Alex (Toby Nichols), whom Josef has kidnapped, groomed, and, naturally, abused. What follows is the relationship between Mina and Alex as it develops into a kind of twilit co-dependency based on the confluence of their respective traumas. The problem with expanding shorts to feature-length is that it's often done on the premise that what worked well in shorthand would work better with extended narratives and backstories. What's murky is sometimes best left that way. The Dark is elegant, even beautiful, when it regards Alex and Mina silently in their brief space together. Doom hangs over them and it's understood that there's no future for them, but the film captures those delirious moments in a child's emotional life when it seems like forever is possible. Yet whenever it leaves that space, be it through flashback or some other external contrivance, its deficiencies in script and performance become clear. Still, even with a bit too much fat left on the bone, The Dark is a promising debut for Lange.

FrightFest '18: The Witch in the Window

**/****
written and directed by Andy Milton

by Walter Chaw Life as a House as a different kind of horror movie, Andy Milton's The Witch in the Window is an allegory for marriage, attachment, fatherhood tied up with restoring an old house in the country that appears to be haunted by a witch. Half of it is pretty scary, half of it is an overwritten, mawkishly-sentimental, and slow-moving drama between estranged dad Simon (Alex Draper) and his delinquent son, Finn (Charlie Tacker). It seems that Simon has bought a flipper and invited Finn to come over to help restore it, the secret being that this is all a ploy on Simon's part to get the family back together. Complicating things is the ghost of neighbourhood witch, Lydia (Carol Stanzione), who in a few effective scenes scares the ever-living crap out of Simon and Finn. It's a head-scratcher, though, because Lydia apparently wants Simon and Finn to stay with her. She sure has a funny way of showing it. There's a fine sequence where Simon talks with Lydia in the house for a while without knowing it's Lydia, but the rest of it is wildly uneven and, in the picture's more dire dialogues, unintentionally funny. Tacker is almost entirely not up to the task presented him to engage in complex, emotional exchanges, making Draper's calm, guidance-counsellor reaction to Tacker inexplicable, even hilarious. Straightforward with a coda so telegraphed that it loses whatever emotional epiphany it was meant to deliver, The Witch in the Window is obvious, predictable, and stilted in its worst moments. But it's maybe worth a look for that one scene where it all suddenly goes wrong.

FrightFest '18: The Night Eats the World

La nuit a dévoré le monde
***½/****
starring Anders Danielsen Lie, Golshifteh Farahani, Denis Lavant, Sigrid Bouaziz
screenplay by Guillaume Lemans, Jérémie Guez, Dominique Rocher, based on the novel by Pit Agarmen
directed by Dominique Rocher

by Walter Chaw A spiritual companion piece to "The Twilight Zone"'s "Time Enough at Last," in which a bookish, harried loner survives a nuclear holocaust (to his delight), gathers all the books he wants to read, and then accidentally breaks his glasses, Dominique Rocher's The Night Eats the World has angry, awkward loner Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie, who broke my heart in Oslo, August 31) find a little safe space only to discover that the zombie apocalypse has happened. It opens at a party thrown by his ex-girlfriend Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz), where he's come to collect a box of tapes she's accidentally taken with her upon her departure. He's irritated that her attention's divided and that she's invited him to get his stuff during a party. Her public displays of affection with a new, aggressive boyfriend (David Kammenos) seem calculated, too, to make him uncomfortable, small. The first ten minutes of the film see Sam floating through the party, nursing his drink, trying to get Fanny's attention. Hours pass with Sam on the periphery of every interaction. In a very real, visceral way, The Night Eats the World is a character study of introversion and depression. Fanny, frustrated instantly, asks Sam why he can't just mingle, meet some new people, "try for a change." It's clear why they've broken up. She doesn't understand what it's like to be depressed. He doesn't understand what it's like not to be. She tells Sam to go in a back bedroom for his things and stay there because it's quiet. They'll talk later. She does understand at least that Sam might have some audio processing issues related to his overlapping conditions. Yeah, don't we all.

FrightFest '18: St. Agatha

*/****
written by Andy Demetrio, Shaun Fletcher, Sara Sometti Michaels and Clint Sears
directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

by Walter Chaw The title music announces a debt to Rosemary's Baby and indeed Mary (Sabrina Kern) is with child and at the mercy of a religious cult. Her boyfriend Jimmy (Justin Miles), however, is a decent fellow for 1957, nothing like Rosemary's husband. The only hint he's a beatnik is that he likes to blow that horn. There are a few problems with St. Agatha: it's overly familiar, it's tame as nunsploitation goes, and its twist is obvious and unimaginative. Before long, Mary's torment at the wayward girl's home to which she's run after getting knocked-up starts to feel like sadism for its own sake, with the solution to the piece already clear to everyone the second there's mention of the girls looking nice for "the donors" coming on visiting day. It's death for a horror film to only be smarter than the segment of the audience that has never seen a horror film. Carolyn Hennesy rolls her lines around in her mouth as the evil Mother Superior, counting money and renaming Mary for the titular sainted martyr after making her "Fear Factor" some pre-chewed food and spend the night in a coffin. Never frightening, St. Agatha makes a bad mistake in weaving in an extended flashback (which calls out to Antichrist, of all things), so that Mary and the other girls imprisoned at the home never feel truly imprisoned there. Every time you leave a claustrophobic setting like this, it lets the audience off the hook; imagine Suspiria, but with periodic flashbacks to Suzy's childhood as a ballerina. Needing a few more passes at the typewriter--despite a telephone book's worth of credited screenwriters--as well as couple more on the Avid, St. Agatha at least looks and, overbearing score notwithstanding, sounds pretty good.

FrightFest '18: Ghost Stories

**/****
written and directed by Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman

by Walter Chaw A throwback anthology film that alas plays more like a Cat's Eye or a Trick 'r Treat than a Dead of Night or a Black Sabbath, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson's Ghost Stories is a handsome, safe-feeling prestige-horror production that trods no new ground, though it trods old ground pretty well. Paranormal debunker Professor Goodman (Nyman) needs a good knocking off his high horse and gets it in the form of three supernatural occurrences he's tasked with explaining. Three tales--the first a haunted hospital/factory thing, the second an incident on a remote forest road, the third involving a poltergeist (complete with deformed baby)--lead to the resolution of the framing story, in which our Goodman discovers that the real demons are the ones we carry with us from childhood. Despite a concession to cheap jump-scares, it's all stately in mounting and sterling in performance, from co-writer/co-director Nyman in the central role all the way through to young Alex Lawther as the nervous driver and stalwart Martin Freeman as an officious little prick who happens to have suffered an unendurable loss. At the end of the day, Ghost Stories feels like something famous people have done as favours for one another. If you gravitate towards little-girl figures appearing suddenly in flashlight beams and invisible somethings shaking a stalled car in the middle of the night, well, have I got the campfire for you. It's all fine and, more than that, agreeable as something you can watch with your parents. There's room for slumber-party horror films for youngsters, of course, and this one moves somewhere to the middle of that pack.

FrightFest '18: Tigers Are Not Afraid

Vuelven
***½/****
starring Paola Lara, Hanssel Casillas, Rodrigo Cortes, Ianis Guerrero
written and directed by Issa López

by Walter Chaw Estrella (Paola Laura) is just a little girl. Her mother's been disappeared by a local drug cartel and she's living by herself in their tiny apartment. She has three pieces of chalk that a teacher's given her to represent the three wishes little girls without mothers sometimes get in fairy tales about abandonment in times of great evil. She uses the first one to wish for her mother to return, and so her mother does. But her mother's dead, of course, and now Estrella is living on the roof with a small band of other young orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramon Lopez) in hopes that the gangster from whom Shine has lifted a gun and cell phone don't find them. It's W.W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" set against the backdrop of the troubles plaguing modern Mexico, and while it's not entirely clear to the children if Estrella's wishes are actually coming true, it's never really a question for writer-director Issa López, who manifests the subjects of the kids' hopes and fears as animated street graffiti and the sudden animation of a stuffed animal. There are echoes of a lot of things: of Stephen King's short story "Here There Be Tygers", of Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts, and most of all of Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, to which it owes its structure and allegorical strategy. But Tigers Are Not Afraid is most of all its own lyrical thing.

FrightFest '18: Lasso

***/****
written by Roberto Marinas
directed by Evan Cecil 

by Walter Chaw Trish is the star of Lasso. Ostensibly a secondary character, she's played by trans activist Skyler Cooper (who identifies with masculine pronouns) with confidence, beauty, and strength. After the initial "is she a boy or a girl?" question asked by congenital screw-up Simon (Andrew Jacobs), Trish is just accepted as this embodiment of strength and empathy. When Simon beats himself up for causing the death of a few of his buddies, it's Trish who recognizes the importance of preserving his confidence for the long night ahead. She takes the lead. It's not even a question that the others follow. Lasso is about a rodeo run by cannibal cowboys and how one night a tour bus full of yokels makes the bad mistake of staying past closing time. There's a connection drawn between the cruelty with which rodeo animals are treated and the torture our victims endure, from hog-tying to branding, electric prodding to the titular lassoing. The band is divided in two: the one led by Trish, once one-armed hero Ennis (Sean Patrick Flanery) gets calved off; the other by plucky Kit (Lindsey Morgan), who tries to get a few of the older folks to safety in their broken-down bus. Lasso is also about modes of masculinity and how it's possible to be macho and disabled--and transgender, and young. Old, too. The traditional he-man cowboy archetype is the one indicted here and I'd argue that there's more to the moment where Ennis crawls through a killing field without the use of either of his arms than just a feat of endurance. He tells Simon later that it isn't what you're born with, it's what you make of it, and it's corny, sure, but there's something laudable about it showing up in exactly this movie. Lasso reminds in some ways of the gay slasher Hellbent, sharing with it an unusual social awareness while also being a credible entry in the genre. It runs a little long at 97 minutes, but there are enough smart moments to deserve a careful consideration. This is director Evan Cecil's feature debut. Respect.

FrightFest '18: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot

*½/****
written and directed by Robert D. Krzykowski

by Walter Chaw Sort of like The Age of Adeline where the gimmick isn't immortality, but rather a guy who killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot, Robert D. Krzykowski's The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is ultimately an elegy for a certain kind of heroism embodied by Sam Elliott, arguably the only actor who could perform the high-wire act of this high-concept movie. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot has a definite Bubba Ho-Tep vibe, especially in the moments where it uses a sting like Bill Withers's "Use Me" to convey a specific type of weary resignation. But then it cribs the work-shed sequence from Evil Dead II, complete with whip-pans and seesaw, and betrays that what it really wants to be is liked more than anything else. It's desperate for cult acceptance; and equally desperate for critical respect. It's desperate. Elliott has a keystone moment where he talks about how murdering Hitler was Pyrrhic at best, given that his ideology had already taken hold. He's the physical manifestation of regret and the Greek idea that knowledge brings no profit to the wise. His titular hero is asked to kill a world-killing, plague-bearing Sasquatch because a quirk of his physiology and his unusual skill-set make him the only person capable of doing it. The line blurs, then, as Elliott is also the only person who could give something this rudderless a theme that doesn't feel contrived, and a throughline that doesn't feel forced. The seams show and so does the strain; what's left is mostly exhausted from all that effort. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot isn't a product of a vision, it's the product of wanting attention without upsetting anyone. It's a little like that Ezra Pound poem "In a Station of the Metro," in that sense, except there's no poem, just the amazing promise of that title.

FrightFest '18: F.U.B.A.R. (2018)

**½/****
written by Ben Kent & Joel Wilenius
directed by Ben Kent

by Walter Chaw A lark, and often a good one, in the Very Bad Things vein where murder spoils an evening of debauchery, Ben Kent's feature debut F.U.B.A.R. offers up a twist by setting its shenanigans at one of those paintball courses where people pretend to be zombies for the pleasure of the armed guests. It's a bachelor party for nebbish Sam (Sean Verey), who, saddled with his obnoxious chums, hopes the weekend goes well so he can impress his future father-in-law, Gerald (Mark Heap)--Gerald being an ex-Navy special ops guy who did classified things at Her Majesty's discretion. Eric (Danny Kirrane) is the Zach Galifianakis of the group, the loser holding onto past glory who takes it all a little too seriously; Toby is the Ed Helms family man who's outgrown these idiots; and Miles is the unctuous Bradley Cooper figure in charge of making inappropriate jokes at other peoples' expense. These archetypes stretch over essentially every film of this kind, fascinatingly leapfrogging gender barriers in the process (see: Rough Night--rather, don't). The best of the bunch is probably Edgar Wright's The World's End, and F.U.B.A.R. owes perhaps its greatest debt to that film's sense of humour and timing. Essentially, the boys accidentally kill one of the zombie cosplayers--who are, unfortunately for the boys, insane paramilitary types who don't take kindly to the death, accidental or otherwise, of one of their mates. What follows is the usual over-the-top violence and unfortunate escalation, leading up to a final punchline that crosses over into the pleasantly surreal. It's a solid diversion and Kent demonstrates a nice way with his cast, as well as a strong ear for comedy.

FrightFest '18: Upgrade

****/****
starring Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie
written and directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw I can't imagine I'll ever see a better Venom movie than Leigh Whannell's Upgrade, the story of a mild-mannered Luddite mechanic named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) who one day, after delivering a tricked-out antique ride to cyber-genius Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), is paralyzed in a terrible accident and forced to watch his girlfriend, tech-company functionary Asha (Melanie Vallejo), get assassinated by modded-out thugs led by psychopath Fisk (Benedict Hardie). In the film's near-future, there are limited Tetsuo: The Iron Man body modifications like guns embedded in gunsel's palms and enhanced limbs and vision alongside more common advances like self-driving cars and A.I. assistants. The tech, in other words, is entirely credible at first, as the film eases us into nanotechnology and an A.I., STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden), implanted in Grey to not just "cure" his paralysis but also, when allowed to operate independently, turn Grey into a one-man vengeance puppet. The first scene of STEM's emancipation is a glorious invention of fight choreography and performance philosophy: Grey is literally possessed, doesn't really "invest" in what his body's doing to other bodies, and, at the end of the sequence, begs with the last not-dismembered bad guy to please not get up off the floor. It's a Buster Keaton gag, really--the stone-faced centre of a violent storm. Marshall-Green's performance reminded me of both Steve Martin's in All of Me and Jeff Fahey's in Body Parts. In a year that saw another instalment in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible series, this here is the year's best action scene.

FrightFest '18: Rock Steady Row

**½/****
written by Bomani J. Story
directed by Trevor Stevens

by Walter Chaw The latest remake of Yojimbo finds warring frats in some near-future dystopia holding a college campus controlled by feckless, disinterested administrators hostage with their stealing and fencing of bikes. Yes, it's extreme high-concept schlock played with whip-pans and wipe-cuts meant to evoke the showier aspects of the Spaghetti Western while self-consciously making a hard play for instant cult status. It reminded me a lot of Six String Samurai, for what it's worth, and like that film, the mileage one gets from Rock Steady Row may vary. Lester (Hester Horwin) is a freshman with great hair who has his bike stolen on the first day of school. His roomie, Piper (Diamond White), founder/writer/editor of the school paper, tells him he hasn't just lost his only means of transportation--there's no mechanism for getting it back, either. So Lester takes things into his own hands, infiltrating one frat and then the other, and ultimately playing them against each other from the inside. If you've seen it, you've seen it. The dorms, by the way, are co-ed as a cost-saving measure, part of the picture's "satire" of the dire educational debt culture of the United States. There's also a little bit sending up rape culture and the empowerment narrative, but Rock Steady Row is about finding a way to make a sexy-looking movie that moves in sexy ways; when it touches on larger issues, it's without much interest or depth. Technically proficient in every way, it should be enjoyed with an audience and is, in the end, only what a movie shouldering its way into a category that films generally grow into over time can be. That is: obvious and kind of tedious, but, you know, what the hell.

FrightFest '18: Boar

***/****
starring Simone Buchanan, John Jarratt, Melissa Tkautz, Bill Moseley
written and directed by Chris Sun

by Walter Chaw Chris Sun doesn't appear to have any boundaries, at least when it comes to violence and gore in his movies; over the course of four films, he's proven himself to be a vital voice in splatter/exploitation. He dealt with cultures of masculine toxicity in Come and Get Me and pedophilia and vengeance in Daddy's Little Girl, before hewing closer to the genre line with a straight inexorable-killer slasher flick (the ferocious Charlie's Farm) and, now, eco-horror, with his really fun Boar. An odd, mostly inappropriate comparison can be made to the Coens' early career, in which it seemed like they were trying to cover every genre in turn: Here's this guy knocking off horror subgenres with films tied to each other only by their grisly extremes. Eco-horror was popular in the United States in the immediate aftermath of Jaws, because films like Grizzly and John Frankenheimer's Prophecy could be pitched simply as "Jaws in the..." The trend peaked with Australian Russell Mulcahy's Razorback, featuring almost impressionistic work from The Road Warrior DP Dean Semler. Mulcahy's film is unexpectedly artful, almost lyrical in parts, until the end when it pays out in nihilism. For my money, of the two mid-Eighties releases inspired by the death of Azaria Chamberlain, the infant who was carried off by dingoes, it's better than the one that sticks to the facts (A Cry in the Dark).

FrightFest '18: Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich

½*/****
written by S. Craig Zahler
directed by Tommy Wiklund & Sonny Laguna

by Walter Chaw The thirteenth instalment in Charles Band's "Puppet Master" epic is the first real reboot of the series, one that transforms titular master Toulon (now played by Udo Kier, of screenwriter S. Craig Zahler's own Brawl in Cell Block 99) from a Holocaust survivor into a full-on Nazi. It's a dangerous creative decision that, I think, fatally misunderstands the appeal of the previous twelve films in this VHS-quickie-born series, which was mainly an opportunity for cheer-worthy cheap-o practical effects work and a loose mythology about some guy who made enchanted killer puppets once upon a time--a sort of amok-time "Transformers" with toys called "Leech Woman, Decapitron, Tunneler, and Shredder Khan" doing the mad toymaker's murderous bidding. What becomes clear early on in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is that because they're now the product of a deformed Nazi, the puppets' targets will primarily be the same minorities targeted for extermination by the Nazis. If the aim of the piece is still to offer cheer-worthy practical effects, celebrating the ultra-gory eradication of the LGBTQ, black, and Jewish population--yarmulkes and all--takes on, you know, an uncomfortable cast. It's like the bomb's-eye view of the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor in Pearl Harbor that was greeted with loud opening-night appreciation: What is it, exactly, that we're cheering here? Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is arguably worth it for the moment an exhausted Michael Paré says "[this] incident is turning into a happening," but really there's no amount of forced levity that can make this movie seem all right. There's plenty of nudity, plenty of (PLENTY OF) gore, but once a line is crossed from fun to vile in this picture, and it's crossed right around the time a pregnant black woman is killed in just the worst possible way, there's no going back.

FrightFest '18: Summer of '84

Summer of 84
**½/****
starring Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Rich Sommer
written by Matt Leslie & Stephen J. Smith
directed by Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell & Yoann-Karl Whissell

by Walter Chaw From the first strains of Le Matos' Tangerine Dream-influenced score (borrowed most heavily from Risky Business, for some reason), even before the Class of 1984 title font tells it to you raw, you know that Summer of '84, from Turbo Kid helmers Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell (collectively known as RKSS), is going to be another '80s throwback flick. That's not bad in and of itself, but it comes with some built-in pitfalls. "Stranger Things", for instance, the setting is all it has going for it and it doesn't even get the vernacular right, whereas something like It well and truly knows the notes and hears the music, too. Summer of '84 falls somewhere between these two contemporary touchstones. It spends most of its time as a high-concept movie that rumbles along with cozy familiarity and an exceptional cast, and then in its last five minutes, it discovers its purpose and nails the landing. Pity that it didn't find its feet sooner. A greater pity, perhaps, that it didn't get another pass through the typewriter.

FrightFest '18 Coverage Notice (incls. links)

Our FrightFest 2018 coverage launched today in conjunction with the start of the festival and will be updated frequently with reviews and interviews over the next several days. In the meantime, a handful of titles screening there we covered previously, and those reviews are linked below.

• Bodied
• Halloween (1978)
• Lifechanger
• One Cut of the Dead
• The Ranger

FrightFest '18: Bad Samaritan

**½/****
written by Brandon Boyce
directed by Dean Devlin

by Walter Chaw One-time Roland Emmerich beard Dean Devlin drops Bad Samaritan, a slick, old-school genre exercise in the mold of stuff like Bad Influence, Malice, and maybe a little of the Tom Holland Fright Night starring one of the Dr. Whos as a serial-killing millionaire scumbag. It's high camp, of course, played to the rafters by David Tennant as Cale, the murderer-cum-Richie Rich with not only a torture dungeon, but also a summer torture cabin to which he spirits poor Katie (Kerry Condon), who assures that she's cleaned herself using the proper soaps, lotions, and circular motions. I think it's meant to be hysterical. I hope so, anyway, because I laughed a lot. Robert Sheehan's heroic stoner Sean Falco stumbles on one of Cale's OCD murder palaces, runs away, and then spends the rest of the film trying to make amends by getting people to believe that this unbelievably reptilian asshole sociopath is also a psychopath. It's honestly not a stretch and defeats much of whatever tension Bad Samaritan intends to build: Cale is obviously a killer; Sean is obviously telling the truth. That a parade of cops and detectives can't tell that Cale is wired like a shithouse rat says no good things about these cops and detectives. Devlin piles on the useless jump-scares in the first half of the film, unconvincing resolution action scenes in the second, and through it all maintains the warm buzz of familiar thriller garbage just like this that I cut my teeth on as a VHS junkie. It's good that way. That very specific way. I kind of want to figure out how to make a joke of Cale's childhood trauma involving beating a dead horse, but sufficed to say it's worth it for the punchline, and to spend two hours watching Tennant act like Herbert West.

FrightFest '18: The Devil's Doorway

***½/****
starring Lalor Roddy, Ciaran Flynn, Helena Bereen, Lauren Coe
screenplay by Martin Brennan, Michael B. Jackson, Aislinn Clarke
directed by Aislinn Clarke

by Walter Chaw Aislinn Clarke's hyphenate debut The Devil's Doorway is a found-footage concept shot on 16mm and set in a Magdalene Asylum circa 1960. Two priests are dispatched from the Vatican to investigate statues of the Virgin Mary that are apparently weeping blood. "Type O negative, female, pregnant," says wizened, world-weary Father Thomas (Lalor Roddy, a real discovery), who finds himself in the midst of a crisis of faith. It won't be a miracle, he's sure. When his young charge and de facto cameraman Father John (Ciaran Flynn) asks him why not, Thomas responds, "Because it never is." He's Fathers Merrin and Karras, both, from The Exorcist: the man of the cloth who can wield his faith, and the man of the cloth who wonders if he's lost his faith entirely. Thomas--dubbed "doubting" by John, naturally--expresses his rage and disgust at the asylums, also called "laundries," in Ireland where young "fallen" women were sent to hide the shame of unwanted pregnancies, nervous disorders, and other socially-objectionable "maladies" from judgmental neighbours. He's unimpressed, then, by cold, patrician Mother Superior (Helena Bereen), who lacks nuance in the way she sees her charges. And when things become inexplicable, as they are wont to do in haunted asylums, there's something like relief for Thomas to discover that if there's no God, there might at least be the Devil.

FrightFest '18: "All the Water is Holy" - FFC Interviews 'The Devil's Doorway' Director Aislinn Clarke

by Walter Chaw There are some things that horror does better than any other genre. At its best, there's no equal to its ability to surf the zeitgeist, to reflect what a culture fears and offer proximate and ultimate exorcisms. Aislinn Clarke's The Devil's Doorway is an intensely personal piece that works as metaphor in a few broad sociological conversations, covering the continued atrocity of the Catholic Church's systemic protection of predators among its ranks in addition to the broader tradition of male control over and exploitation of a woman's sexuality. Set in 1960, it even riffs, extra-textually, on that year's revolution in cinema, which saw the release of uncomfortable, status-disturbing pictures like Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom, Jingoku, Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, and Black Sunday. Jung had this idea that if you repress something hard enough and for long enough, it becomes monstrous eventually and explodes into the consciousness. The 1950s were a pressure cooker in many ways, and 1960 was the release. The Devil's Doorway is a release, too, in that it confronts directly and indirectly Ireland's dark Magdalene Laundry/Asylum legacy whilst seeking, in the person of a world-weary (doubting) Father Thomas, to make some sort of peace at last with our complicity in the machineries of oppression. Whatever the priest's non-Pyrrhic spoils, they're hard-won and long-in-coming.

FrightFest '18: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw One of the major misconceptions about film critics and scholars is that they aren't fans of film first, and if they are, then surely they wouldn't be fans of a genre as disreputable as horror. But I've long held that horror is an indicator species in our socio-political quagmire. That often with only limited studio oversight, and because they're entirely possible to execute with a small budget in a short amount of time, horror films, by talking about what a society fears, can tap into the collective unconscious more quickly and effectively than any number of "prestige" presentations. There's a reason most myths and fairy tales have strong horror elements. Get Out is a lot of things, for example, but its closest analogue is George Romero's landmark civil rights masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. I wonder if the horror movie's primal simplicity has anything to do with the disdain with which even its creators sometimes approach it. In any case, horror is important, essential, vital. When it's right, there's not much else righter.