Train To Busan [Busanhaeng]

(Frightfest Day 5)
Doesn't add anything new to zombie cinema, but does what most of the others do better.

Found Footage 3D

(Frightfest Day 5)
How to revitalise the wheezing, dying Found Footage sub-genre? Stick it in 3D then solidly rip the piss out of it. Easily makes it into the slim ranks of truly excellent Found Footage movies.

Director's Cut

(Frightfest Day 5)
Fantastic nest of contradiction. It has moments that are as funny as they are unsettling, the film looks as polished as it often looks amateur, it rips the piss at the same time as it expresses undying love for the movies and most impressively it fucks wholesale with form as it presents itself as a DVD extra at the same time as being the main feature.

Man Underground

(Frightfest Day 5)
Beautifully understated film that purports to be about aliens but really it's about humans. Excellent.

Under The Shadow

(Frightfest Day 5)
A haunting befalls a mother and daughter smack bang in the middle of the Iraq/Iran war. Real life and fictional horror battle with each other to see which can be more chilling. Absolutely fantastic.

31

(Frightfest Day 4)
It would appear that Rob Zombie put some time in to coming up with some scary clown names and a vague excuse for them to be killing folk, gave it to his production design team to run wild with and then did fuck all else.

Realive [Proyecto Lázaro]

(Frightfest Day 4)
Frankenstein set in the future, but equipped with a fully aware mind transplanted from the past, makes for an excellent slow burn meditation on all the big existential issues.

Broken

(Frightfest Day 4)
An assured debut that builds naturally to a nasty sting as it examines tetraplegia, damaged psyches and the put upon life of a carer.

Johnny Frank Garret's Last Word

(Frightfest Day 4)
Starts with a title card explaining that this is a fictionalised version of a documentary about a perceived curse. This coupled with its serious tone gives it the feel of a Channel 5 true story. Then when the curse kicks off and the seriousness gets juxtaposed with the usual stylised genre trappings (fast edits, loud noise, bleeding faces etc.) it just ends up feeling a little bit tasteless.

Downhill

(Frightfest Day 4)
Director Valladarres continues to be the Chilean tourist board's worst nightmare this time suggesting the local woods are completely overrun with insane cultists, messy prosthetics and a lack of decent story.

Blood Feast [2016 Remake]

(Frightfest Day 3)
It's not out of the ordinary to expect a remake to be inferior to the original but when the original is Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast then it's going to take considerable effort to muster something worse. So congratulations to all involved in this disaster for their truly exceptional effort.

Beyond The Gates

(Frightfest Day 3)
Two estranged brothers play a VHS board game which mysteriously generates note perfect 80s horror homage. Superb.

Sadako v Kayako

(Frightfest Day 3)
Managed to tick every box on my lengthy list of expectations for this movie. That list being 1) Sadako 2) Kayako 3) Toshio 4) An old house 5) A videotape 6) A well 7) Toshio making cat noises 8) Teenagers dying with a silly look on their face 8) Kayako making her throat click 9) People daring other people to go into that weird old house 10) Black hair emerging from unexpected places 11) Sadako doing her funny shoulders walk 12) The phone call 13) The bath tub 14) The eye 15) Kayako crawling down stairs 16) Sadako coming out of a TV 17) A fucking ridiculous showdown. 
King.

The Master Cleanse

(Frightfest Day 3)
Nice little piece about giving corporeality to your negative emotions in order to make them easier to deal with. Doesn't over-egg its allegory but does make it incredibly cute.

Abattoir

(Frightfest Day 3)
An anachronism and her intensely unlikeable cop boyfriend wade through endless suffocating layers of exposition just to get to a shitty jumped up ghost train.

The Rezort [Generation Z]

(Frightfest Day 3)
Is it a good idea to remake Jurassic Park with zombies in place of dinosaurs?
If you want the long answer then watch this movie. If you want the short answer, it's no.

The Similars [Los Parecidos]

(Frightfest Day 2)
A stunning avalanche of madness that constantly escalates for the entire running time through ever increasing levels of brilliance until you're left with an ending that makes real life sinister as fuck.

Pet

(Frightfest Day 2)
A girl , a cage, a hobbit and a serpentine plot to keep everything active for ninety minutes.

They Call Me Jeeg Robot [Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot]

(Frightfest Day 2)
Italian cinema trying to emulate other countries successful genres isn't anything new, this time they have a go at the superhero movie.
What is new is director Mainetti recognising the budgetary/resource limitations of his home country so that instead of making a pale replication he retools the superhero tale with lashings of social realism to create his own unique version. And it's fucking great.

Another Evil

(Frightfest Day 2)
Matter of fact hauntings + overstepped boundaries = fantastic piece of original horror.

From A House On Willow Street

(Frightfest Day 2)
Credible kidnapping effort that devolves into people walking around corridors as weird things suddenly happen accompanied by jags of sharp noise. Didn't make for the best ending but to be fair my nerves are now shot to shit, which I guess was the point.

Let Her Out

(Frightfest Day 1)
The Nutty Professor remade as a horror movie.

Cell

(Frightfest Day 1)
Fucking awful shit. Still Cusack and Jackson seem aware of this and are fully in on the joke which helped pass the time.

My Father Die

(Frightfest Day 1)
Overstretched revenge tale with strong echoes of Barry Gifford. An impressive debut but tends to muddle any deeper messages on offer with a fondness for dull linearity and unecessary heavy assault weaponry.

Lights Out

A compendium of jump scares executed so well that roughly ninety eight percent of all future mainstream multiplex horror releases are now redundant.

The Sand

A film about a creature that sits under the titular sand waiting for people to step on it and get devoured in clumsy sprays of bad CGI. Until the end that is when the creature suddenly develops ten foot tentacles capable of plucking people off high surfaces, of course had this ability been revealed in the beginning then the film would have barely lasted five minutes and clearly nobody involved in making this shit was willing to do me that favour.

Neds

Superb portrayal of a bright mind reduced to hideous, senseless acts of violence by an unfortunate combination of class divides, gang culture, shitty teachers and living in Scotland during the 70s.

The Shallows

A bonanza of unecessary, gratuitous slow motion that if played back at normal speed would give you a film roughly twenty minutes long that could be neatly summed up in four sentences; Blake Lively goes surfing. Blake Lively meets a shark. Blake Lively sits on a rock whilst the scriptwriter throws darts at a list of random plot points he hopes will liven up proceedings. Blake Lively defeats shark in a manner which can only be described as obscenely stupid.

The Legend Of Tarzan

Things this film taught me; white people are dicks because they enslaved the tribesmen of the Congo, the tribesmen are dicks because they killed Tarzan's adoptive gorilla mother, gorillas are dicks because they insist on awkward social rituals mostly involving unfriendly growling and over enthusiastic back patting. Tarzan is a dick because he killed the son of the tribesmen's chief, Christoph Waltz is a dick because he's gonna give Tarzan to the tribesmen so they can kill him back and Samuel L. Jackson is a dick because he freely thinks that everybody else is a dick. The editor is a dick because he petulantly refuses to let you know what's going on at any given moment, the director is a dick because he supervised this inexcusable shit into the world and, according to my mother, I'm a dick for not liking this flaccid bollocks because the landscapes were 'breathtaking'.

Suicide Squad

An extended series of skits offering every one of an extremely bloated cast list the opportunity to have their moment, even if some choose to just shrug and look around bewildered instead, all of which hangs together loosely as a movie at the start and by the end doesn't.

Jason Bourne

A solid 50 % of the movie consists of Matt Damon hurriedly walking somewhere, 20% is Matt Damon talking to someone whilst they both hurriedly walk somewhere, 10% is people looking at each other nervously whilst they watch computer screens showing fucking Matt Damon hurriedly walking somewhere. The remaining time is taken up with the usual fighting and chasing reduced to incomprehensible blurring and an incongruous 5 minutes where Matt Damon stands still and looks at a computer.

Jeepers Creepers

Because every film should be a learning experience I used this viewing as an opportunity to teach the teenager what contrived means and why it's bad for a story.