Tragedy Girls

(Frightfest Day 5)
The American high school slasher fully updated for our modern times, doing away with the usual played out whodunnit plot and instead presenting a pair of murderesses concerned with boosting their social media presence, the upcoming prom and dismemberment. Likeable.

The Terror Of Hallow's Eve

(Frightfest Day 5)
Yo, the eighties called. They want their movie back.

Top Knot Detective

(Frightfest Day 5)
Loving homage to crazed Japanese TV via a mockumentary that is as hilarious as it is balls out insane.

Lowlife

(Frightfest Day 5)
Strong echoes of Pulp Fiction as various tales of underhand activities and moral free decision making neatly entwine. What sets this apart is the level of compassion that comes from the most unexpected of characters. Very well played.

Veronica

(Frightfest Day 5)
Gorgeous forest location used as a canvas for an excellent psychodrama that never lays things on too thick and delightfully flips the twist that you're expecting.

The Villainess [Ak-Nyeo]

(Frightfest Day 4)
A typically lengthy South Korean vengeance tale peppered with some breathtaking fight choreography in symbiosis with breathtaking camera work/editing.

Mayhem

(Frightfest Day 4)
And in one fell swoop Office Space loses its top spot as most cathartic workplace revenge movie. Superb.

Replace

(Frightfest Day 4)
Elizabeth Bathory via Nicholas Winding Refn.

The End? [In un giorno la fine]

(Frightfest Day 4)
Just as you're asking yourself if there's anything new to be said with zombie cinema? Along comes this with a firm resounding 'no, not really.'

Killing Ground

(Frightfest Day 4)
A couple in terror movie that does everything you'd expect only told with twisted timelines and directed with an assured maturity that you maybe wouldn't expect from this kind of thing.

Death Laid An Egg [La morte ha fatto l'uovo/ A Curious Way to Love/ Plucked]

(Frightfest Day 3)
Quasi-giallo about how complex the economics of chicken farming are when you also have to juggle a wife, a mistress, a long lost amnesiac friend and a slew of tied up prostitutes. There's also a genetically modifed food subplot that gets a bit Cronenberg. And a room of truth.
Batshit crazy.

Victor Crowley

(Frightfest Day 3)
An array of extreme gunk spouting prosphetics and some beautifully crude humour, at their best when they're happening at the same time. The best Hatchet sequel. So far.

Attack Of The Adult Babies

(Frightfest Day 3)
Laughed so hard at the fucking weirdest shit.
King.

Jackals

(Frightfest Day 3)
A clever drama about de-programming a cult member that throws clever out of the window from the off by casting Stephen Dorff as the clever character. Drama goes out the same window a half hour later when eighty massive cultists rock up and everything gets a bit Assault On Precinct 13 to preoccupy you whilst you wait for everybody to die.

Boots On The Ground

(Frightfest Day 3)
Filmed entirely with head mounted cameras creating maximum geographical confusion alongside a total inability to tell characters apart. Having a twist that puts forward the suggestion that everything was meant to be a confusing mess doesn't then make this ok.

The Bar [El bar]

(Frightfest Day 3)
Siege situation that allows de la Iglesia's attention to character and irreverent humour to shine brightly.

Dead Shack

(Frightfest Day 2)
Sweary Joe Dante.

Leatherface

(Frightfest Day 2)
Starts like Natural Born Killers vs Nekromantik and ends with Stephen Dorff chewing both the scenery and a chainsaw. So quite enjoyed it.

Our Evil [Mal Nosso]

(Frightfest Day 2)
A lot of familiar pieces assembled in a most enjoyably unfamiliar way, capped off with a fantastic soggy devil.

Dhogs

(Frightfest Day 2)
Asks me to be critical about my desire to view screen violence, abuse and the darkness contained within all humanity. It does it effectively as well, but unfortunately seven films into a horror film festival is the wrong time to ask me to give a fuck about why i'm watching so much nasty shit.

Sequence Break

(Frightfest Day 2)
Man uses complicated time loop to give himself a bit of a kick up the arse and get on with life.

The Glass Coffin [El ataúd de cristal]

(Frightfest Day 2)
Woman imprisoned in limousine has a lengthy conversation with a red light that has made some poor life choices but is unable to apportion blame to the self. The red light is also unable to recognise that their life choices can't have been that bad if they're now able to scrape together the considerable level of money and resources required for such elaborate misplaced revenge.

Psychopaths

(Frightfest Day 1)
Would benefit from having a story. And some competent camera work. And from not being shit.

Death Note [2017 Remake]

(Frightfest Day 1)
The first act effectively streamlines the ludicrously complex storyline of the original film, the second act muddles all the characters and the third act shits the bed. But with style.

Cult Of Chucky

(Frightfest Day 1)
My complete overwhelming joy at another chance to see Chucky up to his tricks renders my opinion of this worthless. The doll could've farted for 90 minutes and if it was subtitled 'Hey Andy, I'm your friend to the end, wanna play?' then I'd be whooping and applauding.
There wasn't any farting. But I did whoop and applaud.

Your Name [IMAX] [Kimi no na wa]

Everything about this is just too damn nice to be truly critical about. So it's convenient that it was really good otherwise I'd have to bullshit.
Now somebody do Akira in IMAX. DO IT NOW.

The Dark Tower

Always a problem when adapting large scale book sagas is how to bring together your two disparate audiences, those who have read the books and those who have not.
This succeeds by having those who have not read the books think 'What the fuck?' for the entirety of the running time, whilst those who have will think 'WHAT THE FUCK!' for several hours afterward.

It Stains The Sands Red

Sets up a fantastic original zombie premise, gets a bit silly with it and then completely gives up attempting, instead, to shove an entirely different unoriginal movie into the last twenty minutes.

A Ghost Story

Poses a lot of big existential questions and then literally just stands and stares at them. Still can't decide if this is a good thing or a cop out.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

As a film? No, not really. Constant digression loses the weak narrative and Dehaan is an extremely poor casting choice, though Eyebrows was excellent.
As a carefree romp through a fully realised world bloated with imagination? Yeah, loved it. And Eyebrows was excellent.

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times [La dama rossa uccide sette volte/ The Corpse Which Wouldn't Die]

A great film trying very hard to fight its way out of a mediocre one containing a baffling amount of characters. Should have made The Red Queen Kills Four Times instead.

Five Dolls For An August Moon [5 bambole per la luna d'agosto/ Island Of Terror]

As Giallo begins to boom in popularity a wilful Bava appears to already be bored with it all, abandoning the usual explicit violence and instead trying to bend the whole affair into being a relationship farce more suited to the stage, only with plenty of sleaze and a high bodycount.

68 Kill

Quick note to any other misogynistic dick who thinks that this kind of nonsense empowers women; If you make every woman in your film a hate figure that must be killed by an emasculated idiot so he may become a real man, then you're not empowering anybody, you're just churning out sub Tarantino bollocks.