Playhouse

(Frightfest Day 2)
Confused gibberish. The main source of confusion being all the actors look roughly the same age but are all playing different generations.

The Columnist [De kuthoer]

(Frightfest Day 2)

A sort of Schrodingers Cat exercise in freedom of speech where it’s simultaneously both a really good thing and a really bad thing and only settles in one state when observed.

Visitor Q [Bijitâ Q]

In which a litany of taboos are unflinchingly deployed in the service of heartwarming family bonding and the darkest of humours.

12 Hour Shift

(Frightfest Day 1)
Deliciously dark and deliriously twisted. A bit like if Kevin Smith remade Bad Lieutenant in a hospital. Ace.

There’s No Such Thing As Vampires

(Frightfest Day 1)

Although evidently there is such a thing as utterly bollocks vampire movies.

Tenet [IMAX]

Nolan at his Nolaniest. Best summed up by a character early on in the movie who says “Don’t think too hard about it”.

The Beast In Space [La bestia nello spazia]

Can’t decide what’s madder, the fact some Italian thought that Walerian Borowczyk’s hymn to craven animal fucking The Beast needed a sequel or the fact they decided it should be set in space and packed with clear references to Star Wars.

Monkey Shines

By a long, long, long way this is easily the best movie about a quadriplegic and his homicidal simian that has ever been, or ever will be, put to the screen.

In The Tall Grass

How times change. Afforded a rare opportunity to watch a movie with the teenager, I let her make the choice. I knew we were too far down the line to end up with talking animals but I was fairly certain I’d get a film with a young sweaty fella who has more biceps than brain cells running about. But no, she wanted me to watch this because there’s time loops and every time the plot suddenly shifted she could grin at me and tell me it was awesome. She’s clearly got some way to go in exploring weird time loop plot twist movies, but she’s definitely on the right track.

6 Underground

An incoherent ceaseless parade of indiscriminate death.

Satan’s Baby Doll [La bimba di Satana/ A Girl For Satan/ Sexorgien im Satansschloß]

An utterly deranged movie that began life as a hard porn production, but then got downgraded to soft porn before finally being released as a horror movie with a disproportionate amount of scenes involving ladies wanking.

Love Goddess Of The Cannibals [Papaya dei Caraibi/ Caribbean Papaya]

Moralises about the evils of folk from rich countries that turn up in poor countries and steal valuable land and resources from the indigenous population in order to build nuclear power plants. This message is softened somewhat by the choice to communicate it via the medium of soft-core pornography. No cannibals.

The Platform [El hoyo]

A film so wrapped up in presenting a barbed, society-critiquing allegory that it forgets to include obvious stuff like a story that makes sense, characters you give a shit about and context that might make that oh so clever allegory actually cut deep.

One On Top Of The Other [Una sull'altra/ Perversion Story]

Springs from the same source as Hitchcock’s Vertigo only with considerably more strippers and erotic photographers.

Ballad In Blood

An eye-wateringly insensitive take on the murder of Meredith Kercher that suggests that all students from overseas are permanently ripped off their tits on hard drugs, incapable of empathy and lacking in any form of emotional coherence. Though this only really takes up a small fraction of the running time of the movie, the rest being dedicated to a thorough examination of breasts.