Canary Duty - FrightFest Weekend Special

Yeah, trying something new out this time!  I saw a bunch of new horror films this weekend, two on general release, three at Arrow Video FrightFest, so I thought I'd do one big blog post of all five in one go.  Forcing myself to cut down on the waffling by just having one big paragraph per film.  Let's see how that works out after the page break.

First up is Crawl, directed by Alexandra Aja.  Now Aja is a director with good skill, but a lot of his I haven't gotten on with at all (I hated Horns, thought The Hills Have Eyes remake was meh, that bloody twist that ruined Switchblade Romance...).  This one worked pretty well though, mainly down to a tight, focused script that made the best use of a limited cast & location.   This was produced by Sam Raimi, and it seems that a good lesson was learned from the original Evil Dead, in that the film takes time to lay out the geography of the house before the horror aspect begins, which helps the audience understand the action later on.  The characters do some risky things over the course of the story, but not due to standard horror movie stupidity, it's because the situation calls for it.  Yeah, they have to go out into 'gator filled waters, but it's a case of "we go out there, we may get eaten, we stay here, we definitely will drown!".  There are quite a few implausible bits as well, moments of "you couldn't hear that from one room away?", and the characters do seem to be able to take a lot of punishment... almost as much as Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead come to think of it.  But it's still a good time, a slick, no fat horror, that doesn't outstay its runtime (which is under 90 minutes!  Films that short can still get made!).  Hey, at least it's not another shark movie.  There actually was a movie with a similar premise done with sharks come to think of it...

Crawl is out in UK cinemas now.

Next up is Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark directed by André Øvredal.  Now this is going to sound like a very negative review, so I should say that I quite liked the film overall.  The problem this one has is that it's in two very different modes, and those two modes don't gel together very well.  The obvious one is the bringing to life of classic urban legends from Alan Schwartz's books, in a style close the legendary Stephen Gammell illustrations.  They do a reasonable job here, but the trouble is that a lot of those illustrations worked best by being very abstract, putting them in a photoreal setting doesn't quite fit.  Also, the tales were so arch, they could have happened to anyone, that's why kids got such a kick out of them, so that effect is lost when you make it about a very specific bunch of characters for a particular reason.  They also get less effective when you have characters try to apply logic to them.  The other mode of the film is in telling the sad ghost story of Sarah Bellows, and it's this strand of the film that works the best, carrying the whole thing, and where the aspects of social satire of the 1968 time setting work well.  If they had maybe dropped the Scary Stories altogether, and found a more thematically appropriate haunting for this plotline, it would have been even better.  This has sounded a lot harsher than I wanted, I still enjoyed it and recommend it, but it's an uneven experience.  Still, there's a lot to like, including the characters actually trying the obvious ways to get out of the situation, and that not working, something I greatly prefer to standard horror film idiocy.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is out in UK cinemas now.

Now for what I saw at FrightFest itself, starting with the UK premiere of Ready or Not, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett (Radio Silence).  Right from the trailer this looked promising, and this certainly delivered on that promise!  Now you might have heard about the controversy about the film The Hunt, driven by the whole class war riff on the old Most Dangerous Game concept (when none of those making the biggest fuss about it have seen it!).  What I love is that those commentators haven't noticed this one at all, which seems to go about a similar premise in a much more clever way.  Samara Weaving's lead has married into a 1% family most of whom will not hesitate hunting down and murdering someone if it means they hold on to their best interests a bit longer.  There's also the strong running gag in that the rich are really not very good at doing things for themselves, whether that's murder or other matters.  The film suggests that all the ultra wealthy only really get that way on the back of diabolical acts or cruelty... and I cannot find anything inaccurate about this statement.  The great thing is that all of this is in the background, it wisely focuses on telling a gory, funny, thrilling tale of an out-of-her-depth lead against rather incompetent killers, with the satire bubbling under the background.  Definitely see it in the cinema when it comes out in the UK, it's a huge crowd pleaser, especially with any scene involving that crossbow, and for an absolute killer of a final line.  Oh, and you know what this would make a great double bill with?  You're Next!

Ready Or Not is coming out in UK cinemas on the 27th of September.

I promised that I'd do this one when the trailer came out, so here we are kids, it's The Banana Splits Movie, directed by Danishka Esterhazy!  Hew-he-he-hew!!! (Since I did the trailer then, above is something a bit more wholesome.)  From the off you can tell that this one is not meant to be taken quite seriously, it's a goof of an idea, so if you approach it from that angle, it's a lot of fun.  This one of those films you can never really call "good", but it is definitely enjoyable in a trashy video night kind of way.  Given that Warner Bros. have done part of the marketing material as rental VHS covers (which we all got free T-Shirts of at the screening; woo!), that's very appropriate as it's exactly the sort of thing that one would pick up as part of a multi-rent deal in Blockbuster back in the day.  Now I speculated before that this started off as a Five Nights at Freddy's movie, before WB lost the rights to Blumhouse, and having seen the final product, I still think that's a good possibility.  Whilst this works a lot of details from the show, it does feel as though they were added in later, and mostly done so for the sake of gore set-pieces (which there are some fantastic ones of!).  Another sign that it's a cut-&-paste from a different source script is that it's odd how not that many characters are surprised about the Splits being robots, and keep referring to them as "puppets", when those are costumes; if they were FNaF animatronics in the first script, that would make sense.  (BTW, that's the second reboot of characters into killer robots we've had this year; I've enjoy both far more than I thought I would.)  Whatever the origins, if you approach it with a drunken beer, pizza, and video night sensibility with some like minded friends, you'll have a good time with this, especially with some of the characters, one of whom in particular gets an interesting role in a sequel-bait ending.  Also, for long time fans of the classic Splits themselves, I can get that this might seem a bit of a disrespectful use of the franchise, I can see that.  As I've discovered though, this might not be the oddest thing done with them in recent years; look at this!

Again, this is a real comic!  Man, who'd have thought that with that crossover, it would be the Splits who get the more enjoyable movie? (YEAH I WENT THERE!)

The Banana Splits Movie is out on DVD, Blu Ray, and on digital now.

Finally there was a title that played at FrightFest Glasgow before which I'd heard very good things about, Here Comes Hell directed by Jack McHenry.  A very simple premise (what if a 1930s old dark house movie suddenly turned into an 80s gore flick?), done extremely well, with an obvious love for both sub genres it's pastiching.  This was made on a shoestring, but all the money was spent in the right ways, and there's plenty of talent both sides of the camera.  The actors all give the right kind of arch performances, of the sort that was common in the time period, the gore is extremely well done, especially the mangled state the first character to get possessed ends up in, and it's photographed in wonderful 4:3 black & white.  I can see this being a cult classic in the making, with many already making comparisons like "Downton Abbey becomes The Evil Dead", although I'd maybe go with "A game of Cluedo suddenly becomes Betrayal at House on the Hill".  Bonus points for a filming location that actually looks the part of an abandoned for many years manor house (i.e. it's a crumbling wreck that's impossible to maintain), and for a little cameo by Robert Llewellyn at the start, in a sort of more mannered "Crazy Ralph" role.  This is the most indie of all the films I saw this long weekend, so it's the one I'm giving the biggest nod too as it deserves every chance it gets!

Here Comes Hell will be released by Signature Entertainment under the FrightFest Presents label on the 11th of November.

So, a fine selection of stuffs.  I recommend giving all of them a go, though if I had to play favourites, it would be a close one between Ready or Not and Here Comes Hell, depending on how nostalgic for old cinema I'm feeling at that particular moment.  As I am making preparations for my usual October Challenge again (yeah, expect blogs about that soon!), I also have a few other titles that played at the Festival on my radar, such as the new remake of Rabid from the Soska Sisters, which you might have heard was centre of a kerfuffle with Twitter.  With all of these though, I have a recommendation; if you can see them in a group, do so; they all work so much better when there's a larger audience reacting as one.  I know the last two are straight to video over here, so as such put on a proper video night, get some friends round to share the insanity of Agatha Christie getting invaded by Lucio Fulci, or a dog in a firehelmet sawing a guy in twain!  Man, I love FrightFest weekend...

Oh, just one more thing.  Going back to Crawl for a moment, the way the story structure of that film unfolded reminded me a lot of an old joke.  There's a valley facing a huge storm, one threatening to break the dam, and flood the whole area.  Everyone has received the orders to evacuate, and almost everyone has done so.  There's a jeep of rescue workers having one last drive through the place, who suddenly spot there's a guy sat on top of his roof.  They drive to the house, yelling for him to come down and leave with them before the water comes rushing in.  The guy shouts "I've been a good Christian all my life, God won't let me drown".  They get nowhere with the guy on the roof, and so they have to drive away as the water starts filling the streets.  As the level rises to the point the whole ground floor of the house is submerged, a boat motors through and comes up to the guy's house, the driver telling the guy on the roof to jump on board.  The guy instead just goes "God listens to all his children's prayers, he will save me!".  With further flooding coming, the motorboat has no choice but to move on out of the valley.  Now the water is coming right up to the roof, and there's a rescue helicopter hovering over the house, with a ladder dropped down.  But our friend up there still isn't taking it, going "The Lord watches over all of his flock, and he will not let his good servant drown without saving him!".  So within minutes, the inevitable happens and the guy is consumed by the flood.  At the gates of Heaven, he asks Saint Peter "I don't understand, I thought God would save me?".  To which Peter replies "Look, He sent you a jeep, a boat, and a helicopter, what more did you want?"  Yeah, Crawl plays out a bit like that, except people do want to leave, the rescuers just keep getting et.  I know that was a pretty tenuous link, I just really like that joke!