Film4 FrightFest Review Saturday (Day 3)

• 2nd Sep 2010

Saturday opened with the UK’s Cherry Tree Lane (taken from Mary Poppins of all places) for a bit of home invasion terror. This was followed by The Tortured which had similar themes of revenge.

The third film was the much publicised 13 Hrs – a sort of werewolf indie featuring a bright young cast including Harry Potter’s own Draco Malfoy, Tom Felton in a role so small it is a real insult to the public to have his name plastered high up on the poster. Still, what we get is a low budget horror of a small group of family and friends attacked by a beast at their rather large mansion out in the middle of nowhere. It’s off to the attic they go where minds and limbs start to fall apart in their desperate struggle to survive.

The problem with this is that it is so low budget they couldn’t afford any decent effects. In fact most deaths happen off camera (although we are usually treated to the odd aftermath shot). But many of the deaths are also sign posted and then badly edited so that in the case of one shot gun wielding defender you barely have time to see what happened to them. There wasn’t much else to hand to this film except that it is perhaps meant to be a stepping stone for the cast and crew involved in the hope that they will be picked up for future projects, and then duly forget about this one as most audience members are likely to.

But Saturday was filled with highlights and one of them came in the form of the remake of I Spit On Your Grave.  The film, simply put, is divided into two halves.  First we have a young woman in a remote location to work on her book having her privacy invaded by some locals when then proceed to viscously play with first her mind and then her body. After being repeatedly raped the woman manages to drop off a bridge into a river and disappear. Thinking she is dead the men involved head back to their normal lives. The second half of the film is watching her get her revenge on each of them in very gruesome manner. So it isn’t a happy tale, but it’s an important one in cinema, and especially horror cinema to tell.

Although we were warned the first half was tough to get through, I honestly thought it was going to be a whole lot worse than it actually was. That is not to say that what you will see is in any way tame, I was probably under the impression that after the rape of the woman that she was then to be physically beaten and cut on top of that. So it is actually with some relief that this is not an action that follows. But be minded that the attack she does suffer is still never pleasant. What is pleasant is the guilt free attack she unleashes in the second half of the film. It will raise laughs, and cringe worthy groans as pain is inflicted in very different ways upon her attackers. You wouldn’t think this sort of film would have a large female audience due to the first half of the film, but the second half shows you why that will probably be a fact for this film. I’ll say no more.

The much anticipated and hyped Monsters was on show next. Gareth Edwards made this film on a tiny budget and is probably set to astound and amaze the world over with his beautifully shot film. We find out that in a near future a space probe brought back the titular creatures with them and they have since been roaming free in what has now become an infected zone directly south of the United States border. Our male and female protagonists are then brought together to safely traverse this zone to safety. Him a photo journalist, her the boss’s daughter.

It’s a touching, if at times, hollow tale. Edwards doesn’t force the feelings the characters have out in words thankfully, but too often we are mean to believe that in such a short period of time through one disaster after another that the two will naturally come together with very little dialogue between the two. Perhaps I was in a cynical mood after I Spit On Your Grave, but although it wasn’t impossible to think of this couple and all that was going on around them, but it felt as if some element was slightly off key there. But this is like pointing out that even cinema greats like Citizen Kane and The Godfather have their mistakes. Monsters is a tremendous film and looks set to launch the career of a man who may well bring us some of the best cinema we have yet to see.

Dream House closed business on the Saturday and the crowd not quite zombified yet shuffled off and then back again for Sunday.