Glasgow FrightFest 2011 Day 1

• 10th Mar 2011

We turned up thirty minutes before the first film was set to start and the queue was already out the door and around the building. Anticipation seemed a little on the high side with posters detailing that all but two of the eight screenings at the festival are already sold out.

Proceedings kicked off with UK flick Little Deaths, a trio of modern horror tales. The first tale, House and Home followed a bored middle class couple with less than charitable intentions. Having posed as religious types to a homeless girl they invite her to join them at home for some charity. Naturally, all is not as it seems leaving the audience waiting for the inevitable twist. The couple were played with slimy revulsion by Luke de Lacey and Siobhan Harrison allowing the audience to revel in their deserved downfall. The direction by Sean Hogan is efficient enough without being remarkable, which is something that could also be said about the film itself.

The second instalment of the trilogy is Mutant Tool which is exploitation film making gone mad. It follows the concept of throwing as much controversy at the audience in thirty minutes. We get Nazis, concentration camp atrocities, prostitutes, drugs, violence and, if that wasn’t enough, there is also the harvesting of sperm from a massive penis. Utter nonsense. The director Andrew Parkinson even admitted after the screening that he was simply trying to include as many controversial images and ideas as possible.

Finally, we get to Bitch which tells the tale of a highly destructive relationship. The girl, Claire (Kate Braithwaite) dominates her placid boyfriend Pete (Tom Sawyer) who helps her with her extreme fear of dogs by allowing her to sodomize him whilst he behaves like a dog. Both leads deliver the best performances of all the short films allowing the viewer to truly despise Claire for her treatment of Pete.  He ultimately takes revenge using the fear she has revealed to him against her in a wonderfully vicious way. The fatal flaw of Bitch lies in the use of dogs to create fear in the central character. Director, Simon Rumley, admitted that he has a fear of dogs but this will not be the case for the majority of his audience.

Sadly the project is bogged down by poor production values and some decidedly ropey performances.  Granted this is not a massive production with tons of money but it still looks cheap no matter how you cut it. The title cards in-between the different episodes are a great example of this as they look like something cobbled together by a 15 year old on their old ZX Spectrum.

The directors of this project did explain afterwards that they made a conscious decision not to include a central narrative that would specifically tie all three stories together, a la Hammer and Amicus classics. This is sadly to the film’s detriment as all three episodes would benefit from a central moral. Explaining the genesis of the project they said that they simply tried to include everything controversial they could think of. Sadly this type of juvenile thought process does not make for a great horror film and Little Deaths is a testament to this.

The second film was Korean horror-thriller, I Saw The Devil. This amped up the crowd with a display of extreme violence that you don’t see in any modern Western horror.  The narrative follows special agent Soo-Hyun (Lee Byung-hun), as he avenges the death of his fiancée by the serial killer Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi). With a protracted capture and release narrative, the serial killer is endlessly tortured then revived and as the chase continues both characters become similar as Soo-Hyun slowly loses sight of his own morals.

I Saw The Devil reminded me of Taxi Driver cranked up to a thousand. The combination of extreme visual beauty punctuated with visceral violence. The film opens with the death of Soo-Hyun’s fiancée at the hands of Kyung-chul. Her car becomes trapped in the snow and whilst she is waiting for the tow truck a strange man offers to help. Staying in her car as instructed by Soo-Hyun on the phone the tension begins to escalate. As Kyung-chul turns to leave there is a brief second of relaxation before you seen him rush towards the car; hammer in hand.  Whilst the beautiful calm snowflakes fall outside we are served up a killing of remarkable brutality.

This type of extreme film-making isn’t for everyone but for those who want an experience beyond the Hollywood norm then look no further. Having never seen anything by director Kim Ji-woon before, I left the screening wanting to know everything that he had ever done. I Saw The Devil is a remarkable film that manages to be emotional, thrilling, terrifying and beautiful simultaneously. The two lead performances are nothing short of astonishing and the immediacy of this film calls to mind the early days of Scorsese.

The festival organisers seem to have considered the extreme effect of I Saw The Devil and chose to follow up with a much lighter affair in the shape of documentary, Machete Maidens Unleashed!  Directed by Mark Hartley it details the Roger Corman helmed New World Pictures who moved production of its 70s b-movies out to the Philippines. The favourable climate included cheap film crews, tropical locations and a total lack of any health or safety rules to adhere to.  The film is full of legendary figures; Sid Haig, Jack Hill, Joe Dante, Jon Davison and, the b-movie maestro himself, Roger Corman. The talking heads paint a rather desperate picture of what was actually occurring on sets of these films. Philippine workers were disposable and the need for more extreme action sequences often lead to terrible injuries. You also get to witness some legendary footage from the Corman canon including Slaughter, Big Doll House, Caged Heat, Black Mama White Mama and Too Hot To Handle.

The first half combines fascinating recollections and fantastic footage which makes for true b-movie indulgence. But, as the end draws near you see the demise of the industry as the drive-ins close and the mainstream appropriates b-movie storylines. The death of mass b-movie gatherings is a truly sad event of the 80s. This documentary certainly reminds you that a legend such as Corman wouldn’t produce this kind of majestic brilliance nowadays.

As we left the splendid Glasgow Film Theatre we were determined to arrive much earlier tomorrow to ensure ourselves seats for another five films of frightening terror.

 Aled Jones