“I thought you quit,” says Machiavellian kingpin Ray Barren (Robert Miano) to his smoking minion Bobby (Pete Porteous) near the beginning of Josh Tessier’s Overrun. “I thought you quit,” replies Bobby, as Ray takes his cigarette and has a puff. “I did,” says Ray, before heading in to torture Yuri Dubkova (Nick Benseman) for the…
Baphomet Mountain opens with two paths crossing, whether by arbitrary accident or providential design. In his cowboy hat, Country Boy (Austin Burnette Mitchell) sits on a dusty roadside, playing guitar and singing a country song – with a blues lilt – whose lyrics (“Mama, daddy ain’t coming home tonight”) mark him as a man on…
Grimmfest is back! Manchester’s International Festival of Fantastic Films is celebrating its 13th Edition – a number normally associated with ill luck and bad omens, except in the inverted world of genre, where everything is seen through a glass darkly, the ominous, the unfortunate and the suspicious are desirable qualities. This year, Grimmmfest 2021 will…
The title Finding Ophelia might suggest something along the lines of Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard (1996), in which the Academy/Tony-award-winning actor seeks the relevance and resonance of his latest Shakespearean rôle. Yet while Stephen Rutterford’s film is also a feature debut, and certainly evokes Shakespeare (among other things), Finding Ophelia is no documentary, but…
The first word in the title of Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane might suggest that the film is going for something extreme like Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) – but in fact the lane in question is a leafy country road leading from the village church where Thomas (Steven Cree) is the local priest, to the big…
Teddy (Osric Chau) and Claire (Sara Canning) are co-presenters on their travel vlog Superhost, compiling and uploading to-camera pieces about the high-end holiday rentals where they stay. They are also a genuine couple – and right from the opening scene of writer/director Brandon Christensen‘s Superhost, there is a clear tension between their real relationship and…
Lair is in the First Blood strand of FrightFest 2021’s Digital Edition Lair begins with a scene of domestic violence, as a mother lies severely injured in a large London house, and her young son is forced to play hide-and-seek. Neither will survive the brutal onslaught of their assailant. Now in jail for a double-murder,…
We Had It Coming opens with two programmatic sequences. In the first, Katja (Sofie Holland) is woken by the sound of a hardcore porn clip landing on her phone – a video in which, by implication, she features. She then, after grimly donning the transparent platform shoes that are part of her work costume, hangs…
The Advent Calendar had its UK première at FrightFest 2021 Writer/director Patrick Ridremont’s The Advent Calendar (Le Calendrier) comes frontloaded with a sense of doom. It is not just the direct-to-webcam address made by paraplegic protagonist Eva Roussel (Eugénie Derouand) at the start – but also clearly near the chronological end – of the film,…
The Found Footage Phenomenon had its world première at FrightFest 2021 “The following is based on real events,” reads the glitchy, juddery text that opens The Found Footage Phenomenon, as though we were watching a VHS of one of the very films this documentary celebrates. That, of course, is a crucial point established early here:…
Slapface has its international Première at FrightFest 2021 “You know why we have to do this?” says young adult Tom (Mike Manning) to his much younger, scared-looking brother Lucas (August Maturo) at the very beginning of Slapface. “Are you ready?” And then, the title of writer/director Jeremiah Kipp’s feature (adapted from his 2018 short of…