More FrightFest

A Night Of Nightmares

Grounded in two solid performances by the leads, this isn't necessarily scary, but it's always intriguing. The director (Buddy Giovinazzo) described it as his first genre movie, but if it is a genre movie, it's decidedly 'off-key' (to use a phrase from the film). This is no bad thing as far as I'm concerned, but then you should hear some of the music I listen to.

This guy who runs an indie rock website goes to interview a singer in the remote cabin she's rented, only for her deranged ex to turn up. The stage is set for a standard ordeal-in-rented-cabin psycho-thriller, except the psycho is despatched pretty quickly, and then the ghostly manifestations start. As does the hokum, you might think, except these manifestations are not the usual ones. A vomiting of coins, a cake full of hair – well if spirits really were trying to communicate, they wouldn't just call you up on the telephone, would they?

Although in this film, come to think of it, they do.

Errors Of The Human Body

Not precisely a horror film, this is more a drama about guilt and grief worked out in sf/horror terms. The gory highlight is the severing of a laboratory mouse's tail. Michael Eklund plays a scientist whose baby dies of a new disease – a disease which then becomes his, er, baby. If you see what I mean.

Someone once rejected a story of mine, saying that it 'works well in its own terms'. What they meant, I think, was: you'll never sell it. Similiarly with this film, it was telling that the first question from the audience was about how they were going to market it. With difficulty, came the reply. It isn't quite arthouse, it isn't quite Cronenbergian body-horror. And yet it does work well in its own terms, and Michael Eklund (the thinking man's Paul Rudd?) is great.

I was less convinced by the appearance of Rik Mayall as the clinic director. Whenever he appeared onscreen I was afraid that he was going to disrupt the carefully-maintained atmosphere of low-key unease by bursting into hysterical laughter or smashing a table over someone's head.

He looked like he was afraid that he was going to do that too.

Sleep Tight

Not exactly a horror film either, this Spanish thriller from Rec director Jaume Balaguero was a highlight not only of the festival but of my cinematic year thus far. Luis Tosar plays the concierge of a hotel who spends an inordinate amount of time under the bed of one of the guests (a pretty young female one), only surfacing – chloroform in hand- when she is safely asleep.

No mere pervert, Cesar, our concierge, is a complex and plausibly human monster, an anti-hero the equal of Tom Ripley, which makes the news that there won't be a sequel disappointing for once.

Less disappointing is the news that there won't be a Hollywood remake. Perhaps they think it might be hard to persuade Tom Cruise to play a man who hides under women's beds and rapes them in their sleep. Considering some of the things he is said to do in real life, I'm not so sure...

Berberian Sound Studio

Sleep Tight dealt with a scenario that's normally about voyeurism but turns out in this case to be about someone trying to hide. As well as hiding physically, Cesar is constantly trying to conceal his true nature behind the mask of a helpful concierge – his worst fear is being seen.

Same kind of thing here. In Berberian Sound Studio Toby Jones' repressed sound engineer enjoys a quiet life living with his Mum, or he would be if he wasn't in Italy providing sound effects for a horror film. It's 1976. We never see the film, bar the opening credits. Instead, the focus is very much on the crushed melons and broken marrows used to imitate the sounds made by ill-used human bodies. It's a refreshingly oblique approach to the genre, and one that grows more oblique as it goes on. How you react to the ending is dependent upon how far you are prepared to follow Jones's character, who is so at odds with the world of brash and stylish Italians he finds himself in, that he seems to want to disappear into the film itself. Or maybe he was dead all along.

I enjoyed this; but then, I would, wouldn't I? Some critics felt that by opting for an obscure ending director Peter Strickland had missed a chance to go mainstream. Personally, I can't see a film about shattered melons setting the box office on fire, but who knows? Maybe this is even the kind of thing that floats Tom Cruise's boat. Ask Katie Holmes.

In order to give you a taste of the last-reel plot contortions of BBS and their bemusing impact, let me just tell you that although this entry is entitled 'More FrightFest' and although the film played just after Sleep Tight at FrightFest, I didn't see it there – I saw it when it went on general release a week later. Ha. Now how do you feel?