Frightfest 2

Frankenstein's Army

It was very hard to resist a film with a title like this. So I didn't. This is a found-footage horror movie set in World War II, in which Russian soldiers towards the end of the war happen across Doctor Frankenstein (not the original, a descendant) and his contribution to the Nazi war effort, a collection of weird and wonderful anthropomorphic weapons. Found footage tends to imply a degree of authenticity – however, students of the period may be confused by the fact that the Russian soldiers here are speaking English, albeit accented English, from the start. The message here is: do not expect strict historical accuracy. So I didn't. There's not much plot in this, but quite a bit of forward momentum, which will do. It's a bit like a first person computer game, though I wouldn't know about that. Dave does, but he wasn't quite so keen on this as I. The director, Richard Raaphorst, got the audience to pretend to be zombies, and took a photo. Those zombies were more convincing than the ones in:

Cannon Fodder

This is part of a new wave of Israeli horror, a wave consisting of three films, one of which (Big Bad Wolves) may not in fact be a horror film. I saw the first Israeli horror film, Rabies, at Frightfest two years ago, and its clever play on genre conventions led me to expect great things of this. I was sadly disappointed, then, by this cheesy low-budget action flick which (mobile phones and bad CGI aside) could easily have been made in the 80's. Here a crack troop of Israeli soldiers go behind enemy lines to investigate reports of terrorist-created zombies, although the general ambience, I thought, was closer to paintball-scenario-gone-wrong.

Shock value comes less from the usual horrors than from the soldiers' racist banter, which is not the kind of thing you get to hear in Hollywood movies these days, and from scenes of Muslim women being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers - scenes which, since they are zombies, we were meant to be straightforwardly cheering on I think. Of course, world cinema often presents the viewer with such cultural challenges.

The director said, I think, that he had the idea for this film when he was ten. And made it, I'd guess, when he was eleven.

The Desert

Talking of world cinema, Frightfest's artiest offering (probably) gives us an Argentinian take on the zombie apocalypse, featuring a grand total of one zombie - and that doesn't come in until halfway through. After Cannon Fodder, this was difficult to adjust to – the film virtually had to break me down emotionally and then build me back up again. But it managed to do so, and finally this turned out to be the best film of Frightfest 2013 apart from, possibly, one of the ones I didn't see, of which there were about fifty.

It tackles the familiar post-apocalypse scenario from an unusual angle – a love triangle, with the zombie as eventual fourth member. The question it's really asking is: can we overcome the hang-ups of the old society and create something new? The answer is (SPOILER ALERT): no. But the journey is atmospheric and absorbing, and the movie bodes well for first-time director Christoph Behl.

Dave didn't think so, but he did appreciate the heroine's performance – specifically, her willingness to, shall we say, expose herself. Certain parts of herself in particular.

And that's Frightfest for another year. It was interesting to have another perspective on this occasion, and useful in that Dave seemed to like the ones I didn't, thus in a way redeeming my stupid decision to watch them in the first place. At one point over the weekend Dave made the extraordinary claim that he had opened a Virgin megastore 'in his pants', at which point I suggested that this might account for the drop-off in sales that had afflicted that company. I just couldn't have that conversation with anyone else. Among the stars I was thrilled to see were that guy from Human Centipede 2, Paddy from Emmerdale, and – well that's about it in fact. I told a work colleague I was going to Frightfest and got an unusually positive reaction – 'Oh, that's interesting!' It turned out she'd thought I'd said I was going to Cyprus.

You're Next

Oh yes – there's a sequel. This showed at Frightfest but we saw it in Basildon. An upper-middle class American family is brutally dispatched one by one by masked killers in Adam Wingard's home invasion horror, which both Dave and I found a pleasant watch. Viewing conditions in the Empire, Bas Vegas, might actually have been improved by the appearance of some brutal masked killers had they turned their attentions on the audience - notably two girls sitting a way behind us, who could be heard gossiping throughout, as if the events of the film were happening to people they knew, but didn't much care about.

This film makes an interesting contrast to The Conjuring and Haunter in that the American family here is not sacrosanct but thoroughly complicit in its own downfall. And it is also an effective shocker, with a certain wit about it – the resourceful heroine, it turns out, was raised in a survivalist compound. Nice, as the guy next to me (the one who wasn't Dave) kept saying - not at examples of deft screenwriting, but at the sight of people having their heads bashed in. Welcome to Essex.