Open Up and Say AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH
Niall Kitson reports on the highlights of this year’s Horrorthon festival.

Let’s face it, they’re not great movies. No reading of the bill for this year’s Horrorthon will find anything to trouble the Oscars (save for the ghetto of the technical awards) but that’s the way the fans like it. For better or worse, horror films are great fun and the fans can’t get enough of them. Be they American, Italian, Asian, there’s room for all sorts in the average gorehound’s DVD collection and they have a reputation for being fiercely loyal, if not unnervingly obsessive.

To celebrate 10 years of the festival, organiser Edward King, along with accomplices Michael Griffin and Conor McMahon constructed a programme encompassing all aspects of the genre from sophisticated modern studio pics to arthouse oddities to franchise classics with a healthy dose of after-hours schlock from Europe and beyond. Running for five days and 27 screenings there was enough of everything on show, from movies with brains to movies with brains getting eaten to movies with no brains whatsoever. Here comes the pain…

Dark places
The opening film, 30 Days of Night, played to a packed house on the Thursday night. Based on the IDW graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith the story focuses on the town of Barrow, Alaska where the sun is about to go down for a month and some unsavoury characters are about to move in. With most of the town gone south for more reasonable climes, town sheriff (and jilted husband), Josh Hartnet, finds himself stuck on guard duty with his younger brother, ailing grandmother and estranged wife. To top it all off a cabal of vampires have decided to turn the town into a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs.

Directed by David Slade (of the excellent Hard Candy), 30 Days manages to retain the sense of isolation the comic depicted so well, while trimming out the weaker facets of the back story. Hartnet, in his second genre role (if you count his cameos in Sin City), does an admirable job as the last hero in town, trying to balance civic responsibility with a less-than-prefect family life. The denouement, however, may be seen as something of a copout in comparison to the source material’s more quirky expressionism. Regular audiences will be more than happy with the solid direction, pacing, creature design and camerawork that’s pure eye candy. Cue round of applause and general sense of contentment. It should play well in the multiplexes.

Fans looking for a dose of the classics were well served. Jason Vorhees in Friday 13th Part 4 and Christopher Lee’s 1958 version of Dracula were well received, as were rare outings for Fright Night and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lines of dialogue from Saturday’s sellout matinee Predator were greeted with enthusiastic cheering: ‘If it bleeds, we can kill it.’ How else are you supposed to respond to that?

The quirkier realms of genre were also out in force. Friday night’s Botched, is a horror-comedy focusing on a heist gone wrong. Starring Steven Dorff and filmed largely in Ireland the action takes place in a Russian skyscraper where a simple case of thievery turns to murder turns to a stint on a disused floor that doubles as… Let’s just say it gets messy in all departments from there. Suffice to say that what starts out as a botched robbery strays into being a botched comedy and a botched horror as well. Director Tim Ryan was in attendance afterwards for a brief and sparsely attended Q&A.

The first true find of the festival has to be George Ratliff’s’s psychological thriller Joshua. The tale of an effete New York youngster in a well-to-do family, the titular protagonist finds himself examining his place in the world following the arrival of a new sister. With a mother undergoing a serious case of the baby blues the youngster decides some family bonds are in need of a bit of a shake-up if his personal development is to continue.

A sharp script and excellent performances across a cast including Sam Rockwell and Michael McKean (sans poodle hair) make Joshua a truly chilling experience with a crushing inevitability to the outcome. The absence of any supernatural element makes for a refreshing execution of a master plan more cruel and cunning than any visceral set piece. The delicacy of the final scene takes one’s breath away.

Youth and experience
Also in the good books is Michael Lichtenstein’s satirical look at teen sexuality Teeth – a contemporary take on the vagina dentata myth. Celibate teen in distress Dawn finds her chaste lifestyle becoming as much a case of biological necessity as personal choice when she ends up castrating a frustrated boyfriend with nothing but the power of her nether regions. Dawn struggles to accept her burgeoning identity as a sexual being while balancing it with the terrible knowledge she can end up giving her suitors an entirely different kind of lovebite than they expect. It almost works but without the technicolour psychosis of Heathers or the high-gloss angst of Donnie Darko, Teeth suffers from a lack of identity, much like its unintentional femme fatale. There wasn’t an uncrossed set of male legs in the house.

Treading more familiar terrain All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is an old skool slasher where the prettiest girl in school has a knack for attracting boys who come to a violent end. It’s a smart and sassy flick with some truly bone-crunching set pieces. As the only sensible girl in the entire film, there is a sizeable chance that, by the end, you will feel rather attracted to the young leading lass as well.

For a realistic take on man’s inhumanity to man, Stuart Gordon’s Stuck is one of the true gems of the festival. Inspired by a true story (which could mean anything really), Stuck, has out-of-work project manager, Stephen Rea, meet nurse’s aide Mena Suvari through the medium of the road traffic accident. Stuck on the bonnet of Suvari’s motor Rea ends up being parked in Suvari’s garage while she figures out how to dispose of his body and get to work on time, all while under the influence of pills and booze. Rea’s struggle for survival involves him balancing out the physical acts of getting off the car to tending his wounds to dealing with Suvari’s attempts to have him offed by her drug-dealing boyfriend. It’s pure adrenaline from beginning to end but it’s hard to see where it will land in terms of distribution. Fingers crossed.

Summer Scars is Julian Richards’s (The Last Horror Movie) tale of council kids coming of age when a chance encounter with a tramp in the woods goes from bad to worse. The film’s linear narrative does telegraph the ending but at 75 minutes this digital feature doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s also fun to hear Ebonics in a Welsh accent.

Festival guest Tim Sullivan (2001 Maniacs) was on hand to introduce his digital feature Driftwood – getting its first screening in Europe at the festival. The story of foul deeds at an attitude adjustment camp where the teachers pack heat and the Dean’s daughter is the tastiest thing on the menu, Driftwood boasts decent performances from Disney actor Ricky Ullman (who gave up his day job in TV series Phil of the Future to do the film) and former wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. Think The Devil’s Backbone meets The O.C. and you’re about there.

With the film going direct to DVD, Sullivan is keen to talk up the importance of digital distribution as a means for independent filmmakers to get their work seen. Working through his MySpace page, Sullivan has been known to burn copies of his films and send them direct to enthusiastic fans. In commenting on his breakthrough underground hit 2001 Maniacs he also revealed that a sequel is in the works and will start shooting in February. He’s also not impressed with the torture-porn of Hostel and Saw – as it turns out neither were the crowd.

Always something of a minefield the surprise movie still managed to draw a full house despite a history of poor quality control. Previous year’s had featured WWE wrestler Kane’s vehicle See No Evil, the Darren Aronofsky-produced fright vacuum Below and Terry Gilliam’s flop The Brothers Grimm.

Introducing this year’s entry in double-quick time Conor McMahon apologised for the absence of King due to ‘tiredness’ and asked the film roll with no further ado before exiting the screen. A sound move given the travesty he was about to unleash.

Parting shots
Few things are as like a red rag to a bull as are the words ‘Bord Scannan na hEireann’ to a fanboy. You learn this the hard way. Greeted with no small amount of folded arms and scoffing, Paddy Breathnach’s Shrooms tanked badly – and not without good cause. Coming across as a bad impression of a sub sub-par slasher flick, it’s hard to credit how funding was ever awarded such a callow mess. Populated by identikit Americans (except for the obligatory über-stoner who was a dead ringer for Jason Mewes) and an English guide this doomed band of ignoramuses fall victim to a bad element from an abandoned orphanage while all out of their mind on magic mushrooms while being stalked by Charlo Spencer and the guy who does the MyHome ads on the radio. Incidentally, the Drogheda accent is the most repellent and atavistic way we Gaels have of speaking. The whole thing looked like that mulchy Specsavers ad set in the forest where everything looks like it’s going backwards – only not as freaky.

The choice of closing film raised eyebrows from the get-go. Passed over for cinema release in Europe following poor US box office returns, Robert Rodriguez’s half of his ill-fated Grindhouse double header with Quentin Tarantino, Planet Terror, came with poor word of mouth Stateside and an additional 40 minutes to pad out the European release. Thankfully the end result is quite, quite brilliant. Framed by a trailer for a fictional b-movie actioner Machete the tone is set for an adrenaline ride with brain in neutral. Starring Rose McGowan as out-of-work go-go dancer Cherry Darling, Freddy Rodriguez as a man with a past, Michael Biehn as the sheriff and Tom Savini as a cop about to explode, there’s only one way this zombie shoot ‘em up can go. Thankfully it races to the point with buckets of blood, exploding pustules and domestic discord making a nice bookending theme to the weekend. It drew enthusiastic applause and the mind boggles how this will not get cinematic release. Maybe the American audience thought grindhouse cinema was a torture-porn thing. And God knows we all hate that stuff.

See Horrorthon's official website here