24FPS @ Frightfest 2013: On Tender Hooks

Dir: Kate Shenton

On Tender Hooks almost beat me.  This is rare.  I've only previously stopped watching one film purely because I couldn't deal with the content (The Bunny Game).  On my first attempt I got only 13 minutes into this film; a low budget documentary about human suspension, in which participants pierce metal hooks through various parts of their skin and are suspended (and sometimes swung) from ropes.

Director Kate Shenton doesn't ease us in, which is why the film took me two goes.  Right upfront we're watching as people get pierced and suspended in the safe (almost medical) confines of a studio.  From there the film opens out, looking at a little bit of the history of suspension both as a religious ceremony and talking to the first people who began doing it for recreational and artistic purposes and seeing suspension in other places and contexts.  On Tender Hooks is more of a document than an analysis, and on that level it's often intriguing.  I was initially skeptical of the artistic side of suspension, but some of the images created here do have a macabre sort of beauty about them.

This isn't to say that the film neglects to explore the motivation behind suspension as well as document it.  Paritcipants speak about many different reasons that they want to suspend; some for the natural high that many report, others for the artistic value and many simply for the experience, but at just over an hour it doesn't have time to delve as deeply into these things as I might have liked.  Certainly I still struggle to understand the attraction of the practice.  The most interesting segment of the film in this respect are its last ten minutes, which show the suspension that Kate Shenton did before starting production.  It was odd watching this, because I had recently met and liked Shenton I was very uncomfortable seeing her in obvious (and real) pain, but her eventual experience and the value she seems to take from it are the things that speak most eloquently about what draws people to suspension.

The film is full of eye-watering images, after a while I thought I was okay, then came the bungee jump and I wasn't okay.  That said, if you can deal with the imagery On Tender Hooks is well worth a look.  The film is packed with interesting characters and Shenton, though not on screen until the end of the film, imparts real personality from behind the camera.  Her interaction with her subjects also prompts an openness from them that produces a compelling, if not always easy to grasp, testimony about the value of this kind of body modification.

★★★

24FPS @ Frightfest 2013: Part 2

Haunter
Dir: Vicenzo Natali

I can't tell you how tired I am of a certain kind of horror film that I call the 'noises off' movie.  You know the one - or rather the several thousand - where all the 'scares' come from things going bump just offscreen and, usually, something popping up suddenly in the background of a shot.  As Haunter opened it looked like it was simply going to be that; one more ghost story full of offscreen noises, but then the film began to evolve, and became something rather more interesting.

Vincenzo Natali's latest starts out with a simple concept, it's the day before Lisa's (Abigail Breslin) 16th birthday, and everything seems normal except that she's not allowed go about because of a thick fog outside.  It soon becomes clear that it has been the day before Lisa's 16th birthday for some time, but that only she is aware that time is looping.  As Lisa begins to investigate what is happening the events of the day begin to change, in small ways to begin with, but then in more disturbing ways.

It's not easy to talk about Haunter.  It draws on a lot of familiar reference points, but even to mention many of them would be to spoil the film, and the strength of the screenplay, in particular, lies in the fact that while it trades in tropes that you'll have seen in haunted house films, serial killer films and other types of horror, one of the thrills of the film is that it combines and twists them in surprising ways.

What can be mentioned is the fact that Abigail Breslin, who I'm not sure I've seen in anything since Little Miss Sunshine, has a really strong role here; an inquisitive, proactive, brave and reasonably complex character, and she does a great deal with it.  A large part of why Haunter works so well is that Breslin makes Lisa relatable despite her situation and is generally an appealing presence.

Credit must also go to Vincenzo Natali, who takes what could be a patchwork of influences and links them all together in a way that creates a look and mood that, while not entirely original, is consistent and gives the entire film a creepy undertone that serves it extremely well as it moves from twist to twist.  Even when Haunter trades in cliche - as in the early things going bump in the might scenes - Natali's craft and Breslin's sympathetic performance wring effective scares from what could just be another genre workout.

For me, Haunter is one of the best mainstream horror films I've seen for some time.  I wish I could get more in depth with this review but trust me, after you see it you'll thank me for keeping things vague.

★★★★

V/H/S/2
Dir: Simon Barrett / Adam Wingard / Eduardo Sanchez  Gregg Hale /
Gareth Huw Evans & Timo Tjahjanto / Jason Eisener

Portmanteau films are, I think, damned by their very nature to be hit and miss, and V/H/S/2 is no exception.  Composed of a wraparound story that shows the discovery of some mysterious videotapes in an empty (or is it?) apartment and four POV horror short films contained on those tapes, the film dips into many horror subgenres and does so with mixed success.

Everyone is likely to find their own standouts, but outside of the wraparound (which is middling) I found two shorts that I really liked and two that I was much less keen on.  Interestingly both of the films I enjoyed were collaboratively directed.  The first was Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale's fast moving zombie comedy A Ride in the Park, which is a gleefully gory tale of a cyclist bitten by zombie, going on to bite a couple and attacking a birthday party.  It's simple, but full of fun details and big laughs and shows that Sanchez can do tongue in cheek horror as well as the straight up scares he supplied in Lovely Molly.

More substantial in theme and running time is Gareth Huw Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's extravagantly bloody Safe Haven; a story of filmmakers whose documentary about a cult leader doesn't end the way they expected.  Evans and Tjahjanto take more time to set up characters, which means that when they spring a mid-segment surprise it has a bit of resonance, and they also have the time and restraint to set up a creepily disconnected atmosphere in the cult headquarters.  Evans bends his action credentials brilliantly to the mayhem of the film's last third, which is jam packed with twisted ideas and moments, leading up to a very funny last line.  The change of tone is nicely handled, going from restrained and tense to exuberantly over the top in minutes and with total assurance.

Unfortunately, these films account for less than half of V/H/S/2's running time, and the rest is filled by Adam Wingard's obvious jump scare packed Phase 1 Clinical Trials and Jason Eisener's cheap looking and as lazy as its title suggests Slumber Party Alien Abduction.  I get that this is the nature of these films, and V/H/S/2 is better than most and has two really great segments, but I can't help feeling they would ultimately make better DVD extras on the respective director's features.  On the whole, there is fun to be had here, but it's hard to recommend V/H/S/2 as a whole.

★★★

Rewind This
Dir: Josh Johnson

Being in my early thirties, I am very much of the VHS generation.  DVD only came on the scene when I was about seventeen, and it was a few years before I got a player.  I very much grew up and educated myself as a movie fan with the help of VHS, and while I don't miss some of the technical aspects of the format I do still have a nostalgic soft spot for it.  All of which makes me the perfect audience for Rewind This; a documentary that takes a scattershot but extremely entertaining look at the format and the revival it has recently seen with collectors.

If you are a fan of VHS exclusive cheese, this is the movie for you.  Sprinkled throughout are clips from some fantastically entertaining and offbeat looking titles (one that sticks in the mind is Bubba Smith's hilarious workout video, which begins with him telling you he loves you), I'd seriously recommend taking a notebook into any screening so you can remember all the films you'll want to track down.

Outside of this, the film moves quickly through various topics related to videotapes, providing an overview of the format wars before focusing on VHS and the nostalgia that collectors have for the format.  The film is especially good at covering the sheer extent of the VHS library, and how the astonishing popularity of video and the slowness of the studios in catching on to it created a whole new market in which independent filmmaker like Lloyd Kaufman, Charles Band and Frank Henenlotter (all interviewed) could thrive.

There is a real joy - and envy - as a film lover who has over 4000 titles, but only about 400 on VHS, in seeing the many different collections displayed and the different ways they are organised (I especially liked an obsessive horror fan's 'Pre-Sellout Craven' section).

Rewind This spends a lot of time talking to fans and collectors, but it also looks at how video affected filmmakers and distributors.  The interviews are all very informative, and the informality of them makes this an easily engaging watch as well as an endlessly informative one.

There are only two downsides to the film.  First is that it does sometimes ping pong between topics very quickly, and it can feel like some sections (on adult video, for instance) could either be longer or left out so something else could be longer.  Also the US-centric approach of much of the film means that it barely addresses the moral panics that surrounded video here in the UK in the 80's and 90's, which are such a large part of the story of the format.

Rewind This is a film by, about and for film fanatics, and if you grew up with the format as I did it will likely prompt all sorts of nostalgic feelings and a desire to pull a big box ex-rental tape down off the shelf.
★★★★

24FPS @ Frightfest 2013: Part 1

The American Scream
Dir: Michael Paul Stephenson

Halloween was not a big thing in the UK when I was growing up.  I didn't go trick or treating, we didn't carve pumpkins and neither we nor anyone we knew ever decided to spend much of the year in the run up to Halloween designing and building haunted houses in our back gardens for people to spend Halloween night walking through and being scared.  Now, having seen The American Scream, I think we missed out.

Michael Paul Stephenson's documentary follows three home haunters from the same town; Victor, Manny and Matthew and their families in anticipation of the big night, as they prepare their haunts for the Halloween crowds.  For me, the heart of the film is with Victor and his family.  Victor longs to go professional and is clearly obsessive about his haunts to the point of testing his relationship with his wife and kids every October, but there is still such warmth about their interaction.  Especially charming is a moment towards the end when Victor's elder daughter, who is about nine, has designed a prop for him to make and he admiringly tells her "you're a sick little girl, you know that?"  In that moment, as well as in the Halloween night culmination of all the work on the various haunts I really felt what seems to me the theme of the film; the way that horror can bring people together in a shared cathartic experience of being scared and enjoying being scared.

While I enjoyed the whole film, and there are especially funny and sweet moments to be seen between Matthew and his rather infirm Dad (especially when they go and do their clown act at a local hospital), I did ultimately end up feeling that Victor and his family, who get the bulk of the screen time, could have supported a film all by themselves.  Still, it was nice to see both the difference between Victor's incredibly professional haunt and Matthew's much more slapdash effort, and the fact that both were seemingly enjoyed by everyone who visited.

Overall, The American Scream is a warm and funny film about the art of scaring people, and it was a great kick off for my first horror film festival.
★★★★

Daylight
Dir: David McCracken / Joel Townsend / Kaidan Tremain

You can tell while watching it that Daylight has three directors.  That isn't necessarily a problem, after all, Airplane! is a pretty great movie, but there are always likely to be pitfalls when three people - all of whom ostensibly share creative control - are trying to put their ideas into a single 90 minute basket.  Daylight is jam packed with ideas; there is the down to earth horror of real life, possession, childhood trauma, exorcism, surrealism, and this is exactly the problem.  The film never manages to coalesce around a single idea, instead shooting off in all directions as takes its fancy, all of it filtered through perhaps the most obnoxious use of the found footage gimmick I've ever seen.

To be fair to Daylight it starts out potentially interesting, focusing on three child support workers (one of whom, for some reason, films everything) investigating statements made in a teenager's diary which imply that her priest may be abusing her.  There is a creepy plausibility to this section of the film, but it quickly goes off the rails as the focus moves to another family whose nine-year-old daughter the group begin to suspect is possessed.  Throughout, directors McCracken, Townsend and Tremain attempt to convince us that we're watching a degraded videotape (on file as Police evidence) by putting as many technical flaws into the picture as they can; tracking goes out regularly; the top of the image is often seen at the bottom of the screen and the quality in general is abysmal.  Verisimilitude is one thing, but honestly, I have long play VHS tapes 15 years old that hold up better than this, and put together with the endless judder in the frame, even in the infrequent sedate moments, it's almost unwatchable.

The more down to earth portions of the film and the illusion of the found footage conceit are not aided by a collection of extremely rote performances.  It's sometimes hard to define what makes a performance good or bad, but in this case they just feel off; there's an unnatural affectless quality that simply rings false to me.  You can sometimes get away with acting that feels like acting, but not when we're supposedly seeing 'real life' footage.

The killer, however, is the last ten minutes.  Daylight had gone off the rails long before this point, but the last ten minutes are when it chucked every single idea it had at the screen in a desperate attempt to get something, anything, to stick.  Nothing did, except an escalating sense of having wasted my time.

★

Sadik 2
Dir: Robin Entreinger

One of the major complaints that I'm used to both hearing and making as a horror fan is that the characters - especially in slasher or torture porn films - are voids who exist merely to be cut up, and that the films have no interest in developing them.  Sadik 2 definitely doesn't suffer from a lack of character development, but that's not such good news as you might think.

Sadik 2 (which, by the way, is not a sequel) divides its 75 minutes into two distinct halves.  The first sees a group of friends arriving, as they apparently always do, to spend New Year's Eve getting drunk together in a remote cabin.  The film spends a lot of times on the various crushes that exist in the group, on the filmmaking ambitions of one of the characters and on their shared history living in a children's home.  This would be fine except for two things.  First of all, we all know this is a horror film, but in this character heavy first half, there is little sense of build to becoming that horror film, aside from the premise of six people in a remote cabin.  However, more problematic is the fact that not one single solitary moment of the character development pays off in any way during the horror driven second half.  For all the time that Robin Entreinger spends on ostensibly setting these people up, come the kills they are still used as nothing more than meat bags.

This is a terrible pity because when we see the horror concept behind the film it is actually very clever; a sort of down to earth indie spin on Cabin in the Woods.  The kill scenes are really well done, the effects are largely kept off-screen, but those we do see are impressive for the budget (especially a face being peeled) and there is a great balance between genuinely nasty imagery, a sense of terror and some pointed and knowledgeable genre satire.

If Sadik 2 were a short, the opening 40 minutes trimmed down to 10, then the emptiness of the characters would likely not be an issue, indeed it might even make a satirical point.  As it is the film, while it promises interesting things from Entreinger in the future, is outrageously padded and too bogged down by a first half that never pays off to end up being truly effective.

★★