FrightFest: It's showtime

London's 26th FrightFest continues through the weekend with movies that are designed to entertain us by scaring, unsettling and grossing us out. As always, these films are somewhat hit and miss. Many are made on very small budgets, proving that pretty much anyone with a camera and some up-for-it friends can make a movie. Although it also quickly becomes clear whether the idea, narrative and characters are strong enough to hold the interest. Of course, I need to watch everything all the way to the end, and I always give the movie the benefit of the doubt. So it's great when a movie surprises me. Here are five more highlights...

Your Host
dir DW Medoff; with Jackie Earle Haley, Ella-Rae Smith 25/It ***.
pening with gleeful grisliness, this horror thriller quickly sets up characters before launching them into a freak-out situation. Taking inspiration from the Saw movies, director DW Medoff and writer Joey Miller clearly enjoy devising the most sadistic nastiness they can think of while keeping everything both jaunty and sharply pointed. But the grubby production design is a bit tired and, even with comical asides, it's almost overwhelmingly hideous.

Pig Hill
dir Kevin Lewis; with Rainey Qualley, Shane West 25/US **.
Punctuated with sudden violence and freak-out images of people wearing pig heads, this horror thriller is fairly relentless in its dark approach. Scenes play out with super-high intensity, as director Kevin Lewis ramps everything up exponentially, including camerawork, performances, music and gore. And as the narrative travels through oddly spurious sequences on its way to the horrible truth, it never seems to be daytime in this small town.

Where Is Juan Moctezuma?
dir-scr Alaric S Rocha; with Alaric S Rocha, Erin Hughes 25/US ***
Diving into the mystery surrounding an iconic 1970s Mexican horror auteur, this lively movie embraces the cheesy sensibility of filmmaker Juan F Moctezuma II. Appearing on-screen to narrate the story, filmmaker Alaric S Rocha has fun with colourful period movies and comments from his extra-sparky interviewees. So there's plenty of ramshackle energy, mixing a wide range of hilariously outrageous material. But it could have been even funnier than this.

Sane Inside Sanity
dir-scr Andreas Zerr; with Jim Sharman, Richard Hartley 25/Ger ***.
Celebrating 50 years of a camp classic, this documentary explores "the phenomenon of Rocky Horror", the offbeat play-turned-movie musical that went viral long before that was a thing. German filmmaker Andreas Zerr carefully traces the development of the show and film, then dives deeply into the fan experience that has evolved exponentially over the decades. It's a brisk, knowing trip into a quirky corner of film history.

Malpertuis
dir Harry Kumel; with Orson Welles, Susan Hampshire 73/Bel ***.
An eerie mix of horror, comedy and lustiness infuses this wonderfully offbeat 1971 Belgian thriller, which has been digitally restored to maximise the impact of Harry Kumel's visceral direction and Gerry Fisher's vibrant cinematography. This is a rich-hued, lavishly designed and very bawdy film with a cheeky sense of humour and insinuating moods stretching from burgeoning sexuality to existential angst. And astonishing freak-out moments punctuate the meandering plot.

Full reviews will be linked at Shadows' FRIGHTFEST PAGE >

Critical Week: Silent running

It's been another eclectic week at the movies, with a couple of terrific in-cinema screenings alongside other films I watched on screener links at home. And I've also had several stage shows to watch as well, which I'm also reviewing here. Easily the best film I saw this week was the Irish drama The Quiet Girl, anchored by a remarkable performance from newcomer Catherine Clinch (above). It's a beautifully understated story told through perceptions and emotions rather than plot. A real stunner. Virtually the opposite was the mega-blockbuster Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which is consistently entertaining thanks to a terrific cast and lots of whizzy visuals. But even though director Sam Raimi stirs in some comedy and horror, it feels oddly aimless.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Swimmer • Eleven Days in May
PERHAPS AVOID:
Escape the Field
ALL REVIEWS > 

A bit further afield, I watched the rather simple-minded thriller Escape the Field, about a group of people who find themselves in a cornfield and must solve puzzles to get out alive. It's violent and nasty and never surprising at all. The Danish-made but Norway-set Wild Men is a fascinating black comedy about masculinity, with all kinds of emotional, social and action textures woven in. From Iran, Atabai is a complex portrait of a man who returns to his small hometown for a revelatory journey of self-discovery. And the documentary Eleven Days in May, narrated by Kate Winslet, is the harrowing but urgently important account of more than 60 children killed by Israeli bombs in Palestine over a brief period a year ago.

Coming up this next week, I have a mix of press screenings in cinemas and online, including Eugenio Derbez in The Valet, Caleb Landry Jones in Nitram, the comedy thriller Emergency, the British comedy All My Friends Hate Me, the military drama Foxhole and the Chinese animation blockbuster Boonie Bears: Back to Earth.