view from the cheap seats

Don’t worry, two more posts of film reviews are on their way to complete the picture being painted of the recent Leeds International Film Festival. In the meantime however this post presented itself to me on a plate and I just couldn’t resist.

Sometimes three nice neat points just roll along and pile up in my head. These kinds posts almost write themselves really, though I wish they actually would as there are about a million other things I ‘should’ be writing instead.

So anyway, here we go, here’s your three:

First up the whole BA, cross wearing extravaganza. It’s been a long time since such an irritating story has been kicking about. The fact that almost all of the arguments AND coverage are so deeply flawed, thus rendering the whole thing a nonsensical waste of breath, time and ink, serves to truly infuriate me, when I let it.

So let’s clear a few things up:

I’ve noticed various media outlets referring to the offending piece of jewellery as a crucifix. The item shown in the various photographs etc is NOT a crucifix, it’s a cross.

There’s a big difference(1) which, given that the whole beef about this is story respecting other people’s religions, you might have thought would have been recognised.

Secondly, and most importantly, the comparison between the cross and the hijab or turban is simply NOT valid.

As I understand it BA forbid the wearing of any jewellery outside uniforms, religious symbol or otherwise, to avoid giving violent passengers something to grab hold of.

Headgear is a completely different category of dress and if Christians had traditional headgear they’d be allowed to wear it, ie. everyone IS being treated equally.

This woman’s real complaint, though she doesn’t seem to realise it, is that Christians don’t have their own brand of silly hat(2). Now whose fault is that? No-one’s but their own I say.

And here we have hit upon the central artery of this post: Christian jealously of other religions, but we’ll come back to this with a vengeance soon enough.

The third and final point on this particular issue is to mention the response of the Church of England.

The Arch Bishop of Canterbury, who I normally find to be pretty reasonable, has thoroughly disappointed me by throwing a world class hissy fit.

It has been ‘suggested’ that BA rethink it’s policy, which is shown above to be perfectly reasonable and fair, on pain of the CoE selling the tens of millions of pounds worth of BA shares it owns and introducing an Anglican boycott.

As much as the church loves to give itself airs and grace, to set itself above the rest of society as being divine and of a higher purpose, in the end it wields a big financial stick just like any other professional gang of elitists.

Despite winning the initial court case and an appeal, BA has committed to review its policy in fear of such divine retribution. To be fair to them however, their suggestion that religious symbols may be allowed as pin badges on lapels does seem like a sensible solution.

The second news item that rolled on up to fit in nicely did so a few weeks back when the government were considering legislation that would force faith schools to include 25% of ‘non believers’ among their student body.

Again, let’s start with the horrendously misleading media coverage. This whole issue was presented in terms of ‘integration’ and ‘multiculturalism’, the suggested aim being to stop ‘certain communities’ isolating themselves from wider, secular society.

In the current climate it’s hard not be drawn by these vibes towards the assumption that the problem being addressed here is that of Muslim radicalisation and of trying to build better relationships between Muslim communities and ‘mainstream society’.(3)

A brief, throwaway statistic I happened to catch towards the end of one report on this issue however, puts this assumption right on its arse.

Apparently Muslim schools already take 25% non believers, they do it voluntarily and have done for a long time.

The problem here is actually with the Catholic schools, ie. it’s not so much a problem of the fringes not wanting to come to the centre but actually the centre resisting such attempts and integration.(4)

As you may or may not be aware this legislation was actually ditched at the last minute, supposedly because a voluntary agreement had been reached among all faiths.

What wasn’t admitted to was that the Government had actually just forgotten what it meant to fuck with the Catholic church.

Again the guys in silly hats and sillier dresses flexed their muscle and the suits bent right over. You can have your democratic systems and rational procedures for the most part, but when we don’t like what you’re doing then you’ll do what (we say) god says bitch!

Let’s not forget that, for a long time, these religious nutters held absolute power over most of the planet and despite the march of technology, capitalism and secular society, they won’t give up their grip on power without a dirty and bloody fight.

Finally let’s turn away from the petty, decadent religious morays of the west. If you want to get to the heart of religious madness, to the real blood-in-the-streets faith, where better to turn than the good old Middle East?

The recent assassination of Christian government minister in Lebanon has served to pour petrol on an already raging fire. Outraged by what they see as the hijacking of their country by Muslim extremists, Christian militias are now arming and organising in Lebanon.

The next time the Muslims decide to take their country to war with the Jews, they say, we’ll be there to stop them.

Yes overall it seems to me that Christians are getting well and truly fed up with Islam and Judaism getting all the attention.

They’re seeing much passion, press coverage and public interest go to their rivals while they watch the cancer of apathy spread from the secular world into their flock.

Time to up the ante, time to get tough, time for the servants of Christ to jump in and kick some ass!

It’s funny, in a dead children kind of way, but when I usually write about the three great elitist menaces to humanity, religion, politics and economics, I tend to think of them as past, present and future respectively.

Looking back over this post however it seems like the latter two could potentially be swallowed up by a global holy war.

Choose your sides, there’s a few millennia of history to tell you which you’re on, and if you’re not on any then you’re in the middle, getting fucked.

The US already slaughters millions ostensibly in the name of god, if the Christians pick this ‘persecution’ riff up and run with it things could get even uglier very quickly.

Now to wrap up I’d like to be a smug little bastard and refer back to one of my favourite chains of thought, summarise by the somewhat flippant sounding mantra:

religion is the only evil

The thinking runs thus:

the abstract concepts of pure good and pure evil are religious constructs, ie. they only exist thanks to religion, eg. personified as god = good, devil = evil,

these concepts cause no end of pain and suffering by enabling people to believe that there are fundamental differences between themselves and others, eg. us vs the evildoers, and that they have some ultimate justification for whatever they choose to do, ie. god’s work,

this blinding of people to empathy and reason is the closest thing to actual evil that there is and so:

religion is the only evil

Outraged? Offended? Well don’t worry, if you’re right and I’m wrong then I’ll burn in agony for all eternity while you blissfully gloat over my suffering from on high that is, after all, what it’s all about right?

footnotes

(1) a crucifix is a cross with an image of the Christ nailed to it, this is the symbol of Catholicism as it represents Jesus’s great pain and sacrifice for which we should all feel eternally guilty; an empty cross is the symbol of Anglicanism as it represents the miracle of the resurrection, ie. the ‘proof’ the Jesus was the Christ for which we should all feel eternally smug,

(2) is it just me or is the entire history of the human world dominated by silly hats? think about it, tribal leaders / monarchies, religions, militaries, the common denominator is the enforcing of respect for silly hats, what’s that all about? maybe there’s actually an archaic global conspiracy among the hatters, was Lewis Carroll trying to tell us something? hmmm...

(3) spot the racist, it’s a game I like to pay when listening to political leaders and public figures talk about Muslims, intentional or otherwise talking about a singular Muslim community or making the assumption that Muslims are, by definition, outside the mainstream of society is inherently racist,

(4) cf. the myth of ethnic minorities ‘taking over’ urban areas and ‘driving out’ the local residents when what actually happens is that the white people choose to move out because they only want to live next to people who look like they do,

Monday 06/11/06

Anthropology 101 2*

I was quite up for the double bill of alternative media politics that was billed for Monday night. Unfortunately I found this opening short to be, quoting my notes from the night:

"Pretentious cack of the worst kind,"

The two stars I gave this piece were in recognition of the concept, which I liked.

The three stars I didn't give it were in recognition of what was done with that concept.

So it's an alien beginners class in the fall of humanity, a kind of educational documentary about our planet and us.

Now this could be a very interesting way of trying to hold up a completely objective mirror to the world, a way to let you look in from outside.

Unfortunately I found myself continually irritated by the familiarity of everything I heard. It's as if this unseen alien race learned everything they knew about earth from hanging out with white, western, middle class pseudo-radical-wannabe teenagers.

I'm the first to admit that I'm being pretty hard on this piece, particularly as, in the great scheme of things, I probably am actually on board with most of the ideals behind the work.

The reason this film wound me up so much is this:

for any of the issues highlighted in the film to be successfully addressed popular support has to be established,

this kind of pretentious, unoriginal reiteration achieves nothing other than turning people off the important issues,

which brings me nicely on to...

On Air (France, 2006) 4*

...a relief!

Also a little pretentious this much longer study of the alternative media landscape of the US shone by letting the people involved do almost all the talking.

Those people involved were the best thing about the film in more ways than one.

While what they had to say was very interesting and even exciting to me, the fact that they didn't all agree was somehow even better.

The 'alternative media' was not presented as that single label may suggest. What I found fascinating and refreshing was learning about a scene that, at times, does indeed seem to move as one, and yet, on the ground, is actually made up of lots of different groups with different goals and agendas.

Despite the various figures and episodes that demonstrate how tight the grip of big business around the throat of the media is in the US, this was ultimately an uplifting film.

Something commented upon towards the end of the film is the lack of popular movements and there is even comment as to suggest that this may be, in part, due to an inability to communicate effectively, (see above!)

What really excited me however was the suggestion, when talking about current protest and struggle for change, that no, it isn't like the sixties now, however it is like the build up to the sixties.

All that's missing is for the radical to move back into the mainstream as more and more people become disillusioned.

It seems that there are people out there, keeping the candles burning at the fringe so that, when we recognise the folly of our ways, we do in fact have somewhere to go.

Another large scale re-emergence of the counter culture? I can but hope...

Tuesday 07/11/06

Splinter (UK, 2005) 3*

I was quite excited about this film, a low budget, British sci fi thriller about thoughts being laid bare.

Another very nice concept, (there seems to be no shortage of good ideas out there!) wherein a couple of scientists create a machine that can read people's thoughts.

Also some great performances, genuinely funny, exciting, disturbing etc. as we see the whole gamut of human experience played out in an office block.

I felt ultimately disappointed however as I found myself waiting for the film to get going all the way through.

The plot was slow, occasionally twisting for no apparent reason.

Yet again you can everything else right but if it's not written well, you're fucked.

Hammer & Tickle (France / Canada 2006) 4*

A documentary detailing the history of Russian Communism from the revolution through to the end of the cold war, sounds like a right barrel of laughs doesn't it?

Well, looking back once more to the comments regarding communication above, the best thing about this film was that it was exactly that.

The simply premise here was that the jokes told in a particular time and place provide a unique insight into what's happening there and then.

They tell you what people were talking about, and how they regarded different people and things.

The jokes come animated, sounded over stock footage and even told straight out by the wide array of experts and witnesses interviewed and all to great effect.

Turning material that is at best terribly dry and at worst terribly dark into something accessible and even fun is grand achievement indeed.

I laughed a lot and I gained a whole new perspective on both Russia and the Communist system.

And yes, I'll repeat one of the jokes, this one seemed to be resurrected for every leader but we'll start with Jo:

Two guys are standing line waiting for bread.
First guy says, "I'm sick of this, someone should do something, I'm going to kill Stalin!"
He storms off.
The second guy continues to queue for another hour of so until he sees the first guy coming back.
"So," he asks the first guy, "did you kill Stalin?"
"No," answers the first guy, "that queue was even longer."

And so on.

So back to the Carriageworks Theatre for the home straight of the Horror Weekend, starting with...

Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With The Plan (USA, 2006) 5*

A half hour monologue from a guy sat alone in a white room with a mirror. Sound good?

Well it wasn't good, it was fucking brilliant!

Armed with a series of camcorders, phones and alarm clocks our lead plans to expose the lethal nature of a sinister and mysterious ornate mirror.

As he summarises his research pertaining to the mirror for posterity we start to realise that he has more than just a professional interest in this supposedly murderous curiosity piece.

The gruesome stories that make up the past history of the mirror are genuinely chilling and build an unsettling tension that just won't quit.

The performance is utterly engrossing as we witness a gradual shift from calm and rational thinking into increasing agitation and confusion.

Is the mirror unleashing it's fiendish and archaic powers or is it all in his head?

A grimly magical tale that hints towards something both epic and evil.

Apparently this 'long short' was intended to be the first of a reverse trilogy but the director is now hoping to make it the first of a nine unconventionally ordered part series.

Can't wait for the next instalment, whichever chapter it may be!

The Call Of Cthulu (USA, 2005) 4*

I was VERY excited about this film.

HP Lovecraft occupies a spot on my very shortlist of favourite writers and the creation of the Cthulu Mythos is surely his greatest work.

Now there is an unwritten rule which had, to my knowledge, never been broken before this film, namely that every single film based on an HP Lovecraft story was utter cack.

It seemed that somehow HPL's work was just untranslatable onto film. While I suspect this has something to do with the fact that his writing is so purely literary in style I have always held out hope that someone would manage to break that rule.

And this film did, kind of.

Filmed in Mythoscope, this piece is an utterly convincing silent black and movie. It absolutely looks eighty years old this seems to help it capture SOME of the essence of HPL.

The festival programme describes this film as "the most faithful and authentic adaptation of a Lovecraft story ever attempted," a statement with which I whole heartedly agree.

The scraps of information from obscure sources providing just enough of a glimpse to suggest something truly awful lurking just out of sight; the stuffy innocence of the late nineteenth century and the dreadful hopelessness of it all.

This is definitely a faithful attempt at filming HLP and deserves credit for being such.

HOWEVER, you'll notice I only dished out 4* here so here's why The Call Of Cthulu only just broke the rule.

It wasn't shit, certainly not, but equally it just a vague echo of the literature it was attempting to animate.

The one aspect of HPL that was conspicuously absent from the screen was the horror.

What HPL did was to tap into the most primal of fears, the things in the dark that are beyond our ability to understand.

His horror was always very subtle and yet incredibly powerful, creating a creeping dread that washes through. Reading HPL is like doing a jigsaw without knowing what it's a picture of.

Right up until you put the last piece in you thinks it's going to be something pretty ugly, but as you place that final tile you realise it's not what you thought, but something infinitely worse!

None of this made it to the screen but, to be fair, it would appear that this is an impossible task so it seems a little unfair to bitch.

The Woods (USA, 2006) 4*

I should say from the start that this is a 3* film.

There is one reason and one reason only that this film ended up getting 4* and that reason's name is Bruce Campbell.

This is an entertaining but entirely unoriginal horror story about a girl being sent to a spooky boarding school, uncovering something sinister and eventually having a symbolic final confrontation.

Set in the fifties, (for absolutely no reason that I could see whatsoever,) the film opens with Heather being driven to the school by her parents.

After about three seconds of looking at Bruce Campbell I knew exactly what was going on with this family. Why hasn't this guy had more work? He fucking rocks and his lack of major roles has been our loss.

Anyway, the film was another string of wasted opportunities. The most was not made of the spooky woods, the sinister back story was confused and flat and the one impressive twist was brushed by so quick you'd miss it if you blinked.

And at one point there were killer trees.

Now that's got to ring alarm bells right there.

The fact is that the infamous Evil Dead 'tree rape' set the bar so damn high for killer trees and creeping branches that if you're going use that device you'd better do it fucking well.

They did not.

A decent enough film but without Bruce Campbell's minor role it would have been nothing special.

Severance (UK, 2006) 5*

I love the Leeds International Film Festival, (and I get absolutely nothing for saying that mores the pity,) not least because the organisers always try to make it more interesting than just showing a bunch of films.

It's not uncommon for films to be introduced by directors or for there to be Q&A sessions after the screenings.

And on Sunday 05/11/06, for the first time ever in the UK, (I think,) they showed Severance with a live director's commentary.

Director Chris Smith stood on stage in front of the screen with a microphone commentating on his film and answering questions.

To be honest I wasn't sure how this would work but it was actually a fantastic couple of hours, mainly because Mr Smith was a pretty funny guy with plenty of cool stories to tell.

Shot partly in Hungary, Severance follows a group of British office workers on a team building trip into the wilderness that goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Any recent British horror comedy is inevitably compared to the fantastic Shaun Of The Dead but such a comparison is not really valid in this case.

Shaun Of The Dead billed itself as a Zom Rom Comedy, ie. a romantic comedy that happened to have zombies in it.

Severance is quite definitely both a comedy and a horror film and Chris Smith explained that one of the most difficult parts of making the film was striking the balance between the two.

For my money he managed perfectly and created a brilliant film which I would highly recommend.

The commentary gave the film a whole new dimension for and was a lot of fun.

If you see it, and you should, take note that most of the stunts are done by Hungarian stuntmen who really don't give a monkeys.

The coach crash for example was undertaken at double the speed asked for and the guy knocked himself out cold doing it.

All the guns you see in the film are real and Chris Smith had to put his foot down to stop them using live ammo for the filming!

A brilliant film and a brilliant screening.

surprise screening (?, ?) 4*

I must admit that I was hoping for something old and rare as the surprise screening but over recent years the Fanomenon section of the festival has moved away from celebrating classics and towards supporting the contemporary scene.

I can't complain about this and I can't really complain about the choice for this mysterious film.

I had "ils" (THEM in French apparently,) down as a three star film right up until the end when it managed to chill me so effectively that it crawled over the line.

We start in some Romanian woods where a mother and her teenage daughter swerve off the road to avoid a mysterious figure. They are swiftly toyed with and executed by an unseen group of assailants.

Cut to our heroine, a French teacher who lives out in the woods with her writer husband.

Pretty much the whole film from here on in is these two being stalked and terrorised.

First off in their big old house, which unfortunately seems to fall foul of a classic horror mistake, namely making the place seem infinitely large, I mean she runs a hell of a long way without going outside, know what I mean?

Anyway, they escape the house and a hunted through the woods before eventually finding some underground chambers and tunnels to be hunted in instead.

To be fair this single, feature length chase is done well. You can really feel the panic and desperation and the scares are delivered well.

As I say, thus far I was not hugely moved by what was happening but I was impressed with how it was being done.

What chilled me was the finale of the piece wherein the identities of the hidden killers was revealed.

SPOILER! SKIP AHEAD IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.

It's a bunch of kids!

Not feral children nor members of an evil cult, just ordinary, bored, hoody wearing urban youths.

As the sun comes up and we see them running to catch their school bus, having successfully slaughtered the long suffering couple, a caption tells us that the film is based on a true story.

A French couple living in Romania were hunted and killed by a group of youths aged 10-15.

This worked very well at bringing the horror off the screen and into the real world, which is after all the secret of truly great horror.

And so that was it, the horror weekend, twelve features and god knows how many shorts. I took Monday off to recover but still managed to catch a couple of films in the evening.

The week saw a break from horror and a change to political docs and more independent film.

They say a change is as good as a rest and they're wrong. Still by the time the second weekend of the festival came around I was up for some more scares and so attended the annual ritual that is the Horror Allnighter.

All these will be reviewed in due course, watch this space.

After a bit of kip I returned to the Carriageworks Theatre for the next instalment of the Horror Weekend. Equipped with a pillow and a bottle of water I settled in for four more films.

Isolation (UK / Ireland, 2005) 5*

The fact that this was director Billy O'Brien's first film made it all the more impressive and while it wasn't my personal favourite film of the weekend it seemed fitting that it won the Silver Melee competition.

Each year a handful of genre shorts and features from the Fanomenon section of the fest vie for the Silver Melee Award. The winners then go into the international Golden Melee comp.

Anyway if this year‘s fest tells us anything about film making it seems to be that less is more. Here we find a cast totalling six on a small and very muddy Irish farm.

Somehow however, by the opening credits alone set an incredibly dark tone, establishing a tension that O’Brien amazingly manages to maintain throughout the film.

We discover that some high powered scientist has paid the struggling farmer, (who bares a striking resemblance to Greg Mulholland, MP for North West Leeds weirdly enough,) to experiemtn on his livestock.

It’s not long before we realise that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The whole thing gave a subtle nod to ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, I felt, with the isolation of the rural setting and the uncomfortable focus on animal slaughter.

When one of the freak calves is finally born and the vet botches the merciful execution, the inhuman squealing made me squirm way more than any glitzy Hollywood gore fest.

The fact that we never fully see the monster that ends up on the loose, and the claustrophobic interiors used resurrected the classis ‘Alien’ vibe for me too.

These echoes of horror classics, (and yes Alien was horror set in space, not sci fi,) did not detract in the slightest however from what was a great, original modern horror film.

A feeling I took from it, which gave it a more contemporary and original feel, was one of a world in decay and despair.

Everything’s old and dirty. The farm is clearly knackered and the money from the scientist is a last ditch attempt to keep the family farm going.

Also, the couple who turn up in a filthy caravan are on the run from their respective families, driven out into the cold.

This feeling of a world falling apart, of people being driven into dark and unnatural places, was uncomfortably familiar and gave an extra dimension of power to the film by linking it so subtly to the real world outside the cinema.

A brilliant piece of work.

Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (USA, 2005) 5*

I loved the concept of this film. In fact I loved it so much that I ended up giving the film 5* despite the fact that the concept was delivered via the medium of lame American cheese.

We follow a documentary team, two camera men and a female presenter as they meet Leslie Vernon, self proclaimed serial killer to be.

In this world Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kreuger and Michael Myers were all real killers and Leslie Vernon shows us, step by step, how he intends to follow in their footsteps.

Initially hilarious, we see the charming Vernon explaining his back story and working out. As he explains he will have to do, “that thing where they‘re running away and you just look like you‘re walking but you keep up with them.”

This painstaking dissection of every element of the slasher horror film makes ‘Scream’ look like the piece of ignorant crap it is.

The tone starts to darken slightly when the crew follow Vernon as he starts to stalk his “survivor girl”. The crew, who are by this point becoming close friends with the killer-to-be, are increasingly caught up in the thrill of the ‘work’ and even start helping out.

I was instantly reminded of a BBCN24 bit I saw recently where they filmed a new recruit to the Royal Marines having one last meal with his family before he sets off to the middle east.

BBCN24 are going to follow his progress and update us etc to give a unique perspective on the conflict. I couldn’t help thinking at the time how good it would be for the BBC if this guy died.

Now that would be some compelling television right there and don’t tell me no-one at the Beeb has thought the same.

Anyway things continue to darken as the night of mass slaughter approaches and the crew’s resolve starts to waver.

SPOILER! SKIP AHEAD IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.

As the night begins to unfold exactly according to every tiny detail we’ve spent the last hour or so becoming familiar with, the female reporter decides that Vernon must be stopped.

Once the crew start to interfere however they find that the plan is shifting under their feet, things are not happening as expected.

We finally realise that the crew, and the audience, have all been duped. The whole documentary has in fact been part of Vernon’s plan and his “survivor girl” is none other than the reporter herself.

The crew are finally sucked into the horror, becoming victims rather than observers and playing out exactly the scenes that they had set out to parody.

A beautiful little touch comes during the credits, after everyone’s been killed except for the reporter who crushed Vernon’s head in a vice and set him on fire.

he credits roll over a CCTV scene of an autopsy room where some doctor is preparing to examine Vernon’s charred corpse and, of course, while his back is turned the corpse, very slowly, sits up!

I am all about blurring the lines man, I love this stuff!

Gruesome (USA, 2006) 5*

Without a doubt my favourite film of the fest so far. Not only truly disturbing but brilliantly written.

We follow Claire, a young American living in a small town, working nights at a convenience store. The whole thing is so flat and dull that the illusion of boring reality is utterly compelling.

Claire herself is absolutely gorgeous but not in a traditional movie starlet way. She still looks life someone who would meet on the street, her and the rest of the cast genuinely feel like a real people.

This flat, everyday background then also serves to bring the horrendous violence into sharp relief.

Basically Claire leaves work one morning to find a stranger waiting for her in her boyfriend’s car. Unsure, she lets him give her a lift home and seems to get in and safe ok until she finds the back door open.

He drags her into the cellar before torturing and murdering her with a particularly vicious looking little knife.

The violence is incredibly disturbing possibly because you don’t really see it. Almost everything is implied and left to your own imagination.

The fact that a friend of mine from work has the same name and bares a striking resemblance to the lead character made this even more uncomfortable for me and somehow I found the brutal punches to the face worse than anything else.

Anyway, the scene now set, Claire awakes to find herself at work, again.

Now no description of this film would be complete without a reference to “Groundhog Day”. This is the basic setup, Claire is apparently doomed to relive her brutal murder over and over.

As the film progresses her grip on reality is gradually loosened by a combination of disorientation and abject terror. Fighting hard however she strives to discover what is happening to her and why.

Another aspect of this film which I loved was the respect shown to the audience. Particularly rare for an American film, things are not shoved in your face, but rather the journey is a gradual one, with information subtly drip fed to build up a picture.

Little things like the fact that the killer was shot dead by police weeks earlier, that she can never get a signal on her mobile and that the priest is nowhere to be found hint upon hint to the truth of the situation.

I was loving this film anyway but the end blew my mind!

SPOILER! SKIP AHEAD IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.

Towards the grand finale we realise that Claire is in actually hell.

Wherever she turns for help she cannot escape horrific murder. With each repetition we are shown a little more, turns out he beats her and cuts the skin off her face before killing her and burying her out in the fields.

Running to her best friend for help she thinks she may be safe only to hear her friend letting the killer in and asking if she can watch while he does his thing.

In the final scene her own mother lures her down to the dreaded basement and actually holds her down while the killer towers over her.

At this point you feel like you’ve got the twist but don’t understand it. OK so she’s dead and doesn’t know it ala “Sixth Sense” but why is she in hell?

As the blade gleams in the gloom she asks this very question for us. I had no clue as to where this was going, just an overwhelming feeling of outrage that this innocent was being so horrendously punished and betrayed over and over.

Why me? she pleads, what have I done? I’m the victim!

But no, she’s not.

Claire is not Claire.

Claire is dead.

As the camera snaps back to the figure kneeling under the knife we see for the first time that we have not been following Claire through her last day, but in fact it is the killer who is forced to walk in Claire’s shoes for all eternity.

The shock of this last minute revelation drew something out of me: relief.

The instant I realised what had happened all I could think was, “oh thank fuck, it’s him not her, that‘s ok then.”

The very next instant, as the film closed, I was sat there thinking, “whoah, hang on, IS that ok?”

That degree of suffering, so relentless and utterly awful, just shouldn’t happen to anyone. Retribution has no value and violence is always wrong.

I know these things to be true and yet this film showed me a part of myself that was ready willing and able to accept those horrific acts as being not only acceptable but even deserved!

An absolutely brilliant film on every conceivable level.

Meatball Machine (Japan 2005) 3*

There are certain phrases that I like so much I try to save them for those special occasions when they are truly apt so as not to wear them out.

Walking out of the cinema at around 7am after watching “Meatball Machine” I found myself able to use one such phrase, taken from the brilliant “Modern Toss” magazine and later TV show.

“What the jeeping fuck?”

My notes for this film read as follows:

?!!

To be fair I did start to nod a little during this one but I’m not sure I would have really got what was happening had I been fully awake.

So basically there are these little alien things that use machines called necroborgs to take over human bodies and turn them into fighting machines. The aliens then pilot the subsequent bizarre result, half man, half vacuum cleaner, with huge blades and drills for good measure, in fights to the death.

OTT gore and quite insane fight scenes, I felt this film wash over me but couldn’t get a handle on it.

Over the past few years I’ve looked abroad, and particularly to the far east, for art that was fresh and different. I’ve come across some really great and valuable cinema, animation and literature but this was Japanese mentalism to the extreme.

At this point I walked back up the hill from the city to my home. I sat on the loo and smoked a joint in a bit of a daze before grabbing another few hours in bed. The final mile lay ahead with just five more films to go.

So before we get started I just wanted to say hoo-fucking-ray, Rumsfeld has gone!

C4 News ran a montage of clips of him with past presidents that included an audio clip of Nixon calling him a cold hearted bastard or something similar.

How low do you have to go before even Richard Millhouse Nixon thinks you're a shit?!

Anyway, the Leeds International Film festival Fanomenon Horror Weekend kicked off in earnest on Saturday night and I started my first stint in the main auditorium of the Carriageworks Theatre, the home of this year's festival.

Hole (Spain, 2005) 4*

If beauty is simplicity then Hole is very beautiful film, except that it's really, really ugly.

A straight, unflinching idea, what happens to a guy kept in a hole indefinitely?

The main character, (one of three,) wakes to find himself at the bottom of circular stone pit. Two captors provide for his most basic needs, bread, water, an occasional cigarette and of course emptying his bucket.

Now as it happens this screening of Hole was a very special one, as it turns out the print the festival had didn't actually have any subtitles.

These kind of things just tend to add a pleasant, quirky feel to the festival I find and in this instance the lack of subtitles worked out quite well.

For a start there was very little dialogue in the film. Most of the time is spent watching this guy pass through various stages of emotion.

Some remarkable acting and an incredible attention to detail makes it impossible not to be drawn into this both horrendous and intimate journey.

The background to all of the states traversed is a cold air of senselessness. The guy doesn't know why he's there, he doesn't know if he'll be released, killed or left to rot.

Over the course of the film the resolve of his captors seems to waver slightly as they commit rare acts of mercy and kindness. It seems that even they do not why the guy's in the hole, just that he has to be there.

The not knowing insulated him, and the audience, leaving only his own form to fill the world. The lack of subtitles only amplified this feeling of isolation, the vulnerability of being the only one who doesn't understand the game.

An excellent though disturbing study of mental and physical decline.

Resonnances (France, 2006) 2*

At last years film festival I watched a French film called Hidden and I found myself whispering the same little mantra during Resonnances as I had during that.

La Haine, Delicatessen, La Haine, Delicatessen...

Basically reminding myself that I don't hate all French cinema.

This is one of only two films to receive 2* so far and it's worth noting that there have been no 1*s at all and not even that many 3*. 4 & 5 *s are the norm.

Looking back at my notes I see that I thought the end of the film was "the only thing not tired and cheesey," but I may just have been glad it was over. I also wrote that nothing in this film was as good as it could have been.

The plot is spread so wide that it is left hideously flat and shallow. Imagine Tremors, (Kevin bacon in a cowboy hat and sound sensitive monsters under the desert,) only in a haunted French forest.

No throw in sinister meteors from outer space and an escaped psychopath and you being to see what i mean.

Group of happy go lucky youngsters stranded in the woods, trying to survive ghosts, monsters and mentalists sounds like a great premise but this really didn't make the best of it.

To be fair I did laugh in several places but the abject lack of any development in plot or character left me ultimately cold.

Fanomenon Shorts 5*

Yet again the short films prove to be where it's at, with some of the very best stuff in the whole festival featuring in this collection.

Lucky (Australia, 2005)
[CONTAINS SPOILER!]

Great concept, excellently delivered.

Guy wakes to find himself bound in the boot of a moving car. Managing to free himself he discovers the car to be tearing, driverless, down a long desert road and attempts to take control of the vehicle.

After a fantastic action sequence of near misses he finally manages, with incredible luck, to himself get into the drivers seat and slow the car to a halt.

Of course as soon as he removes the keys from the ignition the car explodes. Not so lucky after all.

Alicia's Eyes (Spain, 2005)
[CONTAINS SPOILER!]

Another fantastic piece following a single individual's struggle.

A woman wakes hooded and bound in a room. A prerecorded videotape tells her she has agreed to take part in an experiment concerning voluntary amnesia.

She's also told that she hasn't had anything to drink for many hours and is directed her to a glass of apple juice.

Having drunk she is informed firstly that she has hated apples all her life and secondly that the juice was poisoned and she now has four minutes to live.

As the time ticks away and she desperately jumps through the various hoops to freedom we learn that she came to the experiment suicidal after the death of her infant daughter Alicia at the hands of her own husband.

I twigged the twist ahead of time but it was no less satisfying to see that when the hood finally came off the prisoner was the very same woman on the TV screen.

Through the trials she rediscovers her will to live. Great concept, very well done.

Stalk (UK, 2006)
[CONTAINS SPOILER!]

What the fuck?

Very weird animation about a lonely rabbit being stalked by a guy made from carrots and lettuce.

The veg guys courts the rabbit until there seems to be some bond between them. Sparkling eyes suggest love or maybe just delusion, ether way some kind of magic is woven until the final face to face meeting...

...wherein the rabbit just bites the veg guy's head off and eats him!

When Nobody is Looking (Spain, 2004)
[CONTAINS SPOILER!]

A teenage girl out in trendy clubs doing some weird drug that is taken via eyedrops, we never see her dealer's eyes.

The more she uses the drug the more invisible she becomes and the worse her relationship with her mother becomes.

The pretty clear metaphor regarding drug addiction at work here ends with chilling calm as the girl collapses and the mother agrees to let her undergo surgery, seemingly to have her eyes removed, thereby saving her from herself!

A Feast of Friends (UK, 2005)
[CONTAINS SPOILER!]

Imagine American Psycho but with four guys all in it together.

Paints a fairly predictable picture of four despicable yuppies unwinding at an exclusive fitness club wherein they get to rip apart an actual human being.

For all the simplicity and unoriginality of the message, ie. the brutality of humans to one another, especially in the business world, the violence when they actually get down to it is disturbing and so the piece works well.

Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul (UK, 2006)

Things go missing when Ujbaz Izbeneki is around.

This absolutely hilarious animation, great fun to just look at let alone anything else, see Ujbaz arrive in hell having lost his soul.

Before the devil can condemn him to eternal suffering however he'll have to find his book of the dead which has suddenly gone missing as well.

Cute and funny as fuck, there's also a vibe to this about the insurmountable power of apathy. Even the greatest forces in the universe can't overcome the vacant shrug of the mysterious Ujbaz.

Impotence (USA, 2006)

Didn't really get this one. Guy and girl in a car in the fog. He can't get it up and then they're out of gas.

Nicely filmed, with one of the earliest shots being a perfect recreation of a scene from Evil Dead II, I was left feeling that somehow I'd missed the point.

Monster (Australia, 2005)

The kid says there a monster in the closet, but this time there actually is! What's his stressed out mum supposed to do now?

Filmed in black and white with a genuinely scary monster on the prowl and then in your face this was great fun.

Daylight Hole (UK, 2006)

My kind of story here. This film follows a sound recordist collecting ambient sound effects for a totally different short film. The name of the character was, I noticed, the name of the actual sound recordist on this film.

Blur those boundaries man, blur them! I love it.

He can hear far more through the big fuzzy boom than with the naked ear and the weird sounds he comes across in a big old cave draw him in one step at a time until it's far too late.

Slightly disappointed that they seemed to have ripped off Ju On for their nasty, but overall yet another great little concept delivered to the same high standard.

The Grab (UK, 2006)

Not a great deal to say about this one, it's like thirty seconds long.

A guy goes for a lie down, bedside table full of pill bottles, clearly having freak out related problems.

He gets grabbed, very quick, very nasty, gets the job done.

Nest up was Broken but as this is also going to be part of the Horror Allnighter, Saturday 11/11/06, i skipped it and took advantage the subsequent four hour gap to nip home for a kip. There were, after all, another nine films to go!

Well, we're into it now. I've seen fourteen films over the last three days and there's still another week of the festival left. I'm going to do my best to review everything I see and get it on here but there may be a bit of a delay as I realise now that the timetable I've set myself doesn't allow time for eating, let alone writing.

I think the best way to go about this is to do a separate post for each day. It's worth nothing that over the first weekend of the fest is dominated by the Horror Weekend, basically fourteen horror films pretty much back to back. This means that the first few posts will be longer than the rest.

For each film you see you get a response card which you are asked to use to give the film a star rating out of five. I've included my ratings of these films with the reviews. have to admit that I can't remember ever giving anything a 1*, and 2* are pretty rare too so high is the calibre of the films selected for this festival.

Anyway, the fest started on Thursday 02/11/06 but the first film I caught was on Friday:

Little Birds (Japan, 2004) 4*

Subtitled, "How Many Children Have You Killed In Iraq?" this powerful Japanese doc manages to give a fresh angle on a conflict that long ago reached media saturation.

Starting in the days leading up the start of the war we see Iraq as a relatively normal country, with people going about their lives.

Of course we know there're shitty things going on, it's a dictatorship with people disappearing and being tortured etc, but these things are happening within a functioning infrastructure.

An interesting detail is that several of the ordinary people the crew interview on the not-for-long peaceful streets of Baghdad express their disappoint in Japan for joining the 'coalition of the willing'.

Many of these Iraqis actually see Japan as a vague kind of ally through their shared status of victims of US military aggression.

This being the case they can't understand how or why Japan would join forces with the people who dropped atomic bombs on them.

The war starts and we see the 'Shock & Awe' bombing raids, (which I believe you'll find in the dictionary as the very definition of the word terrorism,) from a distance, before seeing the aftermath up close.

Blood on concrete and tattered remains of shoes, this is not for the squeamish. The shops we saw thriving and then being carefully locked up just minutes earlier are now smoking shells.

Move to the hospitals where doctors drag the camera crew through crowds to see the carnage up close. Why? They want the world to see what is happening.

With a sickening feeling of dread I realised something here. These doctors, and many others, are labouring under a perfectly justified but tragically flawed assumption.

They assume that these horrific, inhuman acts can only occur because the aggressors, (us, the West) don't understand the consequences. How can anyone KNOWINGLY carry out such acts? they seem to think.

What turns my stomach and chills my spine is that we know exactly what we're doing, we just don't care. How then can anything change?

In the hospitals we meet see people hysterical with grief, pawing desperately at tiny stiffening bodies. The emotional pain on display here is simply overwhelming.

In a way however, we are used to this. Just as when we see the angry mobs and protests in the streets, it's all very familiar because this is the exciting TV footage we've been getting on the news for over three years.

This is the consumable energy, the eye catching, voyeur sating action we're spoon fed on a daily basis. Ooh, those crazy Arabs eh?

What we get here that we don't on the news, and what gives this film it's aforementioned fresh angle, are the quiet, 'boring', shots.

The people in the hospitals and on the streets who are now screaming and howling, but simply staring, utterly hopeless and vacant.

The guy in the hospital bed, smacked off his tits on morphine, begging to be killed because he has lost a leg. The guy who, later on has managed to rebuild his home but doesn't want to live there any more because it's where three of his four tiny children were killed.

We've been overloaded with the physical tragedy, the material cost of our actions, but Little Birds sticks our faces right into the heart of the hitherto ignored emotional and psychological damage we're inflicting on these people.

In the hospitals we meet people we'll then follow, in particular the guy who lost three of his kids. When we meet him he's stood with his five year old daughter, trying to get her to keep the oxygen mask on.

She's not struggling hard, her movements have a weird slowness, a kind of drowsy clumsiness about them. He tells us this is because, under the mass of bandages, her brain is hanging out of the back of her head.

He tells us how he tried to push it back in and you can see this guy can't actually believe what's happening in front of him.

I'm getting choked up just writing about it.

After the initial chaos and impact, the film slows and begins to drag, There is no direction anymore, just tragedy upon tragedy, hideousness upon hideousness, no progress, no development.

This is not a criticism.

In fact what would be dreadful film making in most other circumstances serves perfectly here to communicate the nature of this conflict. A descent into meaningless, and seemingly endless suffering.

We see the guy and his wife with their single remaining daughter, his desperation that she never forget her siblings and her complete lack of comprehension of the wider situation.

At one point, and my eyes are actually wet now, he takes us to the area where, on the day his kids died, US tanks blocked the street and stopped the ambulance getting to the hospital.

He recalls how he carried both his tiny daughters, or what was left of them, in his arms and managed to get them to the ambulance which was already carrying a man who had lost his leg.

I don't know how but, for the most part, this guy manages to be calm and articulate, he wants people to know, to see. Standing on that street though we watch as he slowly loses it, torturing himself with if-onlys, if only he'd got them to a doctor, to a hospital sooner, maybe he could have saved them.

For most of the films I've seen so far I've made about a page of notes. I have in front of me over five sides of notes about this film and I could write much more, though not without weeping I suspect.

In the interests of making this readable however, I'll just mention a couple more points.

Kids with cancer.

Somehow it had never occurred to me that there would be people in Iraq who were already fucked, people who relied on the infrastructure for their very lives.

The outright demolition of Iraq left these people in the hands of desperately stretched charities and a handful of dedicated Iraqi medical professionals.

Imagine what would happen if all the sick and elderly people in our country suddenly had all their support torn away. How would they survive.

It's also worth mentioning that in his book, "The New Rulers of the World," John Pilger claims that the cancer rate in Iraq is approaching 50%! This is a result of the depleted uranium munitions we used in the southern deserts in towards the end of the nineties.

Unlike in Kuwait, we didn't spend huge sums of money to clean up the mess and so the sandstorms just moved the radioactive material about the country, mutating crops and fishing stock and giving kids cancer.

The sanctions stopped cancer drugs reaching Iraq and now we've wrecked the roads and hospitals. It would genuinely have been more humane to just walk in and shoot these little bald kids in the face.

Do you know what a cluster bomb, or bomblet looks like? Well I do now. They're scattered everywhere, in people's gardens, farms, in open areas outside towns where kids play.

As one young lad tells us, "I thought it was just a piece of metal, I didn't know what it was," and then it blew his arm off.

This film does NOT give you an understanding of how the Iraq people feel.

What this film does is make you realise that we simply cannot even begin to conceive of how the Iraqi people feel. We in the comfortable west, looking down from our moral high ground, have not the slightest conception of this scale of tragedy.

The guy who lost his kids talked about the war with Iran, then with Kuwait and now with the US as being all exactly the same to him. Just meaningless suffering, nothing is achieved he just loses more members of his family.

As the fest rep who introduced the film said, Little Birds is not an easy watch. If you want some idea of the reality of our own foreign policy however, this will it make clear in ways you will not be able to forget.

Dark Remains (USA, 2005) 3*

The horror weekend kicked off with Dark Remains, a shameless collage of a million other horror films with just enough of a vibe to give it its own identity.

After making a few notes on this film I realised I could some it up in just six words: very well made, very badly written.

A couple's young daughter is brutally murdered and they move to a remote cabin in the middle of a forest on a mountain to escape accusing eyes. As you might expect there's something evil in them there woods.

Now there's nothing wrong, in my eyes, with being unoriginal, as long as you do it well. After the first twenty minutes however, all character development ceases and the film plateaus.

In fact the plot was so flat and vague that I didn't care enough to be annoyed by the naff attempt at a dramatic conclusion and chilling end.

To be fair however, as classic and standard as the jumps and nasties are, they are of a high quality.

I was, occasionally, genuinely shocked by the in your face flashes of horror and the figures flitting past doorways in the background, faces reflected in the corner of the TV screen etc did build a nice sense of tense dread.

A horror film from the classic Hollywood mould, competently made but nothing special.

Luckily there was a whole lot more to come from the horror weekend and you wouldn't want to peak too early now would you?