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!
