Are We in Hollywood Yet?

A few weeks ago, my mate Loz - the same one I recently blogged about going to Frightfest with - suggested we throw together a script for the Two Days Later short film competition, which he'd then go off and direct.

This isn't the first time Loz has entered a film competition.  Take this, for example, a mock-up trailer for a horror film I really goddamn want to see.   Nor would it be the first time we'd scripted together - but that's another story, that I hope I'll get to ramble on about at great length some day.

Apparently I was totally dismissive when Loz pitched his idea to me.  This was in Leicester Square, outside the Odeon there, after one of the Frightfest screenings.  I only vaguely remember the conversation.  Possibly it was after the Wicker Tree screening and I was hating on all things celluloid.

Whatever I said, Loz had enough sense not to listen.  The weekend after, he asked me to go over a rough draft he'd put together.  It was very neat, a simple setup leading into a creepy horror sequence that wasn't quite like anything I'd ever seen before.  But, like every first draft in history, it wasn't all there.  And the bits that ran away with my attention weren't always the bits Loz was focusing on.  Of the two characters, a young single mother and the deeply odd stranger she'd invited back after a night on the town, it was the single mum who drew me.  In my head, she quickly became a woman trying to balance boundless love for her child with the notion that maybe, just maybe, she shouldn't have to give up her whole life to motherhood.

I happened to be hanging out at Loz's house that weekend, and I spent a couple of hours hammering out a second draft.  Mostly I just tweaked, trying to prod it towards that idea - that you can love someone and still resent the hell out of them for the hold they have on your life.  That maybe, just sometimes, you wish they'd go away and let you have a little fun.  The result wasn't exactly Mamet or Sorkin, but it was a nice vignette, with one two-line exchange at its centre that seemed to sum up everything perfectly.  Here it is, completely out of context: 

SOPHIE
(Hopeful, yet suspicious)
Yeah? Ever think about being a dad?

STAN
Ever think about not being a mum?

I think the first line was Loz's and the second line was mine.  Our contributions pretty much balanced out that way.  After my pass, we went for a walk - in the rain, as it turned out - and wrestled with what we figured to be the remaining glitches.  Despite the rain, it was a lot of fun.  If I remember rightly, we finally figured out the end while sheltering under a tree, trying to balance the risk of getting wet with the risk of getting fried to a crisp by lightning.

A week or two later, Loz (who I should probably have mentioned, is a professional video editor by day) went off and hooked up with a couple of other mates who also happened to be professionals in the film and TV industry and roped in a couple of professional actors and all together they filmed our script.  Then Loz and his co-editor / director Slade spent twenty three solid hours editing their raw footage within an inch of its life.

The result is Match.  And - not so surprisingly, I guess - it looks pretty damn professional.  Mid last week, I found out it had been shortlisted for the competition.  Having seen what Loz, Slade and crew managed to throw together out of our script, I wasn't a bit surprised.  So in a couple of weeks, I get to go to Kent and watch the first short film I've had a hand in writing on a cinema screen.

Which, when you're a complete film nerd, is just absurdly cool.

Film Ramble: Frightfest 2011 (Part 2)

Below's the second part of my Frightfest 2011 write-up; if you happened to miss part 1, you can find it here.

Sunday's Frightfest session began bright and early - perhaps a bit too early! - with The Divide.   I was looking forward to this one, mostly because I'm a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic and you don't get much more post-apocalyptic than a film about a group of survivors holing up in the basement of their building when nukes start raining from the sky.  

Sadly, for me anyway, the sci-fi element in The Divide is minimal, little more than a stunning opening shot and a brief interlude towards the midway point.  Director Xavier Gens opts instead to concentrate on how his disparate band interact in increasingly desperate, appalling circumstances. As such, there's little here that feels particularly new, but it's definitely effective, more so than many a similar film.  You know things are going to get bad for these people, and sooner rather than later, but finding out who snaps and how and why - and just how far they'll go when they do - is compelling nevertheless.  Gens directs his cast and claustrophobic location well, and said cast are uniformly great, keeping their characters human even while comitting acts at the far end of the scale from what we like to think of as humanity.  A little more invention on the sci-fi side might have made it a minor classic; as it is, if you need your faith in mankind crushing in a gutwrenching manner, you could do plenty worse than The Divide.

Next came Ti West's follow up to The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers.  Me and fellow Frightfestee Loz disagreed massively on House of the Devil; Loz loved it, I admired its style but found its substance mostly lacking.  But given how promising HotD was, I had sure hopes for better this time around.  And at first, it looked like I might even get it.  Though a little slow-paced, the opening half of The Innkeepers sets up two likeable characters amidst an interesting premise, as hotel clerks Claire and Luke (Sara Paxton and Pat Healy, both great) joke around and bicker whilst half-heartedly investigating the soon-to-be-closed-down establishment's history of ghostly goings on.  Sadly, the more it developed, the more obvious it got that the ghost story element - the part I really wanted to be impressed by - wasn't half so well thought out as the character drama.  And for me, the final few minutes sold both short.  That said, Loz loved this one too, and I won't be surprised if many other people do too.  In particular, Paxton was a revelation, and it would be nice if this performance helps draw her out of the mire of Z-grade awfulness she seems to have found herself in.


Our third film was the one I'd been least sure of at the bookings stage.  A microbudget tale of urban vampirism, Midnight Son definitely had the potential to go either way. As such, it turned out to be one of the festival's nicer surprises that it was mostly a success.  Grungy and melancholy, Midnight Son picks at the mythology of vampirism like an old scab, and succesfully finds a little fresh blood waiting underneath.


Okay, it isn't half as original as it perhaps thinks it is, with explanations of and parrallels with vampirism that have all been seen before elsewhere.  But it's committed and convincing, and it's been long enough since other low-fi real world takes on vampirism, like Romero's Martin or Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, that it feels a lot fresher than it is.  In fact, perhaps its biggest triumph is in daring to behave as though it's just invented the vampire movie, and the meticulous, unapolagetic way in which it reveals the concept afresh is its greatest trick.  By the end, I was too caught up to care that I'd already seen a million other vampire flicks.  I can see Midnight Son finding an audience, if maybe not a cinema release, and  it's easy to imagine writer / director Scott Leberecht going on to bigger and better things.

Lastly came the film that everyone seemed to have been talking about throughout the weekend - or at least wearing the shoulderbag of.  Me and Loz were both expecting good things from Kill List, which seemed to be building an astonishing degree of word of mouth support on the barest handful of preview showings.

What I didn't expect was that it would be amongst the very best British horror films I've ever seen.  Ben Wheatley has crafted an impeccable mix of character drama, hitman movie and absolutely nightmarish horror, and come up with something so truly original and unnerving that it still has its hooks deep in my brain almost fourty eight hours later.  It starts out somewhere between Mike Leigh and David Lynch.  Then its gets weirder and darker (and funnier and sadder), through some narrative contortions that I'm still trying to get my head round and some scenes that will stay with me for a long, long time, to arrive at a last act that still feels more like a bad dream than something I actually sat in a room experiencing with other people.  Please don't let anyone spoil the plot for you; just take my word for this one.  Kill List is rare and brilliant work, and I'll be profoundly impressed if I see a better film this year.

One last thought, then - a conclusion of sorts.  Ye gads, that was a good two days of film!  My affection for horror cinema has been sapped in recent years, but this one weekend has restored my faith and then some.  Granted, most of the films I watched brought strong elements of other genres to the mix, but then, perhaps that's the message to take away; be it Norwegian fantasies about troll hunting, supernatural time-travel thrillers, or nightmare takes on the hitman genre, horror has wide borders.  Hollywood may spend its time recycling and sequeling genre classics into so much fertiliser, but elsewhere, brilliant chimeras are being born.  If Frightfest is anything at all to go by, horror cinema is in a very good place right now.

Film Ramble: Frightfest 2011 (Part 1)

I've gone a few days without a post here, but for once I've a very good reason: I spent every possible spare moment of the weekend watching horror movies in a cinema with my mate Loz, at this year's London-based Frightfest festival.

We caught a little of last year's Frightfest, but a lack of planning on our part, coupled with bad luck and bad timing, meant we only managed to make three movies, and those ranged from the merely okay down to the preposterously terrible.  This year, we were determined to do better.  There was heroic talk of doing the full five days, but that was soon dismissed as craziness, and our final compromise was to catch as many of the weekend showings as we could without risking exhaustion or knowingly putting ourselves through anything that was too unlikely to reward our efforts.

The end result was seven movies over two days, three on Saturday and four on Sunday.  And this time, there was no question of bad planning, let alone luck or timing.  We had our tickets booked well in advance (and even won a few for good measure), and everything we saw, with one sorry exception, was above average.  Not only that, we were lucky enough to catch a couple of stone-cold classics days before they get a general release.  In fact, almost everything we saw was a premier of one sort or another - which, by the way, is my excuse from yet another diversion from my self-imposed mandate for this blog.  Hopefully I can tip you off to some impressive movies you might otherwise miss, while steering you away from that one depressingly awful car crash of a picture.

Saturday began on a high note that looked set for a while to dwarf everything I saw for the remainder of the two days, in every possible sense.  Believe the hype, believe the splendid poster, for Troll Hunter is wonderful.  A horror-comedy fit to be mentioned alongside classics like An American Werewolf in London, it combines a dry but fundamentally silly sense of humour with much exciting (and sometimes awe-inspiring) action, all in service of a concept so basically demented that even the smallest slip in tone would have sent it spinning.  The greatest success of Troll Hunter is that it never slips, or never more than slightly.  It treats its central premise - that trolls are real and living hidden alongside us, kept secret by the government and a handful of individuals like the titular hunter - with just the right mix of playfulness and gravity, whilst constantly undercutting one with the other at just the right moments.  No one we spoke to had a bad word to say about it, I came out wanting to watch it again immediately, and all in all I'll be amazed if it isn't the huge international hit it deserves to be.


My fears that Troll Hunter was going to be the indomitable highlight of our mini-festival were only heightened by our next film: Robin Hardy's long awaited follow-up to his classic horror oddity The Wicker Man.  We knew the odds of it being remotely as good were slim, but nothing quite prepared us for how lacklustre, misjudged and all-round clumsy it turned out to be.  Half remake, half sequel, almost all bad, it confirmed  the vague impression I've always had that Hardy achieved Wicker Man's improbably successful combination of scares, comedy, eroticism, mythology and folk music more by luck than judgement.  The Wicker Tree is too lacking in tension to be frightening, too sleazy to be sexy, and despite the comedy being far more foregrounded this time, it's never particularly funny.  The folklore feels hotchpotch and unconvincing, much as it did in the (sad to say, barely worse) Neil LaBute remake.  Only the traditional songs really stand out, and those are cut away from far too quickly, as though Hardy no longer trusts his audience to stand for such things.  If only he'd paid so much attention to the average viewer's tolerance for predictable plotting, scant characterisation, bad jokes and seventies-style sexism...


Fortunately, things picked up straight away, as we moved over to the discovery screen for low-budget gem The Caller.  Its concept - a woman moves into a new apartment and starts receiving decidedly odd phone calls from a past tenant who, amongst other suspect traits, considers the Vietnam war current affairs - sounds hokey when you say it like that, but director Parkhill makes the right call in playing it straight and keeping character drama front and centre.  Rachelle LeFevre holds things together more than capably in the lead, playing one of the better-written female protagonists I've seen this year, and gets strong support from the always-great Luis Guzmán and a likeable Stephen Moyer.  More thriller than horror, it nevertheless offers a few effective and imaginative shocks.  Maybe more rewarding in the long term, though, is how it all adds up to a poignant study of how we define and are defined by the past, and of the cyclic, inescapable-seeming nature of abuse.

And that was saturday.  One classic, one well-above-average indy horror thriller, and a semi-sequel that would have done well to stay on the drawing board forever.  

Next post: Sunday.  The Divide, The Innkeepers, Midnight Son and Kill List fight it out in a big (cinematic) pit!