Day 2 – Friday, August 22, Odeon West End, Leicester Square
A SciFi brainteaser with a noirish morality at its heart, Nacho Vigalondo’s Time Crimes is a twisted, at times darkly comic tale of flawless construction.
It sees its errant protagonist sent back several hours in time, and desperately trying to disentangle himself from the paradoxes that he has left in his (future) wake so that he can return to the straight and narrow. Best film of the day.
The print of Ole Bornedal’s The Substitute failed to appear, and so had itself to be substituted by Gonzalo López Gallego’s taut thriller King of the Hill.
An urban man gets lost in the Spanish countryside, and finds himself targeted in a deadly game of cat and mouse – but while this film may seem superficially to resemble Eden Lake, it is more concerned with human disconnection in the modern age, and allows a compelling moral message to emerge from its amoral woodland playgrounds. Solidly crafted, and well performed too.
Drawn from the Imperium Comics series of the same name, Steven Goldman’s Trailer Park of Terror is an affectionate trawl through the low-rent end of southern gothic.
On a lonely by-road somewhere between 2000 Maniacs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a bus-load of delinquent teens stumble into a ghost town of redneck undead and zombie trash – and you can guess what happens next.
Even if the climax feels too routine to live up to the delirious set-up, the high production values remain a constant surprise, and there is no doubting that this grisly gorefest is a genuine crowd-pleaser.
Steven Sheil’s utterly assured debut Mum & Dad also riffs off The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but its setting in a house right under the flightpath of Heathrow Airport brings some peculiarly English shadings to the butcher’s table.
Here the domestic horror of Fred and Rosemary West plays itself out as Mike Leigh-style awkward social tragicomedy, offering a view of murderously insane family dysfunction from the inside. With uniformly strong performances and excellent sound design, it is a disturbing slice of British life. Brilliant.
There is supposedly an American remake of David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s home invasion thriller Ils (2006) in the works, but Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers is the first, as it were, to get there second.
It is so well made, so moody and tense, that its emptiness can almost be overlooked – but if you want something a little more than a po-faced thrill ride, best look elsewhere, as here it is a case of much quality ado about absolutely nothing.
With a similar eclecticism to his debut Shrooms, Paddy Breathnach’s Freakdog combines the sociopathic med students of Flatliners, the killer-in-a-coma of Patrick, the murderer who uses host bodies from The Hidden, the shadowy ghost visible only on security cameras from Ju-On: The Grudge, and the disturbed young man whose traumatic childhood is revealed gradually in flashback, seen in literally hundreds of gialli and slashers before. The results are inevitably derivative (and the faux-American accents from the mostly Irish cast grate), but it makes for a heady enough cocktail.
Marking the long-awaited return of cult director Frank Henenlotter, Bad Biology is, like his classics Basket Case and Brain Damage, a loving homage to all things exploitation.
Made entirely independently, this badass polysexual freakshow is unlikely to be showing in a multiplex near you, but is the perfect midnight feature, where its conspicuous low budget and poor production values will go largely unnoticed.
Bad Biology is a warped romantic comedy that builds to a union between seven-clitted mutant Jennifer and Batz, a man whose steroid-injected penis has taken on a life of its own.
Even if Batz’s underwritten delineation wilts somewhat before Jennifer’s stronger characterisation, it is the shocking ideas and grotesque visuals that count here.
You know it will go out with a hell of a bang, but wait till you see what emerges.
