Number 60 - Night of the Mannequins - Stephen Graham Jones

 

Nearly a year to the day since I read my first of his books (The Only Good Indians), I finally got round to reading another of his.  When your TBR pile is as out of control as mine, these things happen.

It certainly has an opening line for the ages. 

"So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, we thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I'm really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all,"

That's now a firm fixture in my favourite opening lines ever.

This book has cemented Jones in my eyes as a major talent, and proved that The Only Good Indians wasn't a fluke.

It's a slim volume, and I read it in just a couple of hours, making it a perfect cheat read.  

Sawyer Grimes is a high school student who, as mentioned in that opening sentence, plays a prank on one of his friends, along with his little gang. they sneak a mannequin into the theatre where she works.

The prank backfires and things turn nasty.  Sawyer finds himself taking desperate measures to save people from Manny the mannequin's reign of terror.

This is all told in Sawyer's chatty, conve4rsational voice. As unpleasant as proceedings become, he remains upbeat and hopeful that he's doing the best he can for everyone. 

Sawyer is one of the most delightfully unhinged unreliable narrators I've experienced in several years. Teenaged angst rarely comes with this shade of psychosis thrown into the mix.  of course, it rarely comes with the idea of a killer mannequin either... 

This was a much easier read than The Only Good Indians, and the story a lot easier to follow. Definitely a contender for best cheat read of the year. Psychologically all kinds of messed up and one of the best examples of the villain being a good guy in his own story that you'll ever find.

number 59 - Daphne - Josh Malerman

 

A new book by Josh Malerman will always go as close to the top of my TBR pile as possible. This one was no exception. 

In this book, he gives us a very Malerman take on the slasher genre. 

Daphne is a seven-foot-tall denim clad ghost in KISS makeup who kills basketball players in the town of Samhattan. 

If you think that sounds far-fetched, the most famous slashers out there are a school caretaker who was burned to death and invades teenagers; dreams, a super strong guy who wears a captain kirk mask and gets up every time you kill him, and a nine-year-old boy who drowned and somehow came back as a hulking killer in a hockey mask.  Daphne is almost normal by comparison.

Being a Josh Malerman book, there's more going on here than just a bunch of shreddies getting shredded (or in this case crushed). He uses the traditional tropes of the slasher to look into the causes of fear and anxiety.  Daphne is not just an unstoppable ghost; she is a personification of fear itself.

The book manages to be a tense and scary horror story with plenty of teens dying horribly, and a close look at anxiety and its effects. 

As usual with Josh Malerman, I raced through this in a couple of days.  His distinctive style is remarkably easy and fast to read. His characters are all well drawn and relatable. His shreddies are given just the right amount of background before Daphne folds them into shapes they were never supposed to inhabit. 

There's surprisingly no gore in any of the killings but they're still wince inducing as the mental pictures given to us don't need the addition of buckets of literary blood. Daphne is a scary villain, and the story has a few surprises up its sleeve.

Malerman is one of those writers, who, despite an instantly recognisable style, seems to be able to write vastly different novels in different styles of horror equally well. This is no exception. Highly enjoyable, slightly silly in a good way, but thought provoking when it wants to be.  Another excellent read from Mr Malerman.

Number 58 - Shock Value - assorted writers

 

I bought this at Grimmfest from the publisher's stall. I thought it looked like it would be a fun little cheat read.

I was half right.

It was a cheat read and over in slightly under an hour.

Fun barely featured.

This is an anthology of horrors in comic form.  When I glanced through it at the stall, I thought the art looked quite good. That's true for two of the 6 stories involved. The other's the art is almost as good as the stories they're telling.

Sadly, the stories contained in this collection range from piss poor to just OK.  

The story about the vampires contracting a disease is interesting but isn't actually a story, more a jumping off point for something bigger and better.  It was an interesting concept (and better art than some of the others) but it is just an idea rather than a story with beginning, middle and end. This is still the best part of the publication.

The invisible man story was just about passable.

The three-part story with the mermen is just atrocious. The writing is poor and the artwork even worse. I hope I never have to read anything else that bad again.

I know that a 6-page comic strip is not a lot of time to tell a satisfying story, but it can be done. With only the two exceptions above, all the stories in this book fail spectacularly, either let down by script or artwork or both. 

This was a bad choice of cheat read. I can see what it was aiming at - but it missed on nearly all counts. I could have bought a few more drinks with the money I spent on this.  I'm annoyed about that... 

Number 57 - The Vessel - Adam Nevill

 

Isn't she a beauty? Rumour has it that she leans further out of each successive cover of the book and the last person to buy it, she's going to crawl out and... well it won't be pretty.

But don't let that put you off from buying a copy.

By Adam Nevill's standards, this is a very short book indeed, coming in at about 150 pages. There is a reason for that, which is explained in the afterword.

 Jess is a struggling single mother who takes on a job as carer to a decrepit and very senile old woman in a crumbly old vicarage called Nerthus House. Characters forced into bad situations because of cash problems seems to be a theme in Adam's work. Jess has problems other than cash though.  She's a single mother because her ex is an abusive and controlling bully. He's not ready to give up on the family unit, no matter how often she tells him it's over.

When she can't get childcare, Jess is forced to take her young daughter Izzy to Nerthus House while she performs her nightshift. Flo Gardner, her patient, develops an unhealthy bond with young Izzy, and Jess finds herself in a battle for her daughter's affections and her soul.

There isn't much that I would call original in this story. The story follows a well-worn trail and isn't difficult to predict, but Nevill's prose, and some truly weird and disturbing set pieces elevate the material above most other similar stories. His prose actually reminded me very strongly of Ramsey Campbell in this book. There have always been vague shades of Campbell in his writing, but in this book, I'm not sure if it's that the themes are more Campbellian or the writing itself. 

In the afterword Nevill talks about how this started life as a screenplay before being converted to novel form (much like Cunning Folk was) but he's experimented here with making the book entirely plot driven and removed most of the internal views we would normally see in his books (which are usually very character driven rather than plot driven). This is the principle reason for its brevity.

It's an experiment that is largely successful. It was a quick and easy read and created a real atmosphere of dread in its short number of pages.

This blog gets a thank you in the afterword. It's good to see that the work I put into these reviews doesn't go unappreciated. I'm very grateful to the talented writers and I hope that I'm making some contribution to spreading the word.

This book will be formally released at Halloween. My copy is the limited-edition hardback which was sent out early. The mass market editions can be ordered from Adam's website when they become available.  You won't regret it.

 All – Tagged "Novels"– Adam LG Nevill 

Number 56 - Money - Martin Amis

 

Back to books.

Normally, I only read horror novels in October, but this was my book group read, and I did start it in September. I finished it in the early hours of Saturday morning just gone so it took a while to read.

This book really stretches the limits of the boundaries between what's good writing and what's a fun read. If you're one of those readers who insists on having a likeable protagonist, don't even bother with this. 

The book follows John Self, a misogynistic, alcoholic. drug addicted asshole. He's been tasked with directing a film in Hollywood off the back of some controversial adverts he made in Britain. He spends the book flying back and forth between London and New York, spending more and more money, drinking, jerking off, reading porn and mistreating women.

He's quite simply one of the most repulsive narrators of any book I've ever read. 

The brilliance of the book is in the act of literary ventriloquism that puts us so firmly in his headspace. That headspace isn't somewhere that any sane person wants to be, but it's kind of addictive after a while. One of his few saving graces is that he's entirely self-aware of his faults is too weak to do anything about them without some outside agency. His weakness is also something he is keenly aware of.

The subtitle of the book is "A Suicide Note" so we know it's not going to go to a happy place at the end. Initially the situation seems quite unbelievable- why would anyone give this disaster of a man the responsibility, he's been given? And then the pieces start to slip into place as to what is actually happening. From that point on, I fhought it was compulsive reading, waiting for the fall that was looming ever closer.

The gradual reveal of the plot, told in a very close up first person through the eyes of someone who can't actually see it for himself is quite brilliant in my humble opinion.  

It's a difficult read.  I won't deny that.  I was the only member of the book group that finished it. his narrative voice was too much for the rest of the group and I understand completely why they didn't finish. I found it very funny though. The humour is as black as it's possible to get before it turns into something entirely different, so my love of dark fiction probably helped me get through it. 

There are bon mots galore in here if you go looking for them. One of my favorites was where he describes a body builder he sees in the street as "some track suited miracle of push-ups and alfalfa".

Frequently we're given his version of events and left to work out for ourselves how it looked to the rest of the world around him. The disconnect between his view and reality is both jarring and hilarious in equal measures.

Your mileage may vary on whether the inclusion of a writer with a very familiar name as a central character in the story is amusing or pretentious twaddle. 

It's broad satire on a particular subset of society in the 80s and I would like to hope they're consigned to history. But I look at modern day reports that the Bullingdon club still exists and is still up to its old tricks and I realise that these people might well be running the country at the moment... Please excuse the political digression.

It's a difficult book to love but an easy one to admire. I think it repays the effort required to read it in absolute spades. If you like a challenging read, go for it.  I don't blame you if you fail, but please, push through with it.  You might even find yourself feeling sorry for him by the end of the book as Amis manages to somewhat humanise this monster of a narrator.

Grimmfest final day

 

Day 4 – Final Day

I was really flagging badly by this point.  The caffeine drinks were essential to my continued state of uprightness. I may need to consider factoring in the extra cost of taxis home next year.  It’s still well worth it.

A full day of films ahead again, starting with…

The Harbinger – Dir Andy Mitton, Cast – Gabby Beans, Emily Davies, Raymond Anthony Thomas, Cody Braverman

Pandemic paranoia gives way to a much more existential dread when Monique is called by an old friend to help her.  She’s been having bad dreams of a creature that wants to remove her from the world quite literally.

This was another contender for best film of the weekend.  It certainly contains the best jump scare. Films about dreams can often become irritating with characters conveniently waking (or not) from their nightmares at the behest of the plot. There’s nothing worse than a shocking character death that’s instantly rewritten.  This manages to evoke true horror from the world of nightmares and was certainly a real highlight of the weekend.

Feed Me – Dir Adam Leader,Richard Oakes -  Cast – Christopher Mulvin, Neal Ward, Hannah Al Rashid, Samantha Loxley

When a depressed guy agrees to an assisted suicide in possibly the most gruesome and drawn out manner imaginable, the scene (and table) is set for one of the maddest and least predictable films of the weekend.

I really wasn’t sure about this film for the first 15 to 20 minutes, but it grew on me pretty quickly once the plot really kicked into gear. This was funny, nightmarish, gory and gross and totally off the wall. By the end of the film my initial doubts were well and truly allayed and my biggest issue with it is that there is no meat on a finger.  If you fry it, you’re just going to get crispy skin on a bone and not a particularly tasty snack.

Vesper – Dir Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper – Cast – Rafaella Chapman, Eddie Marsan, Rosy McEwan

A change of pace now with a thoughtful and slow paced environmental science fiction film set in a not too distant future where all plant life has been polluted.  The rich live in domed citadels and the poor outside of the domes are forced to trade the blood of their young for seeds to feed themselves.  The seeds are engineered to only grow one crop so the demand can never change.

This was a welcome slow down from the insanity and intensity of the first two films of the day. Beautiful to look at and very well acted, particularly by the young lead.

Do not Disturb – Dir John Ainslie, Cast – Kimberly Lafferriere, Rogan Christopher, Janet Porter

Drugs are bad, kids.  Don’t do it.  Particularly not when a raving mad guy (whose tie switches position from on to off, to round his head, to loosely over one shoulder etc, depending on the camera shot) throws a bag of murder peyote at you on the beach before walking into the sea and disappearing.

The couple at the centre of this film don’t heed this advice, and are rapidly losing hours from their lives as well as finding they’ve killed and eaten potential sexual partners… 

I really enjoyed this. It’s not perfect.  You need to ignore logic at times, and forget how difficult it is to clean up blood, and how much dead bodies smell and weigh. But if you can ignore that, this is a damned entertaining piece of drug fuelled mayhem.

Dark nature – Dir – Berkley Brady – Cast – Hannah Anderson, Madison Walsh, Roseanne Supernault

A therapeutic hike into the American wilderness turns out not to be quite so relaxing as was hoped for. After escaping a violent relationship, a young woman joins her friend’s therapy group on a weekend retreat into the mountains.  As you’d expect from a horror film, they find their worst nightmares made real instead.

This was a beautiful to look at film.  The backdrops and locations are truly stunning.  The performances are solid throughout.  I’m not sure if I was dosing a bit by now and missed a bit of dialogue here and there, but there were some decisions made by the characters that didn’t quite add up. The monster looked good and wasn’t overused. Overall this was a pretty effective little movie.

The Lake – Dir Lee Thong, Cast – Wanmai Chatburirak, Palita Chueasawathee, Su Jack, Zang Jinsheng

I love a good monster movie, especially kaiju films.  I was really looking forward to this one. A Thai variation on the theme…

It started well, with the baby monster wreaking havoc in a village by a lake, killing everyone in sight. However, it went downhill after the first 40 minutes or so. It was so disappointing when the mother was on her rampage, and walked politely through the standing traffic rather than batting cars aside with every step.

The monster design seemed to change several times through the film and the human storyline was poor even by the standards of Kaiju films. If I’d seen that shot of the monster’s face through a car window one more time, I would have watched Jurassic park in the lobby instead – at least it was scary in JP.

I get that they were trying something a little different to other rampaging monster films, but it was something that’s been done before and better (and made sense in the other variations on this idea).  There were hints at a more interesting storyline that never came to fruition. This was a frustrating film.  So much potential, but ultimately wasted.

Sadly, that was the last film of the festival. However, we all decamped to the festival bar and got roundly drunk. The organisers were there and as friendly and effusive as ever.  

Grimmfest is a definite highlight of the year – and two duff films out of 21 is a damned good batting average. There were several guests across the weekend who were all interesting and good to chat to. If you could find time between films, there’s always a guest or two hanging around. 

Now that the weekend has been fully documented, normal service will resume.  I have three books to write up...

Grimmfest Day 3

 

Day 3 – Saturday

If I was feeling a little tired on the morning of day 2, I’m properly flagging now.  The can of monster from Tesco was an absolute necessity today.  I always walk home from the festival in the evenings and with the last film ending at 1am, I got home at about 2.  Then to get up in time for the bus into Manchester is a struggle.

Day 3 opened with another batch of short films.  There were 5, but only 4 are listed in the programme.

The shorts Some Visitors and Old Timers both had almost identical stings to the tale, but Old Timers definitely did it best. 

Some Visitors is a home invasion story that was reasonably good but was a little bit annoying when the action sequences started.  If someone knows how to fight (and the central character certainly did), they don’t flop their arms weakly around them if someone is trying to strangle them.  Also (sorry, slight spoiler) if they take a meat cleaver to the shoulder, that’s the collar bone broken and they ain’t using the arm on that side again for a few months if they don’t bleed out and die. It ended nicely, but the fight scenes were too silly and unrealistic.

Old Timers was a lot more subtle and delivered its twist with panache. It was certainly the best of the shorts for the whole weekend.

The Evil is Inside looked like it was going to borrow from the old Bill Pullman film Frailty, but then just stopped mid story which was a bit of a shame.   The Baby Next Door was entertaining and yet another baby centric short.

The first full length feature of the day was Moon Garden

Moon Garden – Dir Ryan Stevens Harris 

This was a really quite special movie. It’s not a horror film as such, although the Teeth character is truly nightmarish. A young girl falls down a flight of stairs and enters a dream world while her parents worry at her hospital bed. This uses traditional stop motion and time lapse photography to stunning effect.  I’ve not seen a film like this in years.  It’s another one that compares very favourably to early Tim Burton with its fairy tale feel. I voted for this as the best movie of the festival.

The Q&A with the director was the best Q&A of the weekend too

The Goldsmith – Dir Vincenzo Ricchiuto, Cast – Stefania Casini, Guiseppe Pambieri, Gianluca Vannucci

When three criminals break into the isolated home of a goldsmith, they find themselves caught in a deadly trap. This ratchets the tension brilliantly and throws in unexpected character deaths and some truly surreal horror moments towards the ending.  Recommended.

Night Sky – Dir Jacob Gentry, Cast – Brea Grant, AJ Bowen, Scott Poythress

This was a very entertaining road trip movie with a thief heading across the USA to New Mexico with a young woman who isn’t entirely human while a cold blooded killer tracks their every move. The dialogue was great between the leads and it built genuine tension  as it moved on. 

The Price We Pay – Dir Ryuhei Kitamura, Cast – Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff, Vernon Wells

More robbers on the run.  This time they hole up at a remote farmhouse with their reluctant hostage where they find the proceedings are far more dangerous than anything they’re hiding from.  This contains some of the most creative character deaths I’ve seen in a long while. Buckets of blood are thrown gleefully across the screen to accompany the spot on characterisations and crackling dialogue between the leads.  This was one I thought about voting for as best film.

Next up was supposed to be Cult hero. But, the organisers had managed to get a copy of Pussycake with English subtitles so I saw that instead.

Pussycake- Dir Pablo Peres, cast – Macarena Suarez Dagliano, Aldana Ruberto, Anahi Politi

An all-female rock band (the eponymous Pussycake) are sent to a small town for their next gig.  Unbeknownst to them, the previous day, a portal had been opened to an alternate dimension in this town, leading to the release of a deadly creature.  This is the second best “alien slug which turns people into drooling blood soaked zombies” film of the festival but is still good fun. The performances are decent and, even though we know from the start who lives and who dies, it stayed entertaining and happily blood soaked throughout.  The beach scenes were particularly good and the most original thing about this film.

I’m glad we had this film on the Saturday because it meant there wasn’t a bad film all day.

Final film of the night

Malibu Horror Story – Dir Scott Slone, Cast – Tommy Cramer, Dylan Sprayberry, Jacob Hughes

This is a found footage film of sorts, following the investigation into the disappearance of 4 teenagers the previous year. It has the most jump scares of any of the movies all weekend and delivered them impeccably. The creature wasn’t overused and was genuinely pretty bloody scary. A good end to a very strong day at the festival.  

Once again, I left at 1am and got home at 2 but it was well worth it. Day 4 write up to follow soon. 

Grimmfest Day 2

 

day 2 - already it's a struggle to wake up early enough for the bus into Manchester. There's a full day of films ahead starting at 10:30 with Piggy

Piggy - Dir Carlota Peroda, starring Laura galan, Adrian Grosser, Carmen Machi

Sara is a large girl and continually bullied by the popular kids in the town (leading to her rather unflattering nickname), and even her supposed best friend doesn't stick up for her. After a particularly nasty session of bullying, Sara witnesses a visiting serial killer kidnapping the girls in his van.  She says nothing and allows him to drive off. 

Over the next few days, she keeps quiet about him when questioned by the police and forms a weird relationship with him. 

This is a brilliantly disturbing film, psychologically convincing and repulsive at the same time.  There's not a weak performance in the film and it leaves you feeling a bit shell shocked.  This is the sort of film I go to Grimmfest to watch.  

Megalomaniac - Dir Karim Ouethaj, Starring Eline Schumacher, Benjamin Ramon, Wim Willaert

If Piggy was a bit messed up from a psychological viewpoint, this is ten times nastier.  The son of a serial killer from a few decades ago takes up the family mantle.  His sister is attacked viciously at work. He gives her a pet to look after, aka a new victim who is kept chained in the spare room. 

This is a fantastically well made film.  Every shot and camera angle specifically calculated for maximum impact. This makes Piggy look like an episode of the magic roundabout.  Whether it's enjoyable or not is up for debate, but it's a great film by any objective standard of filmmaking. 

The next film was supposed to be Pussycake, but thanks to a complete screw up by the distributor (nothing to do with the festival organisers), the copy they started showing had no subtitles.  That's not ideal for a Spanish film.

Instead of that, the festival bods showed Holy Shit! in this slot.

Holy Shit! - Dir Lukas Rinker, Cast - Tomas Niehaus, Gedeon Burkhard, Olga Van Luckwald

Single location films can be difficult to pull off. When the location in question is a collapsed porta-potty, and the whole film centres on one actor for 90% of the running time, it takes something special to make it work. This film has that something special.

A man wakes up. He can't remember the previous night.  He's in the aforementioned porta-potty and his right arm is skewered on a piece of rebar so he ain't going nowhere fast. We hear over a nearby loudspeaker system that the demolition is due to commence in 30 minutes...

What follows is a tense, funny, occasionally gross race against time to escape. I had a few issues with the ending but nothing unforgivable. Other than that, this was great fun and highly recommended. Several scenes had me squirming in my seat.

Final Cut - Dir Michel Hazanavicus, Cast - Romain Duris, Berenice Beho, Gregory Gadebois 

This is an almost shot for shot remake of One Cut of the Dead. There's a couple of extra jokes thrown into the mix. There isn't really anything to mark it as different from the original though.  it's nicely done, although (unlike the original) I did find myself wondering whether the "one take" gimmick of the opening 30 odd minutes was genuine. There are some very very obvious edit points in there...

House of Darkness - Dir Neil LaBute, Cast - Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Gia Crovatin

A pick-up artist drives his latest conquest to her home in the middle of nowhere. It turns out to be a huge estate, and she invites him in.  Thus begins a comedy of manners with a dark heart. 

This one split the audience. At least one person I spoke to was pretty angry about it saying it wasn't a Grimmfest movie.  I disagree entirely.  Despite the fact that the story could have been told in half an hour, I thought this was so well acted that I was never bored in the slightest. It did need the nightmare sequence in the middle of the film to remind us it was a horror film before the ending (which certainly was horror). The twist was fairly predictable, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment of this one.

Candy Land - Director John Swab, cast - Olivia Luccardi, Sam Quartin, Eden Brolin

At a truck stop/brothel in bible belt America, a client is viciously murdered, and later a girl is abandoned by her cult and taken in by the sex workers for safekeeping. The killings continue and soon no one is safe. 

This is a confrontational film which doesn't back away from much in its depiction of the sleaze inherent in both the sex workers and the religious cult's lives. It's not as hard hitting as megalomaniac was, but i was grateful for that to be honest. 

I thought the ending was possibly a little bit weak, and I was wondering at one point why no one had smelt a particularly badly hidden corpse. Those concerns aside, this was an excellent film, brilliantly acted and some real shock moments.

Since Holy Shit! was meant to be the final film of the day, the organisers brought Cult Hero forward from day three for those who'd already watched HS!. 

Cult Hero - Dir Jesse Thomas Cook, Cast Justin Bott, Jessica Vano

the first dud of the festival for me.  There's a fine line between a parody of bad horror, and actual bad horror.  This took a running jump over that line.

It's always a bad sign when the title is different in the programme than in the film itself. The title in the opening credits was Cult Busters and the film is as poor as that title. It's about a washed-up cult buster who once caused the mass suicide of a cult, who is recruited by a Karen to free her husband from what she believes to be a dangerous cult. 

For a comedy film the jokes were very weak and relied on really badly done overacting by the main leads tp try to sell them. I think I heard three laughs during the running time of this film, and probably a dozen people took the sensible option and left for their lodgings/a drink not far into it. I should have done. It was too silly, not gory enough for what it was trying, and just lazily written.

I will write up day 3 tomorrow.

Grimmfest 2022 - Day 1

 Not about books for the next couple of posts

Grimmfest is an annual horror film festival in Manchester and one of my top priorities every year. It's where I've spent the last weekend, and the reason I've had about 12 hours sleep since Friday.

Here are my opinions on it day by day.

Thursday 6th October - a nice easy lead in to the main body of the festival, with a shorts programme and two films

There were 6 shorts, all of which were well worth watching. The highlights, basically the ones that I can came straight back to me when I looked at their titles, were Yummy Mummy and Baby Fever. they both feature pregnancy as the central theme.

Yummy Mummy follows a young woman who finds herself increasingly depersonalized by her husband, his family and the medical staff she sees. This is taken to nightmarish proportions and was really quite disturbing.

On a lighter vein, Baby Fever featured a prom queen to be who accidentally becomes impregnated by a slug type creature from the lab where she loses her virginity to the school football jock. This leads to some queasy makeup effects and a blackly comic descent into madness.

The other shorts were Enough Sleep (another baby themed horror), Ringworms (gory fun), Unheimlich (which I'm struggling to remember details of other than it was surreal and B&W), and Tranvia (a woman boards a tram to hell).

The first full film of the festival was The Loneliest Boy in the World.  Dir - Martin Owen, starring Max Harwood, Ben Miller and Susan Wokoma.

This was a gorgeous picture, very reminiscent of Tim Burton before he became quite so irritatingly self-indulgent. A young man just released from therapy is told he needs to make friends if he wants tto stay living in his dead mother's house. he does what we would all do in this situation and digs some up from the local graveyard including the local school jock who recently died in a car smash, and 3 victims from a recent plane crash.

When they start talking back to him, the film really takes off and runs with it. this is surreal, touching and occasionally quite gross as his friends continue to decompose whilst handing out life advice and getting him back on track. Thoroughly entertaining and unexpected.

The Passenger - the second and final film for opening night - Dir Fernando Gonzalez Gomes, Raul Cerezo, Starring Ramiro Blas, Cecilia Suarez, Paula Gallego, 

I wanted to like this much more than I did. I don't know if it was the projector at the Odeon, but this was very dark.  it seemed like in some scenes they'd blown the lighting budget on slime instead. This is a Spanish film with a parasitic alien slug that turns the cast into zombies one by one. 

It starts well with good character development as the 4 leads travel in a van across Spain. On the back roads they run over a woman and take her on board the van to get her to hospital. Once the monster mayhem started, I thought the writing lost a lot of the tightness that it had in the beginning.  

There were a couple of my pet peeves with this type of film.  Not one but two lots of "we need to split up" when it was far more sensible to stick together. A character who took a blow to the head and was so badly hurt that an hour later (in film time) he started passing out. However, after a glass of water he was completely cured.  When one of the characters is fighting a zombie in the back of the van, the two characters in the front don't notice for several minutes because they're playing music?  I recognise that that bit was an attempt at comedy, but it wasn't particularly successful IMHO and was vaguely irritating.

One of the characters witnesses one of the zombies decapitate a man at the petrol station. When her friend comes back and asks her what's wrong, she doesn't just point at the corpse on the floor behind her.  Which wouldn't have made much difference since it was gone and not even any bloodstains to show where it was.

It was an ok film but, with a bit more attention to detail on the edit, and less sloppy writing once the action got underway, it could have been excellent.

Day 2 and 3 write up tomorrow.  I need my beauty sleep.