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.
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