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.
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