GRIMMFEST DAY THREE
Written by Daniel Benson
Day three, and I managed to miss the opening attraction again, this time it was the second shorts programme. Still, a bit of a lie in never hurt anyone.
Moon Garden 
My day opened with the dark fairy-tale Moon Garden from Ryan Stevens Harris. The film follows a young girl in a coma, fighting her way through a fantasy dreamscape back to consciousness. Created on a limited budget, the film hinges on the performance of Haven Lee Harris (the director’s daughter) as the little girl, Emma. Given that she was only six years old at the time of filming, she does an incredible job and carries the movie. The visuals are a mix of creepy and beguiling, using all practical effects to create a part dream, part nightmare world. The only downside is that it’s extremely clear to see where the story is going, so all that’s left to do is sit back and enjoy the ride on how it gets there.
The Goldsmith 
I almost skipped out on this Italian production as I’d had my fill of subtitled movies over the first couple of days. I’m so glad I didn’t, as I had a ball with this one. It’s very much a film of three parts; home invasion, psychological mind games and the bloodthirsty insanity its final act descends into. Best seen without any prior clues as to what’s going on, its last third will assault your brain with some images that might be difficult to forget.
The Price We Pay
From almost skipping out to actually skipping out, Jacob Gentry’s Night Sky came second to my desire to eat (seriously, Grimmfest, a decent gap between films just once a day would really help to get proper food rather than cinema junk). Another time, perhaps.
So straight from dinner to Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Price We Pay, which finds a group of robbers and their hostage fleeing a botched heist and hiding out at a remote farm. The only problem is it’s harvest season, but a different kind to what we’d normally expect to find on a farm. Emile Hirsch is the group’s loose cannon, and a grizzled Stephen Dorff is the experienced old hand who keeps things under control, to a point at least. Gigi Zumbado is the remarkably compliant hostage and the hero of the piece. In typical Kitamura style, this starts as a fairly standard heist-gone-wrong movie and descends into all out insanity by its bloody finale.
Cult Hero
Rounding out my night (I wasn’t staying to catch the 11.35pm screening of Malibu Horror Story) was the European premiere of Jesse Thomas Cook’s Cult Hero. An archetypal ‘Karen’ in the shape of realtor Kallie Jones hires a washed-up and disgraced ‘cult buster’ Dale Domazar to rescue her husband from the clutches of a dodgy wellness centre. It’s played entirely for laughs, but most of them are expected to come from the overplayed Snake Plissken-esque antics of Domazar. If you find that the joke of someone being a bit of a dick and exclaiming “yeah!” after almost everything would wear a bit thin (and it does) then maybe give this one a miss. Still, it’s mostly good-natured and does have some amusing moments as it barrels along towards the final showdown with the cult.
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