GRIMMFEST DAY TWO
Written by Daniel Benson
Day two of Grimmfest kicked off late morning with Carlota Pereda's Piggy. Fortunately for me, Becky Roberts has already reviewed this one, giving me valuable time to do things like eat breakfast and get the Day One write-up finished.
Megalomaniac 
Perhaps that one might have been a gentler start to the day instead of Karim Ouelhaj's Megalomaniac, which dragged its victims kicking and screaming into the afternoon. If yesterday's The Loneliest Boy in the World was the whimsical, heartwarming story of a boy in search of friends, this was the brutal, harrowing version of a similar yet altogether different tale. Félix and Martha, children of infamous Belgian serial killer The Butcher of Mons, live together in an old house. Martha works cleaning a factory, where she is routinely subjected to hideous abuse by a couple of workers. Félix, on the other hand, is intent on carrying on his father's work and abducts and murders women. When Martha asks for a companion to keep her company during the day, Félix obliges in the only way he knows how. Not so much entertainment as a viewing experience (and not a pleasant one at that), the film puts all its development into its lead characters, leaving little time for the victims we should be rooting for. Even as a victim herself, Martha is difficult to empathise with due to the cruel treatment she serves to others. Not a film for everyone and certainly not a movie I'll be in a hurry to revisit.
The next scheduled film was Pablo Parés' Pussycake, which kicked off on time. However, by 15 minutes in, it was clear we were being shown this Spanish language film without subtitles. Apparently an oversight, it seemed the subtitle file was nowhere in the building and, with the Canadian distributor barely waking up in their timezone, there was little chance to fix it. Working quickly, the Grimmfest team switched the end-of-night film Holy Shit! into the afternoon slot and put in place extra screenings to allow everyone to see Pussycake on another day. In the meantime, if you want to read Stuart Monroe's thoughts on that particular film, you can head over and read his Pussycake review.
Holy Shit! 
127 Hours set in a porta-potty is pretty much the setup and execution of Lukas Rinker's Holy Shit! but without the trail biking and mountain vistas. Regaining consciousness in an overturned temporary toilet, action architect Frank Lamm finds himself pinned through the arm by a reinforcement bar and must try to escape his plastic prison by utilising the scant items around him. As single-location, person-in-peril movies go, it works extremely well. Clearly shot on a minuscule budget, it's hard to imagine that 90 minutes of action contained entirely within this tiny space could work, but it does. And then some. If you want to read further thoughts on this remarkable achievement, then check out Joel Harley's Holy Shit! review.
Final Cut 
If there was ever a case of a niche remake, then it's Michel Hazanavicius's French language remake of the Japanese language One Cut of the Dead. As horror fans, we expect that popular foreign langauge films will be remade by western territories, but we normally expect that they'll be remade in English and on a massive budget to cash in on the cult hype around the original (See Ringu to The Ring and Ju-On to The Grudge). However, after the breakout success of the original One Cut and its massive box office domestically, plus sales worldwide, we've got another low budget and pretty much beat-for-beat remake. In French. If you've seen One Cut of the Dead then Final Cut will have little in the way of surprises but still manages to match the original for energy and enthusiasm and inject some wholesome family values into its ending. The only logical progression is now a Hollywood remake called One Final Cut of the Dead.
House of Darkness 
If you're familiar with the technique of horror movies having a five minute prologue to set up the story of a film, then House of Darkness is exactly that but stretched out to 88 minutes. Hap (Justin Long) and Mina (Kate Bosworth) are a couple who met in a bar that night and have come back to Mina's impressive gothic mansion to see where the night takes them. Gothic in both tone and setting, it's a talking piece that takes far too long to get where it needs to be. It's testament to Long and Bosworth's acting abilities that they're able to carry the whole thing off, but there's far too much milling around in the murky depths of the house and verbally beating around the bush until something actually happens in the last three minutes.
Candy Land 
Set around a truck stop and a small group of sex workers that, ahem, service the location, Candy Land finds Remy, a devoutly religious ex-cult member, as the most unlikely addition to their tight-knit circle. This is not a film that shies away from the seedy and often dangerous side of sex work, but makes sure to paint its characters in a positive light as they welcome Remy to their clan and care for her like a family. Of course this wouldn't be horror without a threat and that comes in the shape of a serial killer who stalks the location and leaves the girls' customers ritulistically slaughtered. It's an earnest portrait of an underrepresented section of society.
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