CELLULOID SCREAMS 2015: DAY ONE

Sheffield's very own horror movie festival, Celluloid Screams, celebrated its seventh glorious year with yet another strong, diverse line-up of films. In the first part of this special festival-focused blog, I take a look at the feature films screened on the first day...

*** NOTE: THE MINI-REVIEW OF YAKUZA APOCALYPSE CONTAINS SPOILERS ***


THE INVITATION

The festival kicked off with Karyn Kusama's slow-burner of a horror/thriller, fresh from its recent win at Sitges. Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited to a dinner party by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and he is naturally wary of what might happen, having not seen her for a couple of years following a family tragedy and their subsequent break-up. As the evening progresses Will becomes increasingly worried about the intentions of Eden and new husband David (Michael Huisman) and suspects their guests may be in grave danger.

Proficiently made and well acted, this turned out to be a wee bit too slow and deliberate for some but Marshall-Green is perfectly cast as the lead, a spiky, emotional mess of a guy whose paranoia could be well-founded but could equally be the product of his own damaged psyche. The film deliberately fogs the issue in a skilful way and with a neat, though not entirely unexpected, twist about an hour or so in the viewer, like Will, really doesn't know who or what to believe. The eventual pay-off just about matches the careful build-up and there's a memorable final shot but that's all I'm going to say as this is a film where spoilers need to be kept to an absolute minimum. It could have done with being around ten minutes shorter but that's a minor gripe about a movie that's well worth seeking out.

GOODNIGHT MOMMY

The hills are alive with the sounds of abject terror as Austrian writer/directors Severin Franz and Veronika Fiala serve up a tale of twin boys suspecting that their mother isn't the woman she used to be after she returns, face bandaged, from a cosmetic surgery procedure. If she isn't their mother, how will they go about proving it and are they putting themselves at risk by doing so?

This movie certainly divided opinion, many praising its unrelentingly tense atmosphere and its acts of genuinely disturbing violence. Others thought the twist was telegraphed way too soon in the movie and hence the climax lost any impact it might have had. As for me, I did twig what was going on quite early but this in no way ruined the experience for me. Even having anticipated the reveal towards the end, the film still worked as a battle for the very identity of its characters and the suspense is undimmed. Absolutely cracking performances too from Lukas and Elias Schwarz as the twins and the marvellous Suzanne Wuest as the Mommy of the title, able to convey a huge range of emotions even when most of her face is obscured.

YAKUZA APOCALYPSE

The opening day closed with a movie that ranks as one of the most bizarre I've ever seen. Yakuza vampires (okay), gunslinging assassins (mm-hmm), knitting circles (what?), a garden for growing humans (huh?) and an acrobatic, ass-kicking martial arts wizard in a frog costume (I kid you not) are just some of the elements in Takeshi Miike's mind-frazzling action/horror combo. The plot dashes this way and that, the result resembling a number of barely-related films fighting for the one space featuring several ideas that you're waiting to see pay off only for them to be summarily discarded.

The good? Well, the Frog Man is amazing, his appearances on screen being mindbendingly odd, jaw-droppingly athletic and laugh-out loud hilarious. The visuals are pleasing too, with sweeping, well-edited fight scenes and great-looking, comic-book style characters. The bad? If you don't tap into Yakuza Apocalypse's rather strange rhythm during the first 20 minutes you're unlikely to get it at all, which means you either have to endure it for almost two hours or get frustrated and walk out.

It's also another Japanese movie which stops dead in its tracks at an inopportune moment, leaving a number of hanging plot threads and curtailing a mouthwatering, cataclysmic confrontation by having the credits run before so much as a blow is landed. Afterwards, I checked with Caitlyn Downs (of the Ghostface Girls) that everything I thought I'd just seen on screen actually happened. Turns out it did. Either that or we were both hallucinating. Which could also be true.




So that was Day One. What of Day Two? Read the next part of my festival blog coming soon...


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