Things picked up with Spiral, the new film from Hatchet director Adam Green. A left field love story about one of life’s misfits, the film may not seem like FrightFest fare but Green imbues the film with an element of menace, to such an extent that even when it’s at its sweetest you’re gripped because you know it won’t last. It’s the sort of film that only pays off right at the end and even then it’s subtly done, but it shows Green is a talent to watch and far more than the one trick pony Hatchet might suggest.
Green proved to be a FrightFest favourite, receiving the warmest welcome of any of the filmmakers on hand for the weekend and he certainly knows how to handle a crowd. As well as answering audience questions he regaled us with his inspirational Twisted Sister story, a version of which will appear on the Hatchet DVD.
In the Wall came next, the sort of story Edgar Allan Poe might have created had he been around at the time of EC Comics. This was the best, and best looking, short film of the festival, with plenty of talent displayed on both sides of the camera.
Russia had already been responsible for the festival’s worst film (at least of the ones I watched) and next provided the biggest disappointment. Day Watch is the sequel to the Russian smash Night Watch but fell into the Hollywood trap of putting lots of big explosions on screen in the hopes of masking the film's inadequacies. Far too long, badly paced, and just downright silly in parts, the film failed to work as a whole, even though its climax was impressive. Maybe Russian cinema just doesn’t translate for a western audience; it certainly didn’t for this audience member.
One of the festival's organisers, film journalist and author Alan Jones, had been hyping The Orphanage since day one and the film lived up to that hype and then some. Getting its first screening outside of Cannes, this was another ghost story but unlike KM31 this one showed how it should be done.
Guillermo Del Toro’s name appears on the film as producer and there are obvious Del Toro influences but this isn’t Pan’s Labyrinth 2, although it does make a nice companion piece to that film, a dark Peter Pan to Labyrinth’s Alice in Wonderland. Juan Antonio Bayona involves us with the characters just as Del Toro did with his Oscar-nominated foreign film but the fantasy elements of that film are replaced with a traditional ghost story. One member of the audience would later remark that it had similarities to Poltergeist, and while that’s true from a story perspective, in atmosphere it's far closer to the classic The Innocents.
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