A new strand of the Bradford International Film Festival, and run in conjunction with Sheffield’s existing Celluloid Screams Horror Film Festival which runs in October, Bradford After Dark presented five new horror movies (each partnered with a new British short) in a day of splattery goodness.
MOTHER’S DAY (2010, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) is a home invasion thriller based on a 1980 original (which I’ve not seen). Jaime King stars as the woman at the centre of the action, a grieving young wife still mourning the death of her son. She and her husband have bought a new home through a foreclosure sale and are having a housewarming with friends when their party’s interrupted by three bank-robbing brothers, quickly followed by the awesome matriarch Rebecca De Mornay.
The film has to do a lot of work to set up its unwieldy premise (this is the brothers’ childhood home and they’ve turned up there because they’re on a bank-robbing spree and think Momma still lives there, having lost contact with her and needing a place to hole up because a) one of them’s taken a slug in the gut and b) there’s a tornado coming) and there are perhaps too many supporting characters cluttering the main story. The body-count rises as home truths are told and secrets revealed, and there’s some impressive gore on display. Bousman directs with his usual restraint and nuance (!) though some scenes are brutally effective. The film, though, depends for its effect on its performances and though there’s an awful lot of waving guns and shouting going on, plus prologue and epilogue scenes which, though good in themselves seem to have come from a different movie altogether, your pleasure here will depend on your tolerance for King’s red-nosed snivelling before she goes all Ripley and on your liking for psycho mothers. This is De Mornay’s show and she knows it, handing her material with skill and grace, and just about keeping on the right side of ham throughout, while never forgetting she’s in a genre pic. There’s maybe nothing new here, but De Mornay is with the price of admission alone.
ROADMAN (2010, directed by Peter Leovic) stars Travis McMahon as the awesomely named Max Greif, a quiet loner working as a demolition contractor and living in an Aussie suburb in the week, but who shirts to the bush at weekends for bouts of alcoholism, being haunted by his tormenting father’s ghost, and the serial killing of lost travellers who come his way. Max’s double life is threatened when a chance at a normal existence and a girlfriend Lorraine (Georgii Speakman) present themselves. Can Max settle down, or will his crimes and/or his madness dominate?
It’s a low-key film, with elements of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and perhaps even PSYCHO II inbuilt. McMahon’s Grief is a stolid, uncommunicative creature, ill at ease with the ordinary world around him. His character’s inability to communicate pervades the film; there’s lot of stillness and stilted conversations here, and the initial sluggish pace may be a turnoff to some. Though the story gains momentum, and there’s production values gained from good use of exterior shooting, the direction and digital cinematography is restrained, with the actors left to make the best of their parts. Perhaps refreshingly, Grief never erupts into the orgy of violence that’s been signalled as building inside him, but too many promising plot strands are left unfulfilled and some clunky exposition frustrates as muted character study replaces genre thrills, leading to a suitably toned-down though perhaps predictable ending.
WAKE WOOD (2010, directed by David Keating) stars Aiden Gillen and Eva Birthistle as a husband and wife (he’s a vet, she a pharmacist) who’ve relocated to rural Ireland to get over the loss of their daughter, who was savaged to death by a dog. Handily, for plot purposes, the village of Wake Wood harbours a secret presided over by patrician Timothy Spall; there are rituals which can bring back, under the right circumstances and for a limited time only, the dead. Provided that the rules are obeyed...
We’re very much in WICKER MAN territory here (and the film is delightfully referenced), with plenty of suspicious-looking locals, odd rites, stone circles, weird wooden wind chimes and other arcana. The plot riffs around ideas that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen/read PET SEMATARY or indeed either FRANKENSTEIN or WW Jacobs’ classic short story THE MONKEY’S PAW; how far will parents to go deal with the loss of a loved and deceased child?
In its largely unambitious way the picture, being released under the revived Hammer brand, gets a lot of mileage from its rural locations and the general folk horror vibe running through it. Gillen and Birthistle are effective leads and Spall plays the ambivalent necromancer Arthur with a sly wit throughout. There’s a great spooky kid for those who like that kind of thing and plenty of splatter, cleverly using farming and animals throughout.
If there’s something that lifts WAKE WOOD above its inspirations though, it’s in the last ten minutes, which really raise the game, delivering a set of reveals/shocks that build on each other in a very effective and surprisingly bleak manner, with an absolutely stunning final moment which indicates how cleverly the whole thing’s been conceived and reminds you why the film has been cast in the way that it has. WAKE WOOD is a film that’s better in the memory than in the moment, but the ending is storming and will echo in you after the credits have rolled. Recommended.
STAKE LAND (2010, directed by Jim Mickle) is a post-apocalyptic vampire movie. After the vamps have taken over, America has regressed into millennial cults, far-right Biblical cannibals perhaps more dangerous than the vampires themselves. Travelling through these lands, going north to the promised New Eden of Canada are Mister (Nick Damici) and Martin, a KARATE KID-ish team of vampire killer mentor and protégé.
STAKE LAND is a bleak, downbeat and serious movie, at once critical and celebratory of America. As a road flick it’s perhaps necessarily episodic, and the plot is sparse, but the film scores in the savagery of some of the ideas and in the vampires themselves, half rotting zombie/half fast and savage killers. There’s brutality and a sense of both hope and uncertainty running throughout; Mickle is not afraid to upset gentle sensibilities here. Perhaps too superficially similar to other films that have been released recently (ZOMBIELAND, CARRIERS and THE BOOK OF ELI come immediately to mind), there’s enough differentiation here to make STAKE LAND worth checking out. Part of that’s in the ways which Mickle seems to draws inspiration from 70s road flicks and from more recent indie fare like JUNO or even OLD JOY, and part in the way that movie vampire lore is added to; this is, if nothing else, the film where end-of-days cultists drop live vampires as inhuman bombs into a vamp-free community from helicopters. There’s some strength in depth in casting too with Kelly McGillis, Danielle Harris and Larry Fessenden all unshowy in supporting parts.
The first four films shared a running theme in that pregnancy (and particularly unplanned/unexpected pregnancy) is an important plot device throughout. I’ve no idea if that was a programming intent (it’s not flagged up in any of the festival materials) or not, but it was interesting to make the observation and also to wonder about the ways in which filmmakers were using this for genre purposes, and their reasons for that.
There were no such lofty concerns in the last movie of the day, though. HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (Jason Eisener, 2011) is a straight love-letter to both 1970s exploitation cinema classics released in the wake of the first DEATH WISH movie like ROLLING THUNDER, and also to the experience of watching these and 1980s quickie horror/thriller movies at home on VHS. Filmed in digital beta, and with the deliberate production values of STREET TRASH (which gets a mention), HOBO simply and straightforwardly has Rutger Hauer cleaning the streets of Scum Town with the aforementioned hardware. Hauer just wants to settle down and start a grass-cutting business, but the streets need cleaning first as villainous kingpin Drake and his Tom Cruise wannabe sons preside over an orgy of drugs, prostitution and wanton murder.
It’s a cartoon of a movie, a Tex Avery short expanded to 90 minutes with as much low-brow humour (there are some genuinely laugh-out loud moments and one-liners), syrupy grue and variable acting as Eisener can muster. Hauer brings some dignity to his role at least, playing the central character with a tired grace. It’s a midnight movie, and there’s something of a SNAKES ON A PLANE one-joke aspect to it, but there’s enough fun and single-mindedness of intent here to at least afford some pleasure to others. Perhaps it feels too deliberately culty, a film calculated to appeal to geeks and nerds too precisely (the story of its inception as originating in a fake trailer competition running alongside the release of the Tarantino/Rodriguez under-performer GRINDHOUSE is now internet canon), but if Eisener’s capable of approaching another subject with the same verve, then he may well be a name to watch.
There’s hopes that Bradford After Dark will become a fixture of the wider Bradford International Film Festival. Let’s hope so. Big thanks to programmer Rob Nevitt for organising the event and for introducing the movies, and also to Gaylen Ross who popped in to say hi.
