Red White & Blue

Film4 FrightFest have announced their programme and it sounds like 2010 is a good year for horror!

The festival will open with Adam Green’s Hatchet 2 and close with Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism. Tobe Hooper is the festival’s special guest and will be interviewed onstage, and there will be a screening of his rarely seen 1969 debut Eggshells alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Again this year there are two programmes, with a Discovery selection running alongside the main event. In the main selection, we can heartily recommend US sexual psycho-drama Red, White and Blue, which Electric Sheep’s Kate Taylor discovered at the Rotterdam Festival earlier this year. Here’s a shorter version of what she said in her festival report:

‘Set in Austin, Texas, Red White and Blue starts as a character study of the ravenously promiscuous Erica, whose existence consists of picking up random men in bars and trying to hold on to the cleaning job at the guest house where she stays. Punk hipster Franki, an earlier Erica conquest, is trying to get his band a European tour, giving his boss grief at his burger-flipping job, and looking after his ailing mother. On her death, Franki and Erica’s paths become entwined again in a twist that would jump out as controversy-baiting, had the preceding scenes not treated the characters in such a non-judgmental way. From then the film shifts gear, unleashing a vicious streak of inventive violence that will satisfy gore-seekers (death by gaffa tape – the ultimate indie way to go?) but still retain the less squeamish brand of cinephile.’

We’ve also checked out the very entertaining Monsters. A cross between District 9 and In Search of a Midnight Kiss, it’s a romance with a sci-fi twist, charting the relationship that develops between a war photographer and a rich heiress as they try to make their way back to the USA through a Mexico infected by an alien invasion. The vision of Fortress USA protected by a wall from South American intruders – alien or human – has a certain resonance, although this is not really a film for deep political commentary. While the focus is more on the romance than on the action, it is witty, well written and engaging.

In the other British films on offer, we’ve seen Outcast but we didn’t like that one: we’re just not quite convinced by the mix of hocus-pocus and grim council estate realities that seems to be developing into a sub-genre of British fantastic cinema (see Heartless and The Disappeared).

However, we’re looking forward to Mexican cannibal tale We Are What We Are, Kaboom, by American enfant terrible Gregg Araki, whose Mysterious Skin we loved, African-set zombie movie The Dead, and the controversial and much-talked-about A Serbian Film. In the Discovery selection, giallo-inspired Amer and Finale also sound worth checking out. And we’re planning to attend Jake West’s documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, which will be followed by a panel discussion. Aside from the two programmes of feature films, there’s also short films, special guest appearances, Q&As with filmmakers, and Andy Nyman’s Quiz from Hell!