FrightFest

6/10 - Some interesting ideas here... but it really didn't work for me.

Liked the idea, but the execution was badly fumbled. The detective with dialogue from a 50s potboiler was jarringly out of place and I even spent the first 10 minutes wondering when this film was actually set! Lin Shaye great as ever though.

mamawaldi wrote:Liked the idea, but the execution was badly fumbled. The detective with dialogue from a 50s potboiler was jarringly out of place and I even spent the first 10 minutes wondering when this film was actually set! Lin Shaye great as ever though.

I had that same feeling too, especially as the opening scene in the newspaper office seemed to be set in the 1950s, dress and all and yet she gets to her sister's house and there's a modern alarm panel on the wall and post-millennial kitchen appliances on the bench. Weird choice of styling for the newspaper/cop.

I don't have much to say about this other than this has been my worst film of the festival just because it's so painfully boring. The idea is sound (a mega-haunted-house built from haunted rooms taken from individual haunted houses), but it's hammered into the audience by endless exposition explaining things over and over again, and at the end I still didn't feel like I was fully clear on what was going on.

As others have mentioned I was unsure when this film was set, as it had a 50's theme to it to begin with. Also found it a little bit like silent hill meets house on haunted hill but it didn't really work for me. It started quite promising but then went off on a odd tangent. The plot left me scratching my head at times and the bad guy just wasn't menacing enough for my liking. I didn't hate it, but just left the screen thinking indifferently towards it.

The bad guy let it down as his motivations weren't clear enough.
I liked the lead characters' 50's retro look at the beginning, even though there didn't seem to be a good reason for it apart from connecting it with 50's film noir. I wish I'd counted the costume changes - the outfits were awesome.
Loved the house and the ghost effects.
I enjoyed it overall, despite the obvious flaws

After the execrable Blood Feast my worst film of the festival. Where Bousman got the idea that he'd made a 'Film Noir Horror Film' from I don't know. I'm not generally a fan of his stuff, but positive online reviews led me to give it a go.

Managed to be incredibly simplistic and yet needlessly confusing at the same time, I'm still unclear exactly what the townspeople were supposed to have got out of sacrificing their children. The second half had endless exposition scenes that either made no sense, or re-explained things over and over again that were obvious. The patchwork house looked great but I was so bored that it had no impact on me.

Why did the 'town' look like the car park of an oil refinery, and yet right next door was Lin Shaye's southern style mansion set in grassland and forest ?

Utter drivel.

I really wanted to like this one, but it fell short of making me love it. I liked the mystery, noir and fairytale elements but not the excess reliance on dodgy CGI at the end.

I'll probably watch it again but it's certainly not to everyone's tastes.

A quirky film with a title that is misleading for those expecting a gorefest. 7 / 10

The final 5-10 minutes unfortunately felt like watching an advert for the latest Alton Towers spooky ghost house ride. I really didn't like the way the filmmakers portrayed the wispy spirits, something about it fell flat for me. It was so forgettable that when chatting with the other half last night and deciding on our weekend faves, we both completely forgot it was even in the line up. Shame, because I thought the main antagonist actor had decent on-screen charisma.

What was it with the heroine being something from a 40s noir thriller, with her boyfriend easily winning the Brad Pitt Se7en look a like award ??

My only walkout this year, and I should have gone sooner. Utterly crap, and cost me 40 minutes of my life I'll never get back - I knew I should have gone to see the third set of shorts instead.

I don't watch the trailers and like to go in blind, so once I've established that a film is neither found footage nor a 'horror comedy' I go mostly by the title. This one sounded like there might at least be some slaughtering but bar a brief bit at the start there was nothing forthcoming, thus I got bored and sacked it for a buffet binge

I don't know what to make of this. It started off well, but things just got weird!