19th-24th November 2019
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales
And so here's the final part of my three-part review of this year's
Abertoir horror film festival, with reviews of the films we saw on
Saturday and Sunday.
You can read the other two parts of my review here:
Part 1 (Tuesday and Wednesday),
Part 2 (Thursday and Friday)
Saturday 23rd November
The first screening on Saturday was a 1975 film by Lucio Fulci – in anticipation of the new documentary coming up later in the day.
The Four of the Apocalypse is Fulci’s slow-paced and lyrical (and admittedly also rather grim) Spaghetti Western. The central character is Stubby Preston, introduced as a vaguely amoral lone-wolf gambler, who arrives in Salt Flats in Utah to win a bit of cash in the casino. Stubby is intercepted by the sheriff on arrival and thrown into jail, which turns out to be a lucky break when the town suffers a violent attack by a band of vigilantes. As he’s locked up, Stubby survives the attack along with three other prisoners: town drunk Clem, pregnant prostitute Bunny and a black man named Bud. The four set out from Salt Flats the next day with optimism. Spoiler alert: their optimism is soon tempered by the harsh world of the western. As they travel, Stubby, Bunny, Clem and Bud run into almost every genre staple you can imagine: pioneers, bandits, zealous evangelists, ghost towns, mining towns, and dangerous gunslingers. It’s this last element that introduces the grimness that punctuates the earlier positivity of the four travellers’ journey.
The Four of the Apocalypse is an unusual (revisionist) western in a lot of ways. Perhaps the most striking deviation from the standard template is that this is an ensemble piece. Although Stubby is the protagonist, the secondary characters share focus with him for much of the film. This results in some interesting moral growth for Stubby’s character, who develops (or reveals) his values as the group faces their various challenges. Fulci’s film might not appeal to genre purists, but it offers a really interesting and thought-provoking take on the template. Not always an easy watch, but certainly an impressive one.
Silent Shorts Vol V
The next event was a regular feature of the Abertoir programme. Silent Shorts is a collection of short films selected by Paul Shallcross, who accompanies them with live piano scores specially composed. Shallcross also introduces the films with fascinating bits of information about the films’ creation and production. Given the theme this year, it was only to be expected that the Silent Shorts selection reflected some science fiction tropes, but it was an eclectic mix this year. There was
The X-Ray Fiend from 1897 (directed by G.A. Smith), which was notable both for its age and for its brevity. At only 45 seconds, this is the shortest film Shallcross has ever included in his Silent Shorts events. And there was Lucius Henderson’s 1912
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is the earliest surviving film adaptation of Stevenson’s novel (and also notable for the fact that James Cruze, who plays both Jekyll and Hyde, is sometimes substituted for a supporting actor!). Gaston Velle’s 1906 film
Voyage Autour à l’Etoile in a ‘trick film’ that uses the cutting-edge technology of the day to create a fantastical journey. This film is a little deceptive, as it starts out light-hearted and charming before taking more of a ‘horror’ turn. Also in the selection were
The ? Motorist, a 1906 film by W.R. Booth that draws its horror from contemporary concerns about the advent of the motor car, and
Slippery Jim (Ferdinand Zecca, 1910), a French film supposedly based on the performances of Harry Houdini. By far my favourite film that Shallcross included, though, was Maurice Tourneur’s
Figures de Cire from 1914. Unusually, this film is notable not for its survival, but for its deterioration. By serendipity, a patch of nitrate decomposition of the film stock perfectly coincides with the deterioration of the protagonist’s mind!
Next up was the UK premiere of Talal Selhami’s
Achoura, which was followed by a Q&A with the director. The film is a dark fairy tale-esque story about a group of four childhood friends, who’ve grown apart in adulthood but are forced back together when a terrifying creature from their past returns. Sadly, it’s impossible to talk about
Achoura without mentioning
IT: Chapter One (or even offering some comparison of the two), and this was something that came up in the Q&A. Selhami explained that
Achoura wrapped in 2015, but that in the time it took to get it out onto screens, Muschetti’s adaptation of King’s novel had sprung into being. It’s unfortunate timing, and a real shame, as
Achoura really should have had the opportunity to stand on its own two feet, outside the later film’s shadow. In many ways, it’s a darker film than Muschetti’s
IT, and its creature draws on an insidious, almost existential, type of fear, making Pennywise seem almost garish in contrast. The film’s group of friends are unsettled by having to face their childhood monster again, but Selhami balances this with a gnawing sense of dread that it is adulthood itself that has taken the biggest toll on them.
Achoura draws on Moroccan folktales to conjure its monster, and one of the film’s early chills comes with a scene in which the children play out a game-like ritual around a bonfire, leading to a nightmare becoming flesh. My main criticism of the film – and it’s a bit of a horror bugbear of mine – is that
Achoura shows its monster a little bit too much. This is particularly disappointing as the film makes brilliant use of atmosphere and apprehension, making the CGI monster a little bit jarring! But otherwise, I very much enjoyed this one.
And then on to another documentary… but sadly this one didn’t impress quite as much as yesterday’s
Blood and Flesh.
Fulci for Fake is described as a ‘biopic’ on the life of the ‘Godfather of Gore’. However, I’m not sure ‘biopic’ is quite the right word here. The film is mostly talking head commentary, framed by the narrative device of an actor preparing to play Lucio Fulci in an upcoming (fictional) film. As he speaks with Fulci’s colleagues and collaborators, family and friends, he attempts to gain an insight into the man and his work. Scafidi has assembled quite a cast of interviewees, and the film includes both previously unseen footage and surprisingly candid anecdotes from its subjects. For Fulci fans – even those who consider themselves fairly well-versed in the man’s career – there is a lot here that will appeal. For me, though, who is something of a ‘casual Fulci viewer’, it fell a little flat. I think the main problem is that
Fulci for Fake assumes (maybe even requires) a fair amount of prior knowledge. Unlike
Blood and Flesh, which vividly conjured the world of Al Adamson in a way that would entertain and inform even if you’d never heard of the man or any of his films,
Fulci for Fake is very much a film for those in the know. Of course, film fans may argue that one
should be more familiar with Lucio Fulci than with Al Adamson, but I found this a bit of a barrier to enjoying the film. Admittedly, I did learn a lot about Fulci and his working practices, but I would’ve appreciated a little more contextualizing of this (and the film is notable for containing very little actual footage from Fulci’s films). All in all, this one unfortunately didn’t really grab me.
Next up was another one of the classic films on this year’s festival programme – and I think this one can rightly be called a ‘cult classic’. This one was a bit of a treat, because not only did it continue the celebration of Donald Pleasance’s work, but the writer-director Gary Sherman was one of the festival guests (we’d already had a great talk on practical special effects from him the previous day). And so this screening was followed by a Q&A with Sherman.
Death Line (aka
Raw Meat) is a quintessentially British horror film (despite its American writer-director, of course), and it has a pretty strong fan following. The film follows a young couple, Patricia and Alex, who discover an unconscious man on the steps of Russell Square tube station. They report the incident, but when the police attend the scene the body has disappeared. Something sinister is going on under the underground. Of course, Patricia (played by Sharon Gurney) and Alex (played by David Ladd) are soon overshadowed by Pleasance’s brilliant turn as Inspector Calhoun and, later, by Christopher Lee at MI5 supremo Straton-Villiers. Much of the joy of this film comes from the scenes in which Pleasance and Lee interact, particularly where they discuss matters relating to the British class system. Another bit of the fun (if you can call it fun… it’s also been described as ‘harrowing bleakness’) comes from the fact that – despite the film’s reputation for being violent and horrifying – the ‘baddie’ is ultimately a figure of pity, if not of sympathy. The stars of the film are undoubtedly Pleasance, Lee and the London Underground, but it’s that plaintive cry from the bad guy that we all remember (and that we kept quoting after the screening had finished!): ‘Mind the doors!’ Really enjoyed this one!
Saturday’s final screening began with
Turbo Killer, a trippy assault-on-the-senses short film that was originally made by Seth Ickerman (aka Raphael Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard) as a music video for Carpenter Brut (aka Franck Hueso)’s track of the same name. As such, it substitutes plot and characterization for style and visual impact, as Ickerman creates something more like a ‘vibe’ than a narrative to illustrate Carpenter Brut’s synthwave music. It’s an onslaught of neon colours, busty women and high-octane cars, with Carpenter Brut’s inverted crucifix logo burning bright throughout. The stylistic influences of sci-fi B-movies (of the highest pitch) are also discernible in the overall character of the piece.
Turbo Killer is – as a music video – only a short piece, but this was followed immediately by
Blood Machines, a longer-form (50 minutes) film that develops both the tone and the ‘story’ of
Turbo Killer further. Here, the creative collaboration is inverted. Ickerman created the film, and then Carpenter Brut wrote the soundtrack.
Blood Machines is structured as a kind of three-act space opera, with a bit more sense of an overall plot. That said, it is still a stylistic and impressionistic piece, despite having some minimal dialogue and characterization. There are AI spaceships, epic (and somewhat scantily clad) priestesses, brutish and threatening men.
Blood Machines throws a big handful of the clichéd tropes of SFF in your face, but it does this with an energetic abandon and visual intensity that is actually quite mesmerizing. Unlike in
Turbo Killer, there is some nod to the idea of female empowerment in
Blood Machines, but it still feels like a bit of a masculine piece – the gaze is most definitely male here, though it might be a male who wants to see the females triumphant. Bit of a full-on end to the day!
Sunday 24th November
As I said in
my earlier post, the science fiction theme this year was in honour of the fortieth anniversary of
Alien. Sunday was the day for the ‘main event’ – a screening of
Alien with a special introduction (more on that below), but we kicked off the day with
Planet of the Vampires (aka
Terrore nello Spazio), an Italian sci-fi horror made in the mid-60s. And there was a good reason for this. Bava’s film is widely held to have been an influence on Scott’s
Alien, both in terms of story and of design. Two ships on an exploration mission receive a distress call from a planet and approach to respond. When one ship, the Argos, enters the planet’s atmosphere, something
very bad happens, and the crew turn violently against each other. Only Captain Markary is able to resist the
very bad thing and is able to drag his crew out of their murderous rage. The Argos then travels to the planet’s surface, partly to find the source of the distress call, and partly to find the Galliott, the first ship that went down to the planet. The film’s visual style is very much pulp sci-fi cinema, with much of the action happening on what is undeniably a studio set. The colours are garish and the gore is exuberant. But this is all tempered by a somewhat Gothic-inflected element – as signalled by the English title of the film – in which the
very bad thing the explorers encounter possesses the bodies of the dead, filling the Argos with the walking corpses of fallen crew members. While the ship’s interior is a rather uninspiring studio, the hostile exterior is an empty and atmospheric soundstage, all mists and skewed visuals (created using miniatures, mirrors and forced perspective). The effect created is… well…
alien.
The Science Fact in Science Fiction - a talk by Professor Andrew Evans
Continuing with the science fiction theme, the next event on today’s schedule was a talk by Andrew Evans, a professor of Material Physics at Aberystwyth University. As expected from the title, Evans’s talk covered some of the background to key tropes in science fiction, with some explanation of how/if/why these tropes align with current scientific thinking. As the festival’s specific bent this year was specifically space-travel sci-fi, a lot of Evans’s talk covered the science related to space travel (including a few theories about how interplanetary/interstellar travel might be achieved). There was also a bit on time travel to balance things out. Evans’s is an engaging speaker, who’s able to translate very complex ideas into terms the layman can understand (thank goodness!). But what I really liked about this talk was that there was no snark or sneering about the genre, even though it sometimes tends towards the… slightly unscientific.
Next up, it was another documentary, which served to complete a sort of triptych with
Blood and Flesh and
Fulci for Fake. Here, the subject was Michael Reeves, the director of
Revenge of the Blood Beast (aka
The She Creature),
The Sorcerers and
Witchfinder General (aka
The Conqueror Worm), who died tragically at just twenty-five years old. Reeves’s work on these films secured him a place in horror history (and, particularly, in the curious history of ‘folk horror’), but his early death meant that we never saw him fulfil his potential (or, indeed, turn away from the genre in favour of other projects). Ballin’s new documentary explores Reeves’s early life and family, his rather arrogant foray into the notoriously ‘closed off’ film industry, and the creation of his three feature films. It’s a well-made film with some enthusiastic and interesting talking heads, and which offers some insight (but also some speculation) as to what the director might have gone on to do after
Witchfinder General. The problem with the documentary is the tragic circumstances of its subject matter. Sadly, Michael Reeves’s life and career were very short, and his childhood and upbringing, while not dull as such, held few surprises. Even Reeves’s entry into the film world – something that the documentary makes a lot of – is more a case of self-assured persistence, rather than anything more dramatic. The most interesting bit of the film are undoubtedly the sections relating to
Witchfinder General, though there is little here (including the director’s fractious relationship with Vincent Price) that’s not already known in horror circles. Price does not emerge particularly sympathetically from Ballin’s film, but he is, as always, a somewhat larger-than-life figure with a tendency to steal the limelight. This new documentary wasn’t bad, but it fell a little flat for me.
Nicko and Joe’s Bad Film Club
And next on the programme was something I was definitely looking forward to. We first experienced Nicko and Joe’s Bad Film Club at Abertoir last year, and we both really enjoyed it. The pair were back this time, albeit with a slightly different offering to last year’s
The Demons of Ludlow. This year, they were bringing us
Spiders, the 2000 Nu Image creature feature (from the studio that brought you
Raging Sharks,
Killer Rats and Tobe Hooper’s
Crocodile.
Spiders is a very late-90s/early-00s B-movie (which I’m pretty sure must have been a direct-to-video). Nicko and Joe had selected this one to fit with the festival’s sci-fi theme, and I must say I commend their choice.
Spiders has plenty of the tropes we love: space shuttles, genetic experiments, secret government facilities, conspiracies, a MASSIVE spider on a rampage. It’s a silly film – not the silliest, though, by a long stretch – but it also offered great opportunities for Nicko and Joe’s particular sense of humour. Like last time, I really liked the way they zoomed in on minutiae and drew our attention to it
ad absurdum (not that this took long… some of these details really are quite absurd). I think another reason why it’s a good choice of film for an event like this is that
Spiders doesn’t take itself completely seriously, and there’s a lot of it (particularly the ending) that’s intended to be OTT, high-spirited fun. Although Nicko and Joe mercilessly mocked and derided it, there were quite a few points where it felt like we were laughing
with the film, rather than laughing
at it. And this was a nice atmosphere to have for an event like this, as it made it feel much more like we were all in on the joke together. Plus… there were sweets.
And so to the big event… and I have no idea what to say about this one. What can I possibly write about
Alien that hasn’t already been said? As I said earlier in the post (and previous ones), this year’s festival had a sci-fi theme in honour of
Alien’s fortieth birthday, so it was only fitting that we got a screening of the film itself. The screening was introduced by Ron Shusett, co-author of the original story, and it was… well… given from space. Now, Abertoir weren’t able to actually send Shusett into orbit (though that would definitely have been something of a coup for them), but rather sent a device up and out of the earth’s atmosphere to ‘beam back’ a message to the big screen. It was a fun way to start the screening, though I suspect we were all so busy watching the weird mechanics of the message that we might’ve missed a little bit of what Shusett was saying! Still, it’s not like any of us didn’t know what to expect from the film! I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen
Alien, but this was the first time I’d seen it on the big screen. I always enjoy being able to see films I love on the cinema screen, as this is almost always how they were intended to be shown. Big-screen
Alien did not disappoint as an experience. I’m not saying that I noticed anything new or looked at the film in a different way, but it was much more immersive and gripping than watching it on the telly at home. I don’t really have a lot more to say –
Alien is a classic for a reason, or rather for many reasons, and it was good to just sit back and enjoy it.
So, sadly, we came to the final film of this year’s festival. The last screening was one that I know a lot of other festival-goers were looking forward to, but it wasn’t one I knew much about beforehand.
Color Out of Space is a – shock! horror! – Lovecraft adaptation, starring Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson. I’m not a Lovecraft fan at all, but I know that his work is widely considered difficult, if not impossible, to translate to the screen. I think I’ve only ever seen three adaptation of his stories:
Re-Animator,
Dagon and the
Masters of Horror episode ‘Dreams in the Witch-House’ (all directed by Stuart Gordon, as it happens). But, I like Nicolas Cage films (who doesn’t?), so I was quite happy to give this one a go. The film is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s story ‘The Colour Out of Space’, which is about a surveyor visited a site in Boston that is said to have been the location of a meteorite crash that did
bad things to the inhabitants. Stanley’s film adaptation follows this aspect of the plot, but it is told mostly from the perspective of the inhabitants themselves (particularly Nathan Gardner, played by Cage). Unlike in the original story, we
see the meteorite land, and then we watch the Gardner family unravel in its wake. (The ‘surveyor’ character is still present, in the form of Elliot Knight’s hydrologist character Ward Phillips.) I wouldn’t say this was my favourite film of the festival, but it was enjoyable to watch. Cage is absolutely in his element as the increasing unhinged Gardner, and the film’s look is stylish and compelling. I liked the slow-burn weirdness of the film’s first half more than the big reveals, but it was a fun way to end the evening and – indeed – the festival.
And so our second year at Abertoir came to an end. Once again, we thoroughly enjoyed our week in Aberystwyth, and we're really hoping work commitments will allow us to return next year for Abertoir 15.
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