Back to Frightfest... The worst film of the festival: 'Inbred'

Now, don't get me wrong, I am totally up for an un-PC, black comedy/horror that, for instance, dictates that all northerners are inbred, cannibal racists. However, when dealing with such a broadly bad-taste topic, the persons in charge of scripting must have more intelligence and maturity than an adolescent trying to impress their friends with racist and stereotypical humor. I do not believe this film or anyone working on it to be racist  though I will say that their grasp of creating comedy out of the foul is at best minimal and incredibly immature. Dire scripting and ethical debates aside, the acting and directing all round is poor and unambitious, creating a total lack of sympathy for characters you are meant to care for when the imposing threat of being made into scratching looms. To its credit (at a push), Inbed does have plenty of creative gore. Though despite being the gore hound that admittedly I am, I found the violence to be unpleasant and puerile. This effect on me most likely stems from what I see as hateful characters and feebly handled topics. This is a filmically trite waste of time and resources, that instead of making me feel gleefully satisfied, left a nasty taste in my mouth and a bizarre sense of intellectual nausea in my mind.                    

The people's free state of Portobello - Portobello Film Festival

My volunteering at Portobello Film Festival has come to an end but it was great. At the absolute polar opposite to Frightfest, mainly showing shorts and all. But the atmosphere and personality was great. Very street. Very hip. Annoyingly, I didn't get to see all I could/should have but met loads of people with great works and opinions. Of what I did see, my favorite short was called, brilliantly, "Il Garibaldi senza barba" (The Beardless Garibaldi) which, also brilliantly, is up on youtube for everyone to see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_zPePfYzGY

The best of Film 4 Frightfest 2009 - 'The Woman'

'The Woman' by Lucky McKee was somewhat of an unknown commodity to me as I had not yet heard of the kerfuffle it caused at this year's Sundance. So it came as a total surprise when I was confronted with a film that made me question the nature of humanity and the position of male dominance in the world even today.  This film will be deemed controversial as it does confront the audience with questions that people will find uncomfortable, just as I did. Admirably, the film never pretends it has answers to questions that are far bigger that the sum of its parts. Instead it managed to burrow itself into my mind and make me question myself in a way that very few films have done in the last decade.  In this new millenium, among films of this ilk, only 'Martyrs' by Pascal Laugier has been similarly provocative.