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THE PAIN IN SPAINSlasherama's Jason Arnopp reports from an excellent Spanish horror and fantasy festival...
The Old Town is a fantastic grid of narrow streets full of restaurants, shops and bars. Slasherama finds some metal-friendly CD shops (try Donostia Rock), plus a tiny boozer at the junction of Calle de Iņego and Calle San Juan, where they play Manowar and the beer is 12.6% proof. None more metal! The well-organised event's countless full-length and short movies are divided between two cinemas - the larger, 500-capacity theatre (Teatro Principal) largely concentrating on new titles, while the 180-seater (Cine Principe) showcases classic fare. And porn. Which we'll get to in a minute. Highly considerate to non-Spanish attendees, the festival always shows movies with English subtitles when necessary - it's not unusual to watch a film with two sets of subtitles stacked beneath it. 
The main culture shock, inside the main cinema, is the amount of heckling while films are playing. An anonymous voice yells something in Spanish, then more often than not, everyone laughs uproariously. Imagine that in England - there'd be murder. "The shouting doesn't happen in normal Spanish cinemas," laughs one of the festival's organisers, Carlos J Plaza. "We always say that our event is a party, where people go looking for fun. It's a tradition here."The main cinema generally shows the more current titles, while a smaller, secondary theatre this year shows (a) Hammer Horror films like Plague Of The Zombies and The Curse Of Frankenstein and (b) hardcore porn with horrific overtones. SFX caught one of the latter movies, Apocalipsis Vampira, and can testify that you didn't miss anything. It takes quite a talent to make vampire porn Despite the fine array of European movies on offer - all with English subtitles - the best film I catch all week comes from the States. You'll know all about Saw by now: it's a film which has been rightly praised and has already spawned an upcoming sequel. Centring on a sadistic killer who makes people face horrendous, life-threatening dilemmas, paradoxically in order to make them appreciate life, it's a nasty delight with one of those climaxes that makes the whole audience gasp. 
The anthology movie I Tre Volti Del Terrore (rough translation: Three Faces Of Fear) is the second directorial offering from Sergio Stivaletti, the Italian make-up maestro responsible for much of the mayhem in splat-fests like Demons and Creepers (and who is a guest at the festival in 2005). It's a Dr Terror's House Of Horrors-style anthology tale with some brilliantly old-fashioned prosthetic gore, if little regard for sensible storytelling. It plays as though it was made 20 years ago, in a good way - even the corny dialogue and creaky plotting are present and correct.Stivaletti's here at the festival, along with Gabe Bartolos, whose exhibition room demonstrates various frighteningly realistic props, including severed heads from the Insane Clown Posse video, Bowling Balls. The French movie Atomik Circus is a lot of fun, with some seriously impressive imagery. Star-shaped creatures invading Earth, you say, with an appetite for human flesh, you say? Where do I sign? The Spanish sci-fi comedy Tempus Fugit deals with time travel. Our heroic nerd is told by a Terminator-esque time traveller that he can save the world from destruction - and all he has to do is *not* buy a packet of eucalyptus drops at his local news stand. It's over-long, but fans of 'time paradox' mayhem will love it. One of the week's most controversial flicks is the cannibalistic serial killer biopic Evilenko, starring Malcolm McDowell as a Russian mentalist. It starts off well, but McDowell is saddled with amateur thespians and a weak script. Way better is a screening of the 1951 sci-fi gem The Day The Earth Stood Still. Very cool robot. 
The Korean entry Spider Forest offers a more subtle approach to horror, hinging on the idea that people who die unremembered turn into spiders and live in a forest (see what they did with that title?) until someone thinks about them. La Peau Blanche (or White Skin) is a similarly classy French-Canadian effort, taking an off-kilter and occasionally bloody look at vampires and racism. The Belgian shocker Calvaire: The Ordeal, meanwhile, is as subtle as a hammer to the skull. Telling the story of a sensitive singer-performer whose van breaks down in the country, it eventually descends into torture, male rape and other potentially Daily Mail-baiting, post-Deliverance fare. Dead Birds is one of the festival's best and creepiest entries. Not for everyone, due to its brooding, slow-burn style, it sees a bunch of 19th century American soldiers-turned-crooks holing up in a house with their stolen gold, only to terrorised by the place's supernatural legacy. Boasting a unique feel, plus a disorientating combination of atmosphere and gore, this one's well worth checking out. Japanese director Miike Takashi proves himself as prolific as ever by having two movies on show at the event. The first, Llamada Perdida (Western title: One Missed Call) is an abysmal meld of Ringu and Final Destination, which Takashi himself admits he did for the money. Zebraman is more fun, being a cartoony action-fest with a superhero kitted out in - you guessed it - black and white stripes. The festival also holds short films in high regard, running various competitions each year. Among the best we saw were Las Viandas (a brilliant Monty Python-style horror-comedy, in which a restaurant diner is forced to drastically over-eat, in order to please the award-winning chef), El Ciclo (pure X-Files horror about a man/alien hybrid) and the British bloodbath Teabreak, in which a succession of humans are decapitated on a moving conveyor belt. Delightful. I'm definitely returning to this year's festival. Maybe see you there, hmmmm? Thanks to Jay Slater at Black Flame for introducing us to the festival. You can see Slater's own report on this event in a forthcoming issue of The Dark Side magazine. Keep an eye on this year's Horror and Fantasy Film Festival event (October 29-November 5, 2005) at the festival's official site. [Join Our Message Board] [Features Menu] [Back To Top] [Home] © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present |