Review: Mayhem Film Festival, Day Three

County: Japan

Director: Sion Sono

Starring: Reina Triendl, Mariko Shinoda & Erina Mano

Running Time: 85 mins

Tag is a Japanese film that was actually released in 2015 but has only recently been able to be released in the UK. It now tours film festivals and opened day three of Mayhem.  

It is absolutely bonkers. Tag feels like a film that has been inspired by a lot, both in terms of its content and its themes. The themes get so drilled into the viewer early on that they feel like clichés. However, despite that, they are still just as important today as they were fifty years ago.  I shan’t give too much away as, as mentioned before the picture started, it’s great to experience with little known about it. But, you won’t be able to tear your eyes from the screen for its sheer lack of predictability as you watch a young schoolgirl taken prisoner by the obscurities and malevolence of life itself. Hilarious and twisted, it’s worth a watch for morbid curiosity if nothing else. Matt Smith

After returning from a trip to the UN, renowned doctor Kim Jun-young arrives at the scene of a traffic accident to discover his young daughter his dead. No sooner as he made this realization, he is suddenly back on the plane, ready to start the day’s events again. Discovering that he is stuck in an endless loop of repeating the same tragic day, he teams up with paramedic Lee Min-chul, who also faces losing his wife in the same accident day after day, to discover what it is they’ve done in the past to cause it. Whilst A Day creeps toward melodrama on occasion, it is an interesting concept that is executed with verve, with Myung-min Kim in particular impressing in the lead role. Ashley Carter

County: USA

Director: Ana Asensio

Starring: Ana Asensio, Natasha Romanova & David Little

Running Time: 80 mins

A true gem. We follow a foreign resident of New York trying to make a living without a visa. It’s a very current look at how foreign people are treated when they move overseas and the crushing reality of the troubles they have to deal with can be felt by everyone who watches it.   It’s a very tender film, but in a sense like your friend is getting pushed farther and farther along this lake of thin ice that you know has to smash in any moment. The suspense that is built is difficult to shake off, and yet the film ends with a slap across your face and leaves you lying in the middle of a street. A fantastic film of real life horror that keeps you thinking back and further back to try and make sense of how something like this can happen to begin with. Matt Smith

The short film showcase was the initial purpose of Mayhem film festival upon its inception - and this year's line up contained something for every sensibility. Interestingly, many of the films used comedy to quickly endear themselves to the horror hungry audience, and this proved to be a sure tactic for winning the audience's approval this year. 

To start the showcase was US horror/comedy Don't Ever Change directed by Don Swaynos, which would whet the audiences appetite for humour. A reunion between a woman and her estranged daughter is interrupted by a man with an unusual request: for the woman - old now, but an infamous murderer in her youth who has done her time in prison and seemingly wishes to lead a normal life now she is free - to murder him, simply for the honour of being killed by such a prolific figure, and for the sensational story her return to killing would cause. With her estranged daughter outside on the telephone, the woman looks suitably horrified at this bizarre request, retreating into the kitchen ...until she returns and gleefully hits him over the head with a blunt object, sharing his enthusiasm for the plan.

Due to the way it was shot, and where it was shot - a normal suburban house, neutral colours, completely un-stylised - the gore that is present is genuinely effective and it is difficult to be desensitised to it in this setting. As the blood from this wound starts to drip down his face as he is still conscious, kneeling down on all fours as he prepared to brace for the attack, the man seems to realise slightly that he is in pain and it's not as fun as he imagined, which is as starkly unsettling as horror violence gets. As the wound drips blood, the woman is in the kitchen searching for a knife to finish him off and the dialogue regarding water spots on the weapon being an issue is darkly hilarious. 

A similarly horrifying and comedic film was Feeding Time from the US, directed by Matt Mercer, which centres around a girl who has been recommended to baby-sit for a couple by a friend. As soon as she arrives at their house for the evening the couple that greet her at the door are overbearingly friendly, extremely odd and wearing goggles. She is left alone with the baby who is upstairs and instant messages her boyfriend from downstairs. The humour stems from this part of the film, as she messages her boyfriend 'I love you'. He begins to type a response, the three dots appearing, and then stops, which of course indicates only one thing about their relationship. 

The horror in the film emerges as after hearing an ominous thud from upstairs and investigating, she realises that there's no baby in the crib, only an empty cage with an unlatched door. Upon attempting and failing to ring the couple in the kitchen using her phone, she is attacked first by one, and then fatally, by a group of deformed baby-size monsters with sharp teeth and glowing blue eyes, created with convincing effects, and introduced by a genuinely effective and unexpected jump scare. As her phone is thrown from her possession, the film cuts to a close up of it, showing the eventual reply from the boyfriend - 'I know.'

After all films had played and I exited, there was one that was frequently praised, and that was horror comedy Blood Shed. A UK short film, this was my favourite of the group, with the title alone leaving me with a big idiotic grin before I'd even seen the thing. Director and writer James Moran and co-writer Cat Davies are clearly well versed in horror tropes and cliches, as they have created a film that unabashedly and daftly includes them in what is one big knowing wink to an audience that they know will be in on the joke.

The story is of a man called Jack, played by Shaun Dooley, who builds a shed from suspiciously cheap second hand parts, which results in the unexpected creation of a killer shed, that lures people (and pets) inside itself to their demise. Alongside his put upon wife, played by the well-known comedy actress Sally Phillips, the first instance of the shed's killer tendencies is when it eats the postman, and spews blood on to the couple as they watch, concerned about this startling development, but never hysterical or shocked enough for the film to wander into boring old realism. The casting of the two leads is excellent, but that is to be expected from the two experienced professional actors the film acquired. A highlight is the conversation between the pair as Jack peruses magazine 'Men's Tools', and discovers, as a result of nagging and interrogation from his wife, that the various parts he used to build the shed were debris from old orphanages and abandoned prisons and other stereotypically haunted locations, and were well-advertised as such in the magazine. Jack also casually recalls that their own house was build on an ancient Indian burial ground, which we know always spells trouble. The hilarity increases ever more when he reveals he has named the shed Bunty. In true horror form, he begins to be hypnotised by the shed and drawn to its evil, a la Jack Torrence in The Shining, which results in a love scene so ridiculous the whole room was in hysterics. The man really did love his shed. Gemma E. Finch

County: Netherlands

Director: Dick Maas

Starring: Mark Frost, Sophie van Winden & Victor Löw

Running Time: 108 mins

Long have audiences enjoyed the simple premise of a monster on the rampage, and Dick Maas' horror/comedy Prey was no exception, if the applause at the end of the screening was an indicator. The director himself was present for the screening, and there was a Q&A at the end of the film. To me, any questions I had when the film had finished were not about the film's content, as to look at this film with a clinical, dissecting eye would be unnecessary, at least in terms of determining whether it was logical and plausible film. Nobody can watch Prey and yearn too much for an explanation as to where the lion came from - the film gives none - as this is not a cerebral piece of cinema in which every plot detail needs to be sewn together in order for it to be classed as a successful film.

The plot is simply and unpretentiously centred around a lion on the loose in the streets of Amsterdam, and the people who try to stop it. This film wasn't as daft and divisive as Sharknado, and the horror elements genuinely stand up to serious scrutiny, while remaining a rough around the edges joy ride of gore and mayhem. Horror highlights include the deadly combination of a lion inside a tram, which is as satisfying as it is unlikely to ever happen, and the somewhat shocking death of a little boy at the swing park, who encounters the lion after he descends down the tube slide. His sister's attempt to climb up the slippery surface of the slide to escape the lion as she begins to lose her grip is genuinely tense and scary. 

For its £3m budget, the CGI lion and model is present in scenes just frequently enough so the film does not descend in to an overdrawn farce of expositional build up to save money on the lion effects. The film contains likeable characters, a testament to Dick Maas' script and the quality of the actors involved - the main protagonist is a zoo veterinarian called Lizzy who is refreshingly likeable and funny, not the usual female we see in films of this genre, who is purely there for titillation. She is accompanied by her useless, unfaithful but ultimately likeable boyfriend, who is a worthy source of comedy, however the main source appears in the form of Lizzy's ex-boyfriend Jack, as he arrives from England to hunt the lion. Brightly comedic and a bumbling Brit, his presence makes the humour somewhat simpler to access for the primarily British audience without missing a beat, as prior to his arrival the film was in Dutch with English subtitles. While I cannot speak in complete certainties, this may have been slightly detrimental to the film in this case, as vocal delivery is important in interpreting comedy. That is not to say the film got no laughs, however. A memorable scene is when a delivery driver is on the phone arguing with his boss, who calls his mother a whore - the driver’s call is interrupted as he is attacked by the lion. After this, the film cuts to the abandoned phone with the oblivious boss still on the line, continuing to insult the driver’s aunts and grandma. Juvenile and daft, unpretentious and gore soaked, this is horror at its most joyous. I must add, LeftLion would never intentionally have a positive bias towards something lion related. Gemma E. Finch

County: Italy

Director: Dario Argento

Starring: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini & Flavio Bucci

Running Time: 92 mins

After arriving at a prestigious dance school Suzy finds there’s a lot more going on than a couple of plies and some pirouettes. In fact murder, a coven of witches and other nefarious activities are the order of the day in the remastered 1977 Argento masterpiece. It’s easy to see how influential this film has been on films from Scream to The Love Witch, and rightly too, as it’s a neon soaked masterpiece with the creepiest (and loudest) score and a whole host of trippy sets pieces and camera tricks. The remastered film is currently on tour, so if you haven’t seen it yet track it down as soon as possible… before the inevitable slaughter by next year’s remake. Penny Reeve