Mayhem Film Festival 2014: Day Four - Part One

Predestination

Predestination: The first film on Sunday was a bit of a mind-screw – not one to watch with any form of coherence if you’d had a few jars the night before. Those Mayhem boys like playing with us though, so a screenful of people took their seats to attempt to understand the sci-fi brilliance that is Predestination.

Ethan Hawke takes the lead role as ‘The Bartender’ a temporal agent who hops through time attempting to stop crimes before they happen. The mission he has in hand is to stop the terribly, awfully named ‘Fizzle Bomber’ from setting off a bomb which will flatten a city for blocks and kill thousands of people.

Armed with what seems to be a violin case, which he programmes to jump through time, Hawke meets up with a hermaphrodite who has a story to tell. As they sit in a bar and he is regaled of the events of The Unmarried Mother’s long and interesting life, The Bartender has secrets of his own to tell.

Focusing on the idea of predestination, as you may have guessed from the title, the film drags us around the idea of our own futures and what happens if our story is already chosen for us.

After the screening we all walked out pretty dazed and confused, though as with Primer, or Mayhem’s Friday night sci-fi screening Coherence, there will definitely need to be another viewing of the film to pick up all those little nuances I’m sure we missed first time around. Penny Reeve.

The ABCs of Death 2: A follow up to the great idea of getting a director(s) for each letter of the alphabet to make a short film about death; some playing it for laughs, some going more serious. With such an idea, the whole collection is bound to be a mixed bag, but both have been of generally consistent high quality.

The films started off very consistently high, with A to H being some of the best. A is for Amateur, from E.L. Katz, is about a meticulously planned hit not quite going to plan, followed by the hilarious B is for Badger (directed by and starring Julian Barratt) about a wildlife documentary going awry. C is for Capital Punishment (directed by Julian Gilbey) goes the serious route, with an excellent spotlight on the anarchic form of justice. D is for Deloused, which is directed by Robert Morgan, who made Invocation that was screened in yesterday’s Scary Shorts, is another weird and wonderful and gross stop motion animation. E is for Equilibrium (directed by Alejandro Brugués) goes back to the humour route, following a couple of heavily bearded guys on a deserted island who have their friendship tested when a beautiful woman washes ashore.

Back to the serious, with Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s (of Rabies and Big Bad Wolves fame) F is for Falling about an Israeli female soldier caught in a tree by her parachute being found by an armed Palestinian boy. G is for Grandad (directed by Jim Hosking) is hilariously bizarre, with a weird young man discovering his Grandad has been sleeping within his mattress. H is for Head Games is an animation directed by Bill Plympton, in which a man and a woman kiss, creating some surreal images in a power struggle between them.

Other top notch ones are M is for Masticate, which is directed by Robert Boocheck and was actually the winner of the competition to find the 26^th director (in which Nottingham’s Holomax, with M is for Merry Christmas only just missed out on) – an overweight, hairy, and very happy man runs down a street in super slow motion and attempts to eat someone; really very good. U is for Utopia (directed by Vincenzo Natali) follows an unattractive man being singled out in a mall full of seemingly perfect people – a nice dark twist on the utopian dream.  W is for Wish is directed by Astron-6’s Steven Kostanski and is predictably brilliant – it starts off as a cheesey advert about a kids toy, until the two kids wish themselves into the fantasy world, and basically shit gets real...and violent. Z is for Zygote (directed by Chris Nash) was a great ending to the film, in which a pregnant woman staves off birth for thirteen years – of course, the child grows at the same rate as if they had been born; funny, dark, and excellent effects.

Julian Barrett in B is for Badger

Other good ones (but weren’t quite top notch) were I is for Invincible (directed by Erik Matti) shows, in a truly OTT-style, a family tries to kill the matriarch for her inheritance. J is for Jesus (directed by Dennison Ramalho) is a well made film about a young man being violently martyred for being a homosexual. O is for Ochlocracy (mob rule), directed by Hajime Ohata, is a great idea, in that people are sentenced to death for murder by a courtroom full of zombies – good, but should have played it for more obvious laughs. P is for P-P-P-P SCARY! (directed by Todd Rohal) has one of the best titles of the bunch and is a wonderfully strange homage to black and white comedy in which three stuttering prisoners encounter a strange man and a baby. Q is for Questionnaire (directed by Rodney Ascher) is a humourous tale of the perils of being a smartarse. S is for Split (directed by Juan Martinez Moreno) is a brutal look at certain people’s twisted idea of jealousy and justice.

Some of the films that weren’t bad, were K is for Knell (directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper), in which a woman experiences the effects of a black liquid that turns people into killers. R is for Roulette (directed by Marven Kren), where two men and a woman play Russian roulette while hidden in a basement – suitably tense, but I couldn’t make out why they were doing it (knowing this might  have made it better or worse, I am not sure). V is for Vacation (directed by Jerome Sable) is cleverly shot through a mobile phone video call - one man is on the phone to his girlfriend and his mate steals the phone to show her what he has been up to. X is for Xylophone (directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo) shows a babysitter (Béatrice Dalle) overreact a little bit to a child's xylophone playing. Y is for Youth (directed by Soichi Umezawa) shows a young girl violently fantasising about the deaths of her abusive family, which was nicely executed in places, but perhaps a bit OTT.

A few I didn’t quite get on with, were L is for Legacy (directed by Lancelot Imasuen), in which a ritual sacrifice goes wrong in Africa. N is for Nexus (directed by Larry Fessenden) shows a few different story strands on Halloween, which all converge in a bad way and T is for Torture Porn (directed by Jen and Sylvia Soska) shows a woman being treated misogynistically at an audition by Astron-6’s Conor Sweeney, but when asked to strip, reveals tentacles where her vagina should be - like ReVulva in yesterday's Scary Shorts, this was a little ham-fisted in its portrayal of feminism.

So, truly high quality overall, with only several duds – and even they had their moments. Bring on The ABCS of Death 3! Harry Wilding.