Mayhem Film Festival 2014: Day Two

Coherence

Coherence: An excellent start to Friday night’s Mayhem festival, Coherence - directed by James Ward Byrkit - is a brilliant, suspenseful film which is as hard to define as it is to review; without giving the plot away, at least. A dinner party on the eve  a comet passes through the atmosphere sets a chain of events into motion that is both chilling, claustrophobic and confusing. As the night draws on tensions start to rise, old stories surface and quantum physics takes a huge dump on the four couples sitting down for a civilised evening.

Coherence is a low budget piece which was shot over just five nights, and excitingly was largely improvised, with the characters being thrown curveballs by the production team throughout. This lends a real air of suspense to the narrative, as the actors are as surprised about the plot as we are - a very Hitchcockian move.

The film feels claustrophobic throughout thanks to some pretty tight close ups, which during the start of the film makes the tone intimate, but by the end adds an oppressive, uncomfortable feel to the happenings. The colour palette similarly starts out as intimate but becomes more edgy and brighter as the film progresses.

Emily Baldoni is brilliant as lead character Em; a wet and needy girlfriend who comes into her own towards the end of the film - Baldoni’s sense of pacing during the improvised script is just great. Starring alongside her is Buffy’s Nicholas Brendon, who is well cast as Mike, who is hosting the dinner party with his wife, Lee (Lorene Scafaria). Bringing the humour that was so prevalent in his Buffy days makes Brendon’s change from loveable down-on-his-luck actor to paranoid alcoholic all the more palatable. Hugo Armstrong is also great as burly Hugh.

Coherence is described as a ‘hall of mirrors’ which is very accurate, however it’s hard to explain the plot without giving everything away. It’s also a cross-genre film, spanning sci-fi, thriller and horror territory which will definitely leave you reeling and with a good few more questions than you enter the screening with. Penny Reeve.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown: Having not seen the 1976 film of the same name and having missed the first twenty minutes of this remake/sequel screening (totally thought it was on at 8.30, rather than 8:00), I suppose I am not in the best position to write the most objective of reviews here. But let’s give it a go anyway...

The original movie was a semi-documentary based on the real-life mysterious killings that terrorized the people of Texarkana in 1946. The murders became known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, claiming five lives and injuring more. The only description of the killer was of a hooded man and the murders remain unsolved to this day.

This new version is set sixty-five years after the killings in the same strange half-Texas, half-Arkansas town of Texarkana, in which the seventies film is played annually. The moonlight murders begin again and young student Jami (Addison Timlin) is caught up in the middle of it all after her boyfriend is killed (apparently - this happens in the first twenty minutes).

There is a smidgen of originality to the story, in that its background story is actual history and it has the kind of film within a film thing. However, it seems perfectly content to just plod along with the odd bit of gore, scares, sex, and mystery before a finale reveal that feels a bit...well, done before.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown is, by no means, awful, and it has intrigued me to see the first one, but  it definitely felt like the B movie in a masked killer double-bill, of which the main event was a classic. Harry Wilding.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Who will survive and what will be left of them? goes the tagline for Tobe Hooper’s classic, originally banned, horror. Mayhem chose to show it this year, as it is the film’s fortieth anniversary in 2014.

After opening with the John Larroquette narration, in which he apparently received a marijuana joint as payment, advising that the film is a true story (it’s not), we meet the young group of friends who are about to run into a bit of chainsaw-themed trouble.

In terms of onscreen gore, it is amazingly tame, even compared with most of the films we have already seen at Mayhem this year. There is certainly an original and haunting atmosphere, which was lacking in the remakes, that leaves you as the audience member horribly unsettled (in a good way). It is actually quite amazing that Tobe Hooper intended to make the film a PG originally – so much for that plan...

Yes, a large percentage of the film is made up of screaming and of running; yes, it isn’t Citizen Kane; yes, it isn’t even Hooper’s best work – however, there is no doubt to how important a film this was, and is - its classic status has not been reached flippantly. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains genuinely terrifying – coupled with its dark dark humour - even forty years on and, most probably, beyond. Harry Wilding.

Coherence, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were shown as part of Mayhem Film Festival on Friday 31 October 2014 at Broadway Cinema.