Mayhem Film Festival: Day Three - Part Two

Michael Berryman in One Please

Scary Shorts: In May 2005, this was all the festival consisted of - Chris and Steve maintain that they want to keep it a central part of Mayhem. Short films have even more of a presence this year, after Astron-6's Shorts Showcase on Thursday and Sunday's The ABCs of Death 2. This year's Scary Shorts selection was not as top notch as it has been in the past, but there were definitely a couple of corkers.

Call Girl. Starring Laurence R. Harvey of The Human Centipede 2 and The Editor fame, all from the POV of a video chat. Filmmaker Jill Sixx Gevargizian packs in plenty of twists and turns for a one shot six minute film, in an effective and tongue in cheek way.

Metamorphosis. A really nicely shot UK short from Robert Nevitt, about the possible side effects of participating in a medical trial, all from the POV of one unfortunate victim.

Baskin. This Turkish entry, directed by Can Evrenol, clocked in at eleven and a half minutes and, although full of plenty of weirdness and gore, was a rather boring and nonsensical affair.

6 Shooter. A Nottingham entry from director David Wayman about six friends who drink shots from a bottle of mysterious green alcohol. Things do not end well.

Box Room. A UK short from Michael Lathrop, in which a reclusive boy finds a, well, erm...vagina in the wall of his bedroom. Being a teenage boy, he quickly moves from sticking a pencil in it, to, well – you can guess. In terms of special effects, this is excellently executed, but the whole concept was a little ridiculous.

Mr Dentonn. A Spanish short film from Ivan Villamel - with a strangely similar idea to that of The Babadook, but without the same level of freakiness - in which a mum reads a story to her son, that comes true. The design and effects are great but it definitely felt like a preview for a larger film than its own complete short. 

The Muck. A US short set in the eighties, from the ironically named Tony Wash, in which a woman has a bath, with horrific consequences...Plenty of interesting eighties props and a suitably disgusting climax.

I Am Monster. A short at over seventeen minutes, from filmmakers Lori Bowen and Shannon Lark, in which Vivienne shows her fetish for sex with corpses at the morgue. Perhaps a bit much, but the second half is reasonably humourous. Kind of. 

One Please. A great looking Jesse Burks short film, about an ice cream van (manned by Michael Berryman). Berryman asks for another form of payment, rather than money, for the lollies on offer.

Colera. One of the best films of the bunch. An angry mob, armed with pitchforks and shotguns, chase off a deformed guy, presumably with Cholera. A clever look at fear, intolerance and violence and how it can make things much worse.

The Marionette. Another local entry, this time from Jack Lindley, with some nice images of a full size human marionette and the grisly way in which it was created.

Invocation. Robert Morgan brings an amazing mix of animation and live action in this film about a guy who drops some of his own blood in a camera before filming – with hilarious, and gory, consequences.

The Stomach. Another of the best films in the selection and certainly a different take on speaking to the dead. Great design, effects, and story from UK filmmaker Ben Steiner.

ReVulva. A very short short about the perils of letching at women. Harry Wilding.

The Canal

The Canal: The penultimate film of Mayhem’s Saturday rosta was The Canal and we got a quick introduction from the writer and director, Ivan Kavanagh. He explained that he had wanted to make a film that was like a nightmare that got worse and worse, and one that would stay with you for days, if not weeks, after viewing. Well okay then – there’s a challenge.

David, a film archivist, lives with his very beautiful wife and their cute five-year-old lad in what is a rather lovely old house. So, good job – check. Gorgeous family and home – check.  Nice friends – check. Well, you can’t be in a film with all those nice things and not have a storm of unpleasantness brewing in a corner somewhere. Let’s look at this a bit closer. Oh, your house is old… well, someone is going to have died there then. That can’t ever be good. Your wife’s hot and she’s always working late… hmm, she probably gets quite a bit of attention from one or two male colleagues. Yeah, the picture looks less rosy now.

So all is not what it initially appears and as the pretty picture of family life starts to crack, so does David’s mind. After being given a reel of film at work that shows footage of the aftermath of murders that took place in his house, the murderer starts to prey on him and it becomes hard to tell what is real, a haunting or just plain madness.

The tension and ill feeling in The Canal  does certainly build to a crescendo and you watch as everything unravels for David and his family, knowing that regardless of whether it’s his mind or reality that is causing the events, it’s not going to end well. I won’t give anything away, but the ending is quite shocking and Kavanagh has succeeded in creating a film that stays with you after the lights in the cinema go up.

Relying more on psychological torment than easy jumps, and not showing too much of the ghost – that almost always ruins it – he strikes a good balance in a genre that has been explored for decades. Although The Canal won’t go down in history as one of the greats of modern ghost stories, with its solid performances and well-crafted shots, it certainly holds its own. Ali Emm.

Stagefright

StageFright:Aquarius: Any film that begins with Chris ‘Mayhem’ Cooke interpretive dancing his take on a film is a good indicator of how much fun a film is going to be.

The 1987 film, the directorial debut of Michele Soavi (Dellamorte Dellamore), falls between a slasher flick and a giallo, genre-wise. Stylish, with hints of his mentor, Dario Argento, throughout, Soavi makes an impressive first movie - even if it is pretty cheesy, in the way only eighties horror movies can be.  

StageFright begins as a group of actors get together in a theatre one night to rehearse what seems to be an erotic musical, under the watchful eye of a very demanding director. Upon hurting her ankle, lead actress Alicia (Barbara Cupisti, who stars in various Argento and Soavi films) is taken to a nearby asylum to beg a doctor to take a look at it. Not the smartest move on a cold, stormy night with a recently captured killer residing in the very same hospital they visit, but I suppose we’ll let her off, seeing as she has no idea she’s in a slasher film. As Alicia gets looked at the killer, nicknamed ‘The Night Owl’ sneaks into her car and is taken back with them to the theatre.

As the actors are picked off one by one, they start to turn against each other, as unbeknownst to them the guy walking around in the owl mask is the killer, and not just another member of the cast. Will the actors work out the mystery before they’re all killed off?

Insane, dreamlike and completely hilarious StageFright is all that you could want from an eighties slasher, big hair and all. It was definitely a film that got me ‘right between the eyes’. Penny Reeve.

Scary Shorts, The Canal and StageFright: Aquarius were shown as part of Mayhem Film Festival on Saturday 1 November 2014 at Broadway Cinema.