MAYHEM HORROR FILM FESTIVAL 2010

The Mayhem Festival in Nottingham returned over Halloween for an extended schedule of five days featuring a tasty mix of new and classic movies, short films and side attractions, ranging from stalls by FAB Press and The Monster Store to a laser maze and the Broadway Cinema's legendary Halloween Party - plus of course, the horror quiz by yours truly that this year seemed to reach a pinnacle of hardness - might have to dial it back next time! The event also took in a Halloween night devoted to ghost stories with live readings and classic TV broadcasts.

The event began on October 27th with a BAFTA presentation of understated ghost story The Awakening. This 1921-set tale was, like most ghost stories, a slow burn shocker, but it's one that actually improves with distance - I found it a little too ponderous at first, but as the weekend progressed, it's low key chills lingered in my mind. The BBC Films production might be better suited to television than cinema, but as a classic ghost story, it was pretty impressive. On hand to do a Q&A was director Nick Murphy.

Things took a decidedly left-field turn with The Theatre Bizarre, Severin's long-awaited, much discussed portmanteau movie from seven different directors. As you would expect with so many people involved, the results are a mixed bag. Personally, I enjoyed David Gregory's Sweets - a collision of John Waters, Curt McDowell, David Lynch and Peter Greenaway - Douglas Buck's remarkable The Accident (though it's not a horror story at all) and Buddy Giovinazzo's bleak I Love You, but found Richard Stanley's Mother of Toads too ordinary, Tom Savini's Wet Dreams too ham-fisted and Karim Hussain's Vision Stains entirely arrogant and self-indulgent. But notably, discussion over the weekend with friends and strangers alike revealed very conflicting opinions on the individual stories and the film as a whole, with people hating the stories I liked and liking the ones I hated. So certainly a divisive film... and arguably more an arthouse than grindhouse horror.

Friday opened up with an early evening screening of The Devil's Business to an impressively packed cinema. While this gangland horror film has been compared to Kill List, it's actually a very different and much better movie, with some audacious moments and a minimalist feel - for the most part having just two characters in one location - that works very well, thanks to some sterling performances and strong direction from Sean Hogan. I wasn't too keen on the ending, though to tell you why would be a major spoiler... but as a whole, this is a powerful, effective mix of dark horror and even darker humour. Hogan and producer Jennifer Handforf were on hand to discuss the film afterwards.

From the relatively sublime to the pretty ridiculous, The Wicker Tree saw Robin Hardy making on his third feature film, a sort of sequel, sort of retreat of his classic The Wicker Man. Often hilariously funny - sometimes deliberately so, often accidentally - the film takes the elements that made The Wicker Man so good and strangles them like a karaoke singer murdering classic tune. With awful characters, dreadful music and a story that had little of the subtlety and intelligence of Anthony Shaffer's writing for the original film, it felt a bit like a slap in the face with a dead fish. Christopher Lee makes an appearance so brief that I went to the toilet and missed it, and much of the acting is atrocious. I'm told it improves on further viewing, if only because you're no longer watching it is a state of shock. But I thought it was pretty dreadful - though still better than the American remake. Robin Hardy was on hand to discuss the film and threaten us with another sequel, but he couldn't convince me that this was anything other than a mad folly.

Friday night ended with Helldriver, the latest slice of Japanese pop-gore insanity from Sushi Typhoon. Normally, I enjoy this sort of thing as disposably over-the-top madness, but as a two hour assault at 11pm, it began to feel a bit much. After a while, I figured I needed to get away from the barrage of sound, visual lunacy and idiotic characters, and so I bailed on it to head to the bar for some convivial conversation. I'm sure I'll enjoy it on DVD.

Saturday saw things open up at noon with The Whisperer in Darkness. Made by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (!), the film makes a decent stab at recreating 1930s style horror, though the extended running time, CGI effects and crisp black and white visuals were very much of the present day; had it taken a Guy Maddin approach to the production values and lopped half an hour out of the story, it would have looked more authentic and been a tighter film. But this tale of alien visitors, sinister cults and visting sceptics was good fun nonetheless and a nice way to ease into a long day of movies!

Things took a bad turn with A Horrible Way to Die, which proved to be a horrible way to make a movie. You might associate out-of-focus, shaking camerawork with someone figuring out how to use a camcorder for the first time, but here it's apparently art. Add to this a non-linear narrative and you have the height of self-indulgent film-making. I'm sure director Adam Wingard felt very pleased with himself, but quite honestly, this was the worst film of the weekend - even without the godawful visual style, the serial killer tale was a mix of cliche and tedium as the central characters engage in their mind-numbingly boring lives between the occasional badly-filmed killing.

Thankfully, Saint came next - we've already reviewed it, and so I took a quick movie break to grab some food and catch up with the FAB Press guys before the much-anticipated Revenge: A Love Story. From the same team who brought us last year's excellent Dream Home, this had a lot to live up to, and sadly couldn't manage it. It starts well, but slowly disintegrates and can't seem to bring itself to end, with several false finales causing the film to drag on interminably. It wasn't the worst film of the event, but it was certainly the most disappointing.

After Revenge, my head was throbbing, and I was in no mood for the Scary Shorts. Much as I love short films, two hours of them - with the natural inconsistencies that will come from such an eclectic programme - begins to feel like hard work. However, the Strange Things associates who braved the selection assured that the high spots were mad crab-monster movie Decapoda Shock and (unsurprisingly) Banana Motherfucker, from the team who brought us last year's highlight Papa Wrestling. Masturbation and Seppuku film Miss Mishima seemed to split audiences and animated film Battenberg seemed to have its admirers.

While the shorts played, The Broadway was hosting its Halloween Party, attracting a mind-boggling selection of costumes that ranged from the amazing to the dreadful. But how could any party compete with the last attraction of the evening, Theatre of Blood? I've lost count of how many times I've seen this film, but it always feels fresh and entertaining, with Vincent Price on very top form offing a stellar cast of supporting actors in Shakespearian-inspired ways. Gory, funny and sometimes moving, it's a jewel in the crown of horror cinema, and it was great to see it projected in 35mm - and still in very watchable condition - in the Broadway's plush main screen.

After some post-film celebrations, there was barely time to return home and get some sleep before we were all back for more crazy Japanese horror in the form of Tomie: Unlimited. Less frantic than Helldriver (thankfully), it tells the story of schoolgirl Tomie, who is constantly killed by those she loves, but never quite seems to die. It's got some great atmospheric moments, some outrageous effects and the feel of vintage J-horror, and although it sometimes labours the point, the film was pretty good nonetheless.

Sunday afternoon's classic movie was Georges Franju's influential Eyes without a Face - still a potent shocker, albeit one I've seen a few times and so provided me with a chance to a quick break. For those who hadn't seen it though, this surgical horror film was a startling and impressive revelation, and the audience came out raving.

Little Deaths was next, and again, we've previously reviewed it. Watching again, I didn't find my opinion changing - it's still challenging, taboo-shattering stuff, and notably split the audience over which segment was the best.

The classic Ghostwatch was next - this 1992 TV shocker terrified audiences at the time and has never been repeated, so catching it here was a treat - though one parts of the audience did their best to spoil. Writer Stephen Volk introduced the film and pointed out, quite reasonably, that scares that would work on a small 1992 TV might seem less subtle on a large cinema screen, but the irritating hipsters who came and sat in front of us nonetheless found it hilarious that 'hidden' ghosts seemed only-too-visible, and that technical equipment twenty years ago now looks a bit clunky, or that TV presenters would behave like they did (and still would), or that someone described an under stair cupboard as a 'gloryhole' - perhaps funny once, but by the fourth mention accompanied by idiots laughing, it became quite annoying. The truth is that while inevitably dated, Ghostwatch still holds up very well and the continual laughter that spread through the cinema (one dickhead in front of me was chortling through a description of child abuse and murder, because after all, that's so funny) was a moment of shame for an audience - not the Mayhem hardcore, I would say - who you imagine consider themselves a cut above the multiplex hordes.

The main event ended with another ghost story, The Last Employee, an understated and fairly average story of a haunted office, and then led into my fiendishly difficult quiz. I was later told that the winning team had spent the year revising to avoid the humiliation of a low score, which is both admirable and sad...

Mayhem wound up with a special event on Halloween itself, where the bar was taken over for ghost stories, both live and on video. The former were in collaboration with Nottingham Writers Studio, with various local writers reading (or in one case performing) extracts from their works. Of course, being a good writer doesn't always make you the person to read your work aloud to others, and so this was a mixed bag of performances, though the tales themselves seemed decent enough - an extract never really telling you what the full novel will be like, admittedly. More interesting for me were the vintage BBC Ghost Stories - Robert Powell, Christopher Lee and Tom Baker reading stories by MR James and Ray Bradbury to an admirably silent, rapt and sometimes terrified audience (a girl sat near me clearly had a terror of spiders, and so the end of Lee's reading of James' The Ash Tree seemed a traumatic moment for her).

Then, it was time to end on a high note, with the last minute addition of The Human Centipede 2 (Final Sequence) - cut by the BBFC, but still very, very wrong. A feast of excessive gore, gleeful bad taste, almost Eraserhead levels of oddness and a self-referential tone that would make it a good pairing with Seed of Chucky or Wes Craven's New Nightmare, this is a marvellous film. The fact that it's (a) in black and white, (b) a satire on the 'monkey see, monkey do' fears of censors, (c) extraordinarily unreal, (d) doesn't exactly have a central character than people will identify with and (e) shows that imitating what you've seen on screen is a lot harder than the films make it look, should show why the BBFC's initial ban and subsequent cuts are so idiotic - and I can confirm that censor's press release description of the film was a massive misrepresentation. This is more Monty Python than snuff movie. It was, without question, the highlight of the event.You can read our full review here.

Of course, a festival works because it is more than the mere sum of its parts, and Mayhem becomes more and more fun every year simply because the event has such a good vibe - helped, of course, by a venue that allows film screenings, eating, drinking and shopping in one venue, but also because there is a relaxed friendliness about the whole event that is missing from some similar fests. With sideshows like Friday's live ghost hunting, the Laser Maze and the Matthew HOPkins Witchfinder GenerALE on tap, it feels more like a long party than a mere collection of films - and the fact that people return in greater numbers each year suggests it's not only me that thinks that. Of course, as the event's quiz master, you might expect me to be biased - but if Mayhem wasn't the most fun you could have over a long weekend, I wouldn't be doing it. If you missed out, shame on you - don't make the same mistake next year!

MAYHEM 2010 REVIEW