BIFF Scary Saturday

Second last day of the festival and I've got two late night movies lined up.

First up is Sinister. This is a scary movie, in the best traditional style of using a dark house, effective sound and a sense of foreboding to scare yourself.  The movie stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a man who writes those true crime novels which detail the how, who and why of real life crimes.  After a couple of flops he is chasing another big hit bestseller and thinks he's found the best chance after a family is murdered in their back yard and the youngest daughter is still missing.  Struggling financially and refusing to take a normal job, Ellison sees an opportunity to gain unique inspiration when the murder house goes on the market for a steal.  Not telling his wife and two young children about the fact they are moving into the murder house seems like a pretty bad idea.  And so it proves to be....

Almost from the first day that he sets up his home office and begins researching for the book, Ellison is drawn into the mysterious events after finding a box of home movies filmed on Super 8.  The movies are from different time periods and turn out to be much more than they first appear - they contain many clues to what is really going on.  But how did the movies get in the attic in the first place?  Who filmed them?  Why do creepy things keep happening?

I strongly recommend this movie if you like scary movies with a slight supernatural element.  I was truly creeped out in some scenes, to the point where I was squirming in my seat every time Ellison put on one of those movies (or it put itself on).  All the usual scary movie tropes are used in this film, but they are done really effectively to build tension and send a chill down your spine.  And if you don't believe me, take it from the girl 2 rows down who kissed her boyfriend, got up and left, not to return, after about 40 minutes.  This movie should be coming out at the cinema soon and I suggest you slot it into your schedule as it should be seen in a dark cinema.

Second movie tonight was Inbred which was promising to be a funny, gory splatterfest.  Instead what we got was a bit of a shocker.  Four young juvenile delinquents are taken to a secluded cottage in a small English village with two social workers for a bit of time away from society.  Unfortunately, escaping from a gang of THE most inbred, hillbilly, maniacal weirdos that inhabit the village proves a little too much of a team building activity for this bunch of misfits.

This movie is just bad and weird.  The person who has thought up the concepts for the manner of death (of both the city folk and the few inbred hillbillies they manage to take out) and the bizarro 'theatre' that the locals attend, is obviously a pretty twisted individual.  I don't normally mind weird or gory but for me this just didn't gel and it was hampered by some pretty poor acting all round.  The hillbillies are a cruel bunch of freaks and the city kids are a cruel bunch of misfits and the biggest problem is that I didn't feel sympathy for any of them so I really didn't care who lived or who died.  My recommendation: Avoid.