Varous (director)
Various (studio)
18 (certificate)
(length)
28 August 2017 (released)
18 September 2017
Better Watch Out
Home Alone will give you some idea of where this is coming from but only so far as there’s a home invasion and there are minors involved. Otherwise this Christmas film (that can be watched any time of the year) has a few more surprises and is far nastier.
Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) has babysitting duties for 12-year-old Luke (Levi Miller) who has a bit of crush on her. So, pizzas are ordered, or are they, and Luke hits the Champagne for Dutch courage. This is all disturbed by a brick through the window, and someone creeping about around the house. This sets off a chain of events that sees DeJonge getting some horrible treatment. Add in Luke’s nerdy friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould) and later on Ashley’s boyfriend Ricky (Aleks Mikic) and you have the set up for what looks like a classic home-based horror although it is anything but.
Chris Peckover has really pulled something off with Better Watch Out as he loads on the Christmas paraphernalia, for there not to be that much good will. Luke’s parents (Virginia Madsen and Patrick Warburton) are hardly full of festive cheer and Luke himself is a creepy kind of guy. It also plays on the mind as well as the visceral, as things start to fall in to place, with some characters not being quite what they are, it asks the audience to try and work with their twisted logic.
4/5
The Terror of Hallow’s Eve
The Terror of Hallow’s Eve is a tricky one. Straight off it’s not a bad film; with writer/director Todd Tucker at the helm, who has some experience with the horror genre, it wasn’t going to be. It just doesn’t hit all the notes and it has the look of a merchandise drive (The Trickster?) and a set up for a franchise, which initially niggled.
Tim (Caleb Thomas) is a shy boy who has an obsession with monsters, and with a bit of an over active imagination builds them in his home. This of course makes him a target for bullies, and he’s badly beaten up by one of them Brian (JT Neal) one day. So he prays to his works and gives life to his creations.
He manages to get Brian, his girlfriend April (Annie Read) – whom Tim likes and she has some sympathy for - and his idiot sidekicks to his home where they are confronted by demons and their own nightmares, come to life.
Tucker’s background in special effects is put to good use with a welter of neat practical effects that, like vinyl, seem to be in vogue at the moment. There’s a few references to the classics - Haddonfield Hospital, though doesn’t get carried away with that. It’s all fairly routine with the bullies, the shy boy and out of reach girl he likes, and a variation on the be-careful-for-what-you-wish-for theme.
It’s a perfectly good popcorn muncher of a movie for an evening and you aren’t too bothered about audience chatter because this film is going to attract that crowd.
3/5
Tragedy Girls
Most definitely one of the films of the festival and pushing of the year. This vicious, very funny macabre observation of high school, social climbing and social media is reminiscent of Heathers and Scream, blending the formers observations on status, with the latter’s self-knowing blood-letting. A master class in mixing the brutal, with the subtle and asking ‘should we be laughing at this?’
High school seniors Sadie (Brianna Hilderbrand) and Makayla (Alexandra Shipp) have a website ‘Tragedy Girls’ that they use to tracks killers, true crime, and also boost their social status. The point is to keep the ‘hits’ coming so to that end they are in luck that there’s a none too bright serial killer Lowell (Kevin Durand) ‘working’ in the area, whom they capture with the idea of learning off him.
He’s uncooperative so the pair set about their rivals in the popularity stakes, with a view to neutralising their threat to them. This works pretty well in that they kill them though as they look like accidents, there’s no kudos for the murder, which annoys them no end.
Within this murderous project there’s the usual high school tropes of prom-night, princesses and boyfriends. As the girls get deeper so they start to compete with each other leading to a break in the friendship. Which is resolved leading to a Carriesque prom night massacre.
There is glorious bad taste at almost every turn of Director Tyler Macintyre’s (co-written with Chris Lee Hill) riff on the pressures of high school, social media manipulation and those beholden to it. Crucially they’ve ensured that as funny as the girls are, it’s obvious they are monsters; constructs of all the worst of high-school traits, taken to a max, then twisted again and again.
4/5
