Plenty of high spirits at Paracinema 2024
Derby Quad’s celebration of the weird and wonderful, Paracinema, returned to its original May timeslot this year, with four days of short films, international previews, anniversary screenings and dark, often funny, features.
Kicking off day one, we got the Strange Visions short film programme. The Concierge at the Sunrise Inn, directed by Calum Weir and written by Joe Dore, was a great indicator of the quality we’d see over the next few days. Sam MacGregor plays the titular concierge, stuck in a sleepless loop as he tries to maintain the hotel. While there are moments of humour at the start, the arrival of a late-night guest (Diana Feng) sees the film take a sharp left turn into something darker and more emotive, with excellent performances from both leads.
Michael Bartolomeo’s Fed is an inventive stop-motion short, following a chef (Kirra Hughes) who is tackling personal pressures and a fussy food critic (Angelica Gomez). The stop-motion is very impressive, but this was a little too light to make a real impression. The same could be said for Re-Birth, written and directed by William Brooke, which feels like an out-of-context clip from a longer film. There are good performances, but the script felt cliched and the story never got out of second gear.
The shorts programme concluded with Tobias Enevoldsen’s Lovecraftian short Tranquilizer, which just about stays on the right side of repetitive, and showcases some impressive, but restrained use of CGI. There’s a decent atmosphere and a dark, ambiguous ending.
The first feature was Amanda Nell Eu’s debut Tiger Stripes, a Malaysian-language body horror film that has made headlines after being censored in Malaysia while simultaneously being put forward as the country’s Oscar nomination. Eu successfully overcame clear budget limitations to tell an affecting coming-of-age story about a girl starting her period while at a conservative all-girls school.
The performances from the three young leads (Zafreen Zairizal, Deena Ezral and Piqa) are excellent, and Eu balances the light body horror with commentary on misogynistic views of menstruation. It runs a little long but this is an assured debut that tackles culture and gender politics in a clever way and should be discussed in the same breath as Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
The first night ended with a 25th anniversary screening of The Blair Witch Project which I’ve reviewed in full (click the link here), which tied in nicely with a talk from Sarah Appleton on the second day. Appleton, who has directed The Found Footage Phenomenon and the upcoming The J-Horror Virus, both for Shudder, presented a host of clips covering the genre from its very beginnings with Orson Welle’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, through Powell’s Peeping Tom and Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, some lesser known experiments with the genre, including the 1988 Japanese horror Psychic Vision: Jaganrei, and finally the explosion of found footage films that have continued to permeate cinema since The Blair Witch Project.
With so much to get through, Appleton couldn’t stop to focus on any one thing, but she made several interesting points about how found footage subverts the horror genre. Instead of rooting for the lead characters, we watch found footage with the knowledge that these people are already dead. While originally used by directors like Michael Powell to make the audience complicit in the violence on screen, this has now been watered down to a morbid curiosity, with the viewer seeing the scares through the eyes of the lead.
There were a few issues with the shorts programme on the second day, with Eiichi Takahashi’s Sakura cutting out halfway through, and Jimi Holmberg’s Genre Hopper appearing with no subtitles. This meant that the Dead Funny programme was a very British affair, kicking off with the stellar Free Spirits from George Moore (with co-writers Stuart Armstrong and Ben Bovington-Key). Spencer Jones stars as an introverted reverend who finds himself caught between a conservative village council and a nudist camp haunted by a poltergeist. There are some great visual gags alongside the strong performances, making this a genuine highlight of the festival.
There were also plenty of laughs in Collection Only from Alun Rhys Morgan. Mixing some very funny dialogue with some particularly gory practical effects, this will make people think twice about any ‘collection only’ items on Freecycle. RoButler was another Welsh effort, this time from James Button, made in just 48 hours, and was a very silly, but entertaining eight minutes as a mail-order robotic butler causes havoc for an overworked call centre employee. Even shorter was Tony Hipwell’s two minute The Lure, which honestly has to be seen due to its length but does a lot in just 120 seconds.
Craig Theiman’s Suicide for Beginners continued the comedy-horror theme, taking its incredibly dark premise of a man writing a suicide note for the girl he is in love with, and letting it spiral as the body count starts to build. There are some great performances here, with cameos from Sid Haig (his last role) and Corey Feldman, and a standout central sequence that provides ample laughs and gore in equal measure.
Things took a turn for the serious with Zarrar Kahn’s Urdu-language horror In Flames which follows a young woman (Ramesha Nawal, putting in an incredible, vulnerable performance) and her mother (Bakhtawar Mazhar) as they cope with the death of the family patriarch and find themselves haunted by ghosts of the past.
This was an excellent debut from Kahn, perfectly balancing the realistic household drama, the conservative, patriarchal values of Pakistan and the supernatural elements. Not focusing on scares, it focuses on building real tension until its satisfying payoff.
The audience will have had severe genre whiplash, moving from In Flames to a screening of Repo! The Genetic Opera, held in association with the Cult Film Club. This very silly rock opera managed to pull together a fairly decent cast, including Alexa Vega, Anthony Head and Sarah Brightman, but is a tonal mess, with nearly every cast member giving a performance that clashes with their co-stars, dodgy CGI even by 2008 standards, and some pretty poor songs.
In his introduction, Cult Film Club host Johann Chipol noted that the film was based on a one-act play focused on the Graverobber (Terrance Zdunich), something that’s abundantly clear as the only real highlight of this is the Graverobber’s Zydrate Anatomy track. Thank Christ we didn’t get the proposed trilogy.
Rounding out the second day was Chad Ferrin’s HP Lovecraft’s The Old Ones. While obviously influenced by Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’s 1980s Lovecraft adaptations, with its practical effects, humour and gore, this was a far more in-depth picture. Ferrin has a clear love for the source material, and the script is steeped in Lovecraftian lore.
It means that while audiences can enjoy the film passively, following Russel Marsh (Robert Miano) and Gideon (Benjamin Philip) on their mission to reverse the acts of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, understanding a lot of the context requires a much deeper knowledge of Lovecraft’s work.
It certainly won’t be for everyone, but this mix of B-movie visuals and literary scriptwriting struck the right chord to mark the halfway point of Paracinema.
Matthew Tilt
