The All-Nighter: Community, Bad Meat And Livid

The first thing screened at Frightfest tonight was the trailer for new UK horror film Community, a housing-estate zombie film. Judging from the clips we saw, its heart is in the right place, but there’s nothing new in the staging, mise en scene or FX. I’m not going to hold my breath for this one, but I’d loved to be surprised.

The opening scenes of the first feature, Bad Meat, weren’t entirely dissimilar to Alex Chandon’s Inbred, screened at the August fest. Both set up casts of anti-social kids being packed away to get some character building life experience. Inbred went for soft-soap, UK-style social work but Bad Meat was consigning the kids to a kind of boot camp.

Sooner or later, context was irrelevant, however, and some of the titular bad meat came into play, spreading an infection and turning the rough, tough adults in charge of Camp Hardway into vomiting sex-obsessed sadist cannibals. Only the vomiting and cannibalism were new, however – they started as sex-obsessed sadists.

But this doesn’t have an Attack the Block-like grasp on its social metaphors, and it ends up being everything that film wasn’t: empty, arbitrary, boring, shoddily-made and ultimately forgettable.

The screenwriter was in attendance to tell us he’d never seen the film before and that his script had been hacked about significantly. One key addition was a kind of “Who will be the final girl?” guessing game that managed to be both unengaging while in progress and frustrating in conclusion. Bad bad bad Bad Meat.

Much better was Livid, the second film from Maury and Bustillo, directors of Inside. This time they’re telling a kind of fairytale, albeit a fairytale with one black eye and blood on it’s teeth.

Like Inside, much of this film was set in a single location on a single night, and some of the same devices and techniques were in play. Overall, they were very different films, however.

Where as Inside sought to be tight and visceral, Livid goes for light, floaty and esoteric. In hand with this, it sometimes goes beyond surreal to become nonsensical.

But it was a fascinating variant on the old spooky house story and I’m looking forward to writing more about it soon.

Now. Here comes the Centipede…