Best of Fest

Knox asked me which films I would recommend from previous After Dark festivals, and whether they were things you could actually view on (e.g.) Netflix. Last question first: Yes, they're all get-able through Amazon.com and get aired on FearNet and sometimes the Sci-Fi channel, so I have to assume they're available through Netflix as well.

I wouldn't recommend watching any horror movie on a network that has commercials, with the exception of FearNet because FearNet only puts one commercial break in, early on. (They do the noise at the bottom of the screen, though, which is nasty.)

Recommending movies is a much harder process, because it's highly personal (and doubly so for horror) and the experience tends to be different at home which affects some movies more than others.

But assuming you're not a horror fanatic, there are a few recommendations I can make pretty comfortably.

Borderland is probably the most genuinely frightening film of the three festivals, not because it's based on a true story (which is usually an excuse for lameness) but because it's so very, very plausible. Americans down in Mexico end up crossing paths with a violent gang. Sean Astin plays a very creepy role. I remember being concerned that it was going to veer into "torture porn" but the horribleness is mostly kept at a very real level--that is, you know, in real life, we're more rattled by things that we brush off in horror movies--and is still very effective. (UPDATE: My reviews at the time say it is, actually, torture porn-style violence. So, use caution.)

The Gravedancers is probably the most fun. It stars "haunted house" and goes "Poltergeist", with more than a nod to "Scooby Doo".

Rinne (Reincarnation)is probably my favorite movie of the three festivals, but it's not for everybody. It's a mystery, you have to be very attentive, and it breaks Blake's law of movie reincarnation (which is that audiences reject using dramatically different actors for the same characters). But it "made sense" to me. (It reveals "the rules" and "follows the rules" without being predictable.) Apparently some people find it slow, though. Subtitled. Must be relatively immune from "they all look alike" syndrome.

I love the atmosphere in Unrest, which is powered almost entirely by the verisimilitude of the situation. The corpses are not just realistic, they're real. The writer/director having been a med student gets the feel just right.

In an entirely separate way, I loved the "realism" of Mulberry Street,which comes from the setting and the truly excellent characterization. I get the idea that the writer/director pulled his friends out of the neighborhood and said "Here, be in my movie." Which may be totally false--because they all do their lines excellently and without sounding stilted--but it feels that way. The movie runs out of steam when it goes into standard zombie/plague mode, sort of ironically, or this movie would be a horror classic.

I can't really recommend The Abandonedbecause I didn't like it. But I don't like this kind of movie. No matter how well done, if I know the characters are doomed from the start and yet the movie is going to make them go through the motions of surviving, I get both bored and pissed off. But for whatever reason, this movie is the only one they show on pay cable so maybe it's a good example of a kind of movie I really dislike.

In the horror-like-Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-is-horror category, there's The Deaths of Ian Stone.This is one of the few films that had a real budget, like $14M or something. It shows. And while it's darker than Buffy, it feels like it could be a pilot for a Buffy-like series.

Butterfly Effect: Revelationhas a similar feel. I mean, the whole premise isn't far off from "Quantum Leap", which always threatened to scramble Sam's brains. They just do it in this one.

Out of the 24 films, then, I'd feel comfortable recommending six pretty strongly. Sturgeon's Law and all that.

If you're okay with campy low-budget type flicks, then I can add Tooth & Nail,Nightmare Manand Autopsy.The camp in T&N may be entirely accidental but director Kanefsky (Nightmare) knows the limits of his medium and knows a laugh is as good as a shriek--and Autopsy is so completely committed to the "funhouse" style, it's unimaginable that they didn't know exactly what they were doing.

So, those are my recommendations.

Except for Autopsy, there's not really any heavy gore in any of them (and the gore in Autopsy is right on the line of horrific/comic). Oh, there's a compound fracture in T&N, that's always good for an "ew", and the majority of Unrest features half-dissected corpses as props. (I'm trying to remember if there was a lot of gore in Borderland. If there is, I've blocked it out.)

For hardcore fans, most of the movies have something to recommend them. And for would-be filmmakers, these would have to be interesting if only to examine: a) how much can be done on so little; b) how easy it is to go off the rails.

But for entertainment, the six abovementioned are worth the 80-90 minutes.