Mayhem Film Announcements

It's time for Halloween month excitement again!

Ahead of the full line-up announcement in a couple of weeks, Mayhem Film Festival have announced five more feature films and a special guest. They all look good but I'm particularly looking forward to The Devil's Doorway as it's had a lot of festival buzz & another anthology movie. Early bird tickets still available here: www.mayhemfilmfestival.com 

As its 14^th edition creeps ever closer, Mayhem Film Festival is proud to announce the next set of titles from this year's programme.

Mayhem is to present a screening of Aislinn Clarke's found-footage chiller The Devil's Doorway. In rural Ireland in 1960, two Catholic priests are sent from the Vatican to investigate reports of miraculous activity in a remote home for 'fallen women', only to discover that altogether darker forces may be at work. Mayhem is pleased to welcome director Aislinn Clarke to take part in a post-screening Q&A.

Showing in the festival's coveted Friday late-night slot, Nicolas Cage goes full... well, Nicolas Cage with a fantastically high-octane performance in Panos Cosmatos' cosmic revenge thriller Mandy. Pacific Northwest, 1983 AD. Outsiders Red Miller and Mandy Bloom lead a loving and peaceful existence. When their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire.

Next up in this year's programme is Colin Minihan's grueling survival thriller What Keeps You Alive. On the eve of their first wedding anniversary, Jules and Jackie become embroiled in a merciless fight for their lives against the most unexpected of adversaries - each other. As violence rains down upon their idyllic forest getaway, the women engage in a frenzied physical - and psychological - battle that tests the very limits of their instinct to survive.

Also screening at this year's festival is Shin'inchiro Ueda's unmissable micro-budget zombie movie, and Japanese box-office sensation, One Cut of The Dead. Playing to sell-out audiences since its release, the film has made more than 250 times its budget, and counting. During the making of a small-scale zombie flick, all hell breaks loose when a real zombie outbreak erupts on set - a gleeful horror-comedy packed with seriously entertaining monster mayhem and an epic 37-minute single-take opening.

Wrapping up this second wave of announcements, Mayhem presents Nightmare Cinema, a new horror anthology uniting masters of genre cinema - including Mick Garris (Sleepwalkers, Masters of Horror) and Joe Dante (Gremlins) - for five gruesome tales of terror featuring sinister surgeons, brain-spiders and killer nuns.

Unfriended: Dark Web Review

                                                   Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

IMDb genre: Horror
Director: Stephen Susco
Writer: Stephen Susco
Starring: Betty Gabriel, Rebecca Rittenhouse, Colin Woodell
IMDb summary: A teen comes into possession of a new laptop and soon discovers that the previous owner is not only watching him, but will also do anything to get it back.

Let's start this review by saying I'm well aware of all the hate Blumhouse gets and, while they don't always hit the mark, I am a fan. 

I enjoyed the first Unfriended movie (which came out in 2014 somehow, I'm getting old!) but it was more of a typical silly teen slasher; it was entertaining and I liked the gimmick of it all being on a computer but to be honest I didn't really think about it a lot afterwards. However, cut to four years later and they really pulled it out of the bag. A change in writer/director has clearly made an impact but the smartest change was to really make use of the computer gimmick with dark web chatrooms, hidden sinister files etc instead of a supernatural theme. This means it's not overly scary at the time but it stays with you, it's one of those that could happen so you can't quite fully dismiss it. There's still several tense moments though, have no doubt.

The acting this time round, after Get Out we always knew Betty Gabriel would knock any other film out the park but the only one that didn't work for me was Connor Del Rio's AJ but I think that was more in the writing as he was just an annoying character! Representation is important in movies and this movie features a deaf woman and a lesbian couple that aren't treated any differently and I really liked that.

The deaths are enjoyable and inventive but I do think the film would have benefited from a little more gore in those scenes.

I don't want to give anything a way but I do think the ending seemed rushed and was particularly unfair on one character (I will come back to edit this when the film's been available longer to explain more what I mean.)

So, I'd definitely recommend this one, if for no other reason than there's an English character talking about Craigslist with a different pronunciation to everyone else & I appreciated that!

General Opinion:
   

Scare Factor:

More tense than scary but definitely gives you something to think about.

Gore:

The little bit of gore we do get isn't very good, could have done with less cutting away at the critical moment.

Clowns:

Not funny throughout but there's some funny interactions during the set-up.

Unfriended: Dark Web is currently in selected UK cinemas.