FrightFest review – Minore
A riff on various cosmic horror spectacles – evoking both The Mist and Mars Attacks! – Konstaninos Koutsoliotas’ Minore is also proudly Greek – while it has a few asides bashing Greek Far Right Nationalists – and I suspect full of local in-jokes, references and character types which would get big laughs on its home turf. As an export item, it’s perhaps a bit too rambling in its set-up, introducing a wide range of characters, but delivers on all the flying tentacle-and-eyeball creature action you could want in a lively second half. For a while, it seems our protagonist is William (Davide Tucci), a sailor from the good ship Miskatonia in a bright white tight Tom of Finland outfit (which, of course, gets extensibely splattered with goo and gore later).
William arrives in a seaside town on a semi-quest to find the father he never knew or, failing that, learn how to play the bozouki which is his only heirloom – William falls in with waitress Aliki (Daphne Alexander), who hears the siren song of the sea. But this pair then have to compete for attention with a whole range of folk – a grasping, undead priest … a barbarian bodybuilder … a stoner artist … an angelic-faced muscular dancer … a nasty old hotel receptionists … a granny who has dreams in which her fingers turn to tentacles … a local gangster … the habituées of a music club … some crusty old gits who take up a table and have been arguing over a game for years … a guy eager to impress the girl who lives upstairs, etc.
There are earthquake rumbles, an island surfaces in the bay, mists warp minds and tentacles strike, but all this hint and omen stuff gives way to a Tarantino-style face-off as everyone tools up (adding weaponry to their musical instruments) and blasts away at the big tentacle things in the sky. It’s fun and odd, if repetitive – and ends with a kind of wry shrug which I suspect is particularly Greek, though it reminded me a bit of an Edgar Wright kind of finish as survivors settle back into their ruts.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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