FrightFest review – Hold the Fort
At seventy-five minutes, this silly, lively horror comedy doesn’t wear out its welcome – and it has a genuinely amusing premise. It might not hold up in the daytime, but for eleven o’clock at night it does the job perfectly.
In a prologue, some diehard old-timers spend a night fending off monsters – a blood-dripping stake suggests some vampires were involved – then go against their family tradition by selling the homestead to even more rapacious monsters … real-estate developers who want to turn this patch of land into a ‘cookie-cutter’ suburb. Cut to one year later and ex-townies Lucas (Chris Mayers) and Jenny (Haley Leary) moving into their new home, with Jenny being particularly paranoid about the Home Owners Association and their manic president Jerry (Julian Smith). HOAs are a particularly American thing – in the UK, we tend to have bitchy neighbourhood Whatsapp groups instead – and there have been comedies and horror films about their legendary persnickitiness, tyranny, sinister homogenising influence and bland face of evil. Here, however, the neighbourhood turns out to be surprisingly inclusive – we see all races, sexualities, classes and character types – but Lucas is still blind-sided because he didn’t read the small print in the agreement. On the night of the equinox, a portal to hell – one of several in this year’s FrightFest – opens up nearby and wave after wave of monsters (witches, a werewolf, kung fu zombie demons, the creepypasta-like Stick Man) emerge to besiege the HOA clubhouse.
The residents have an insanely tough action hero type, McScruffy (Hamid-Reza Benjamin Thompson) to do the heavy fighting, but Lucas shoots him in the leg with the shotgun he wins in a lottoball game before the portal opens … so everyone has to dig into a trunk of monster-fighting weaponry and hold the fort. While the suburban context is fresh, with a stream of witty jabs at the lifestyle, this structure is familiar from many, many Evil Dead or From Dusk Till Dawn clones. A lot of monsters attack, a lot of people are bloodily mangled or killed (sometimes with grace moments to mourn a funny presence) and Lucas – a seeming wimp who can at least run cast – has an arc from reluctant, terrified idiot to hardened creature fighter. The cast play sit-com stereotypes, but mostly manage to carve out their own little piece of the picture – Levi Burdick is the grumpy neihghbour annoyed that Lucas isn’t up to speed on the plot, Tordy Clark is the local drug devotee who brings a medicine bag to the siege and Michelle I Lamb is the manufacturer of moonshine which also functions as napalm. No one is really called on to be subtle, but Haley Leary – who impressed in FF selection Spookt – is especially skilled at bringing shading to her role; she ought to be getting a lot more work in higher profile projects.
The effects are pretty much what you’d expect – okay and over with quickly … and a lot of blood gets splashed in faces. Directed by William Bagley, who also co-wrote with Scott Hawkins.
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