FrightFest review – Fresh Meat

FrightFest review – Fresh Meat

Writer-director Daniel Turres follows up Here for Blood with a more extensive essay in carnage.  Two online explorers – fairly serious June (Joelle Farrow) and ‘thrill-seeker’ (ie: asshole) Marcus (Mika Amonsen) – bring their contrasting teams together for a big deal intrusion into a disused prison … which turns out still to have one remaining inmate (Kyle Englehart), an unkillable masked slasher/cannibal who feels like a mash-up of Jason and Art the Clown.  After we’ve had time to warm up to or take against the various influencer type showoffs, they get trapped in the slammer and their attempts to prank each other give way to the inmate’s campaign of ripping them apart and chewing on their gristle.

The success of the Terrifier franchise is likely to give rise to a lot of films on their pattern – and this sometimes turns away from its more interesting, quirkier aspects to give rote gore set-pieces, in which characters often just kneel there gasping in horror while their friends are slowly tortured and mangled to death even though there’s an axe lying right there which could be used to cut off the killer’s head.  A last surviving warden (Jesse Buck), who has been keeping the Inmate (aka Jeffrey) fed, explains that he was the oldest prisoner in the pen when it closed down after one of his rampages in 1986 and that he’s survived being electrocuted, lethally injected, shot, etc.  Someone asks if they’ve tried decapitation, which ought at least to slow the bastard down enough for the survivors to limp away … but in the universe of Fresh Meat, it’s not an option to hobble the lions when there are more Christians to be thrown into the arena.

It’s almost reached a point where it would be a bright new take to present influencer characters who aren’t shallow, unpleasant, deserving-of-death dickheads – and there is an attempt here to make June’s crew less unpleasant than the Thrill-Seekers.  One or two performances – Jorja Cadence as the Thrill-Seeker who’s almost nice, Hannah Galway as June’s best friend – have a spark of sympathy, but mostly we get comic or horrid caricatures of toxic blokiness served up to the blood-drooling teeth-grinding cannibal git who’s likely to be a Funko Pop or bobblehead would-be franchise fiend merch opportunity.  Also taken from Terrifier is the extended running time (100m), which means a last act overladen with gruesome excesses taken at a steady pace so you get to appreciate the practical splat more – there’s an extended tribute to a moment from Nekromantik for the obsessive gore gazer – and cycle through a stuttering succession of false endings, punchlines, and restarts even through the long end credits.