FrightFest review – Grind
At least one of the handful of shorts which make up Grind – Brea Grant’s ‘MLM’ – has played at FrightFest as a standalone, but between them Grant, Ed Dougherty and Chelsea Stardust create an interconnected world which takes in four sustained stories of contemporary workplace horror bookended by vignettes. Indeed, tendrils reach out from Grind to feed on several other films screening at FF this year. ‘Content Moderation’, the most elaborate story, has some thematic parallels with Faces of Death as a corporate drone undergoes an ordeal while checking many thousands of videos for approval or rejection, which bring in glimpses of many more horrors in Grindworld, including guest appearances by the star of the two Frogman pictures (in segments directed by Frogman creator Anthony Cousins).
DRGN is the overarching evilcorp of the universe here, and the individual stories take swings at … Amazon-type megawarehoueses where employees have to pee in bottles and are punished for not meeting impossible time demands … a pyramid scheme whereby signing up for something as apparently harmless as selling leggings online entails being manic and cheery to meet targets and then tortured surreally if not enough merch is shifted, with Sarah (Jessika Van) suffering when her husband’s penis is turned into a small bird (not illustrated) and every food or drink stuff she likes the taste of turns to glitter in her mouth with a slasher movie Ax Man (in leggings) showing up to administer extreme punishment for disrespecting the brand … a Deliveroo/DoorDash driver Benny (Vinny Thomas) who enters into a bizarre game with an unseen customer who seems to be able to manipulate time and has nothing better to do with infinity than make life miserable for a low-level schlub trying to make rent (this runs to an effective use of the revolving room gambit from Royal Wedding/Elm Street) … a carrot of promotion to an overpaid, understressful corporate gig for a moderator (Christopher Rodriguez Marquette) who gradually realises that the game is rigged and that watching all the random hideous shit on the internet won’t get him anywhere but deeper into a nightmare … a Starbucks style coffee shop (Neptulia) defies DRGN’s policy of closing down any branch which unionises and the bosses send a fishy enforcer to make an example.
Several items and characters recur throughout, with Barbara Crampton and Rob Huebel as the bland, smiling faces of corporate wickedness. It tackles a big set of issues cartoonishly, and each story takes a different line – arguably the second story is about an evil customer rather than an evil system and black comedy segues into more or less straight horror for the monster-themed Neptulia segment (with V Nixie as a scary presence). It gets a bit ragged as it goes all out to play EC Comics games with a variety of all-encompassing modern ills – not all of the stories are thought through – and has a poppy hyperactivity which can get a bit wearing especially in the tales (most of them) which feature caught in traps and running like hamsters in wheels to stay ahead.
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