FrightFest review – Hoarder
Health visitors Melissa (Daisy Jelley) and Eric (Paul Casar) have to spend a day driving around their rural patch, calling on people who for one reason or another didn’t make it to the GP’s surgery for their flu jabs. Eric grumbles that this usually means they’re deaf, demented or dead. Naturally, their first call of the day rings bells and flies flags but they press on – into a cluttered, filthy farmhouse where a woman in a rocking chair (Annabelle Lanyon) screams and lashes out when injected … and Melissa’s trip to the kitchen to rustle up a nice cup of tea gets sinister when she opens a cupboard and finds a feral boy scout backed into a nest, hungry for catfood. When Fred Hunt (David Sterne), the farmer, comes home, he locks the place up tighter than it need be and the health visitors, who have both been wounded, find themselves trapped in a house where people are being hoarded like bundles of old newspapers.
Writer-director James Owen starts with a distinctively British take on the Texas Chain Saw milieu but the storyline doesn’t follow the expected cannibal lines – coming up with a far weirder rationale for the situation, featuring a wriggling potato/bug parasite which literally gets right up your nose. Sterne brings whiskery, crotchety eccentricity to the role of a matter-of-fact jailer, even hinting that what he’s up to might be for the greater good … though he’s also not above teasing and taunting his unwilling guests. Eric, one of nature’s complainers, breaks his wrist early and takes a lot more punishment while Melissa womanfully crawls through tunnels, negotiates piles of accumulated rubbish, and does her best to be helpful, though she has a habit of involving others in fatal accidents. Lanyon — whose genre credits include the 1979 Quatermass, Ridley Scott’s Legend and Dream Demon – returns from Owen’s Bite, and seems to be working up a senior scream queen rep, getting a lot of mileage out of a wordless, mostly sat-down role as the bookworm.
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