FrightFest review – Do You Want To Play?

FrightFest review – Do You Want To Play?

Writer-director Nick Lyon has been working steadily under the radar for more than two decades – his highest profile earlier film is one of the direct-to-DVD sequels to Species and he has multiple credits of the yes-the-title-presumption-is-amusing-but-don’t-let-that-fool-you variety for the dreaded Asylum outfit and others (Bermuda Tentacles, Earthtastrophe, Operation Dunkirk, Rent-an-Elf).  This is a step forward from that, though it’s still a generic entry in the cursed-object sub-genre.  Its antique ouija board variant, cause of the trouble, is less creepy than the similar device in Grin, but it does go the cyber route and have kid genius Owen King (Maxwell Mushallo) – son of a horror writer called ‘Joe King’, which might raise some mutters up in Maine – use the board to craft an app which spreads the curse through mobile phones.

Otherwise, we’ve been here before (Witchboard, Ouija, Whistle, Smile, Wish Upon, etc).  Only overloading the film with ominous or borrowed bits and pieces keeps it lively – ticking off the tropes, you get a Halloween-like traumatised killer kid (Weston Oliver) wearing a mask sewn together after he’s cut off his own evil Dad’s face (losing the moustache along the way) … a possessed schoolgirl heroine (Quinn Aune) who has come between longtime friends Owen and Tommy (Leo Larson), with casting and performances pitched to suggest that the real heat was between the two guys who are throwing a massive repressed gay strop about a girl in the clubhouse … a former Jesuit priest reinvented as an exposition-depositing exorcism influencer called ‘Scary Gary’ (Ricco Ross) … a Halloween party in the mansion where murders took place, with flashes of a cut-up angry ghost girl (Aspen K Somers) who was kept in a cage in the cellar (the film gets into my Your Daily Dracula collection thanks to Atticus Jackson dressed up as ‘Vampire Kid’ at the séance party) … a Romanian science teacher (Atlas Von Poncet) who is wary of curses thanks to knowledge from the old country but still isn’t any earthly use … side characters like Tommy’s brother who get got by the curse then forgotten after a funeral … way too many drone (or augmented) shots of the rows of pumpkin-festooned mansions at night with atmos mist and spooky filters (this approach is so much crasser and less effective than the simple way Halloween made the autumnal neighbourhood feel creepy in 1978) … and a basic runaround as characters struggle to get out from under the threat of cyber-doom.

It’s always a risk to ask a question in a title.  The response here is ‘well, sort of, I guess …’