FrightFest review – The Peril at Pincer Point!

FrightFest review – The Peril at Pincer Point!

In 2002, sound engineer Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) is hauled over the coals by his callow bosses for making a rush job of the soundtrack of a new movie by P.W. Griffin (Os Leanse), whose 1997 hit Frogopolis is supposed to be one of the defining films of its era.  Griffin gives Jim another chance and sends him off to the islant of Pincer Point, where he shot the film, with orders to capture authentic sea-sounds and in particular to track down well-spoken waitress Marina Hurley (Alyth Ross) for some voice-over.  Suffering from a crab bite inflicted in his London flat, not normally a crustacean habitat, Jim arrives on the island, which is stocked with whiskery or wigged eccentrics.  The doubling of some actors suggests a charade as do the obvious disguises, but maybe it’s an edge of the world where reality is fraying.  Jim is told by publican Erasmus Bay that Marina has been abducted aboard a ghost ship captained by Sye Telson – Bay and Telson are both played by Michael Mackenzie, so they may be relatives, alter egos or the same guy doing different schticks.  Wandering the island with a microphone and a boom, Jim gets a sense of a world no less strange than the Griffin film, in which a pirate woman and a giant crab are starcrossed lovers.

Written and produced by Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine, The Peril at Pincer Point! is dedicated to Roger Corman – producer/director, of course, of Attack of the Crab Monsters and much given to films in which haunted characters wander on beaches.  It’s an addition to the short catalogue of weird mysteries involving horror film sound designers – Blowout and Berbarian Sound Studio – and has some canny jabs at the state of the industry, especially in the studio scenes with Jim and his shallow, demanding, threatening bosses.  It’s the sort of inside moviemaking film which flirts with the idea that its characters might be based on real people – is Griffin a caricature of any real British genre filmmaker of the 1990s? – but only as an inside joke or a distraction.  In academy frame and sepia-ish monochrome, with an appropriately dense soundscape, it also has some of the feel of Guy Maddin’s film history pantomimes albeit with a particular Britfilm relish which touches on a strain of outsider-to-the-isles cinema going far deeper than The Wicker Man and The Edge of the World.  Mostly, though, it’s just weird and funny – a pub yarn spun to a gullible stranger, perhaps, or one of those stories you used to hear in pubs up and down Wardour Street before the industry moved out to industrial estates.