Two more movies on Friday, as we enter the final week of the festival (3 weeks just before the holidays is too damn long for this!)
First up was an odd hybrid movie, SLEW HAMPSHIRE. It starts out very promising, with a teaser of news reports of strange, ritualistic mass killings in the Northeast and a group of young men from New Hampshire setting out for an adventure at an exclusive, secret strip club just on the Canadian side of the border. They predictably get drawn into something very dangerous. Specifically, a gang of rednecks with their psychotic "games." But then a centuries-old lost tribe of Vikings show up. There's some unexplained supernatural critter running around, and more plot twists than I could keep straight. I got the sense that a lot of the story evolved over the making of it (director Flood Reed was there and revealed that this was mostly made during everyone's free time over the course of a couple of year) and maybe originally it was supposed to feature the supernatural creature more, but budget and time constraints eventually made his drop more of the supernatural elements. Which is fine. The story works with rednecks vs. horny college kids vs. Vikings, with a dash of supernatural on the edges. Or rather, it would have worked, if the second half had more structure.
The the second film started with the short ELIZABETH about a hot vampiress and the clean-up the morning after a wild night.
And then the feature, THE DEMON'S ROOK. A bunch of guys who are into monster makeup and gore effects but don't give a damn about plot or pacing make a movie. Oh, wait, that's my review of the imaginary "making of" documentary. I'm sure this can be edited into something good--there's a lot of individual scenes and images I enjoyed. But at 103 minutes it just became tedious by the end. It could probably be cut down to a 75 minute movie that keeps trucking along and it would be really good.
Total Running Time: 211 minutes
My Total Minutes: 346,468
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