FrightFest the 13th - Five of the Best

So FrightFest happened at the weekend, with the good, the bad and the ugly of the horror film industry descending on the Empire Cinema in London’s Leicester Square to shock and scare thousands of gore-hounds.

The weekend was a resounding success, but if you couldn’t make it down, the following are five of the best flicks that played (alongside the brilliant Sinister, which we previously reviewed here).

Sleep Tight

My favourite film of the festival, Sleep Tight is less an out-and-out horror and more a dark, psychological thriller in the tradition of Hitchcock’s very best. Luis Tosar delivers a grandstanding performance as Cesar, a quiet doorman working at an upscale Barcelona apartment. But below that unassuming surface, Cesar is something of a monster, creeping into his most beautiful tenant’s room at night and doing… well you’ll just have to watch the movie to find out, but rest assured it’s suitably sick and twisted.

V/H/S

Horror anthologies tend to be a mixed bag, and V/H/S is no different, though when it’s scary, it’s bloody terrifying. The wrap-around story finds a group of unpleasant pranksters breaking into a supposedly deserted house to retrieve a VHS tape, and while there they find footage that makes up the rest of the movie. The likes of Adam Wingard, Ti West and Joe Swanberg direct, and the film features the first chiller to tell its story purely through Skype. The undoubted highlight is a very novel twist on the devil worshipping sub-genre.

Berbarian Sound Studio

I’m not even going to pretend I understood this one, though while the vague plotting is frustrating, the bizarre sound and imagery stays with you long after the credits have rolled. Hunger Games star Toby Jones plays Gilderoy, a shy and retiring sound engineer invited to Italy to work on horror flick The Equestrian Vortex. But things turn strange as soon as he arrives at the titular sound studio, with life imitating art as the horror bleeds from the screen and into his life. As Gilderoy endeavours to retain his sanity, the film too starts to lose the plot, but it all looks beautiful, and as an homage to Italian Giallo, it's spot on.

Grabbers

So three serious choices, but what about something a little more light-hearted? Cockney’s vs. Zombies went down well with the FrightFest crowd, but for me Irish effort Grabbers narrowly edged the East End pensioners out. Playing like a cross between Tremors and Whisky Galore, the film stars Richard Coyle as a disillusioned Garda with a drink problem who is lazily seeing out his years in a sleepy coastal town. But when an alien invasion hits, Coyle’s character is forced to step up to the plate, no-more-so than when a scientist discovers that the aliens are allergic to humans with a high blood alcohol level. As ridiculous as it is entertaining, Grabbers is perfect midnight movie fare.

American Mary

Jen and Sylvia Soska – the directors of Dead Hooker in a Trunk – return with what may have been the most talked-about film at the festival. Ginger Snaps star Katherine Isabelle plays Mary Mason, a medical student who enters the shady underground world of body modification in search of a quick buck, and soon finds it taking a terrible toll on her own psyche. Brutal, gripping and genuinely horrifying, American Mary is the kind of film that FrightFest was created for, and should be sought out at the earliest opportunity.

Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN and is finding it hard to sleep after all that horror. His idle chit-chat can be found on both Twitter and MyIGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

Doom 3 BFG Edition: More Horror-Action Than Horror-Survival

When it was first released in 2004, Doom 3 was terrifying. In part that was due to its dark corridors and seemingly endless amount of shock scares as demons spawned from the shadows. If you remember, Doom 3 was state-of-the-art back then, so much so that the remastered BFG Edition still looks really good. It was such an affecting game because, at the time, nothing else looked so authentic.

With the BFG Edition id Software has updated the base game, included the Resurrection of Evil expansion content as well as built in new levels, called The Lost Mission. The BFG Edition is also the first time Doom 3 will be available on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, so if you had a really sad PC in 2004 and never bothered with the original Xbox but pick this up, you'll no longer have to feel left out when your friends get into an argument about the Doom 3 flashlight mechanic.

Speaking of the Doom 3 flashlight mechanic, it's changing in the BFG Edition. Instead of forcing you to use either a flashlight or a gun, id lets you turn a flashlight on whenever you want. The flashlight has a limited charge so it can't stay on forever, but at least you don't need to put your weapon away to shine a light into the darkness. As id Software's Tim Willits recalls, the original flashlight mechanic was "not the best call." He said, "At the time [of its original launch], Doom 3 was pushing PCs to the max. We could not have had that dynamic light at the same time as all the weapon effects. But now we have lots of horsepower. But I've gotten some hate email about switching the flashlight. There have been some people that are pissed. It's kind of cool that care enough after so long to send me an email and say 'I can't believe you're screwing it up.'"

The new missions take place in Hell, where you shoot rockets and plasma pulses at screaming, charging demons as they attack wave after wave and you circle-strafe and hunt down health packs and armor to survive. It feels appropriately Doom-like, but even if you are very familiar with Doom 3, there'll still be some noticeable changes throughout.

"The whole world's a little bit brighter," said Willits. "We upped the player speed, upped the ammo counts, and just by doing those small things have pushed it more towards horror-action instead of horror-survival. One of the big criticisms [of the original] was that people spent way too much time hunting for ammo and not enough time shooting demons, which is what it's all about."

In 3D running on a PlayStation 3, Doom 3 looks surprisingly pretty and runs very smoothly. The 3D effects enhance the fights at times, particularly when you're in larger combat spaces and imps are throwing fireballs and you're returning rocket fire, giving the scene a noticeable sense of depth.

The BFG Edition will also include Doom 1 and 2, so if this is a series that you've somehow completely missed out on so far, the BFG Edition seems like the best way to catch up. It'll be available on October 16.

Id Software still will not comment on what's happening with Doom 4.

Source : ign[dot]com