Blood Fest (2018)

Nerdy Dax (Robbie Kay) is a giant horror fan. It’s something his mother shared with him when he was little, and after she was murdered by your common and garden masked maniac right in front of him, his fandom only got bigger.

Dax is planning to visit Blood Fest with his female best friend – and of course secret love because movies just can’t do without it – Sam (Seychelle Gabriel) and his other best friend Krill (Jacob Batalon). Blood Fest is a new outdoors festival celebrating all things horror in mostly copyright friendly ways. Unfortunately, Dax’s father (Tate Donovan), a TV psychologist, is set against all things horror after the murder of his wife, making the genre responsible for turning one of his own patients into a killer of psychologist wives. Didn’t see that movie, myself. But even when Dear Dad destroys Dax’s ticket to Blood Fest, our young hero manages to find a way in in form of his kinda-sorta friend Ashley (Barbara Dunkelman), who is trying to make it in the movies by having a relationship (cough) with some asshole horror director, so she can provide.

Perhaps Dax’s Dad wasn’t completely wrong with his hatred and fear of horror though, for it turns out, Blood Fest is all too real. The carnival huckster type guy (director Owen Egerton) running the show has decided that modern horror has become too watered down and needs an injection of reality. Which means public murders of a captive audience of horror fans by his various mad science experiments and a super slasher dressing rather a lot like the one who killed Dax’s father. Of course, Dax, being the horror fan, knows all of the genre rules and is therefore predestined to become the film’s hero. No idea why all the other experts on these rules you’d encounter on this sort of festival aren’t doing their part.

However, if you ignore this little problem with the film’s set-up, and the fact ninety percent of its characters and their relations are pure cliché, there’s still some – depending on one’s taste and patience even more - fun to be had with Owen Egerton’s horror comedy. We’ve all gone through a lot of horror comedies fixated on “THE RULES” in the decades after classic bad influence Scream, so don’t expect every joke to be new to many in the film’s expected audience of horror fans. There is still some good stuff in here among the obvious jokes about the things you’d expect a film like this to joke about, however.

Well, you also need to ignore how the way too self-indulgent villain performance by the director (who is no Clint Eastwood) sometimes threatens to take over the film for no good reason whenever we pop over to his lair again so he can make lame jokes and explain how exactly he created his zombies, etc, as if anyone in the audience cared.

But to the elements that actually make the whole thing worth watching without having you cry about the loss of valuable time you could have spent cleaning out your closet: the cast as a whole give fun performances, making the best out of the flat characters they are dealing with and generally providing them with more life than they strictly deserve, not exactly turning them into people but into the kind of joke and monster death dispensers I don’t mind sharing some of my lifetime with. The cast also makes quite a few of the script’s jokes and ideas work through powers of comical timing that can transcend some of the writing. And, to be fair, some of Egerton’s jokes are indeed funny, as are some of his high concept ideas – I’m certainly rather fond of his non-Jason character with the gardening gimmick, and the play with well-loved elements of Friday the 13th Part II.

On the plotting side, Blood Fest is a homage-laden series of action and horror set pieces, and while I’m not terribly impressed by Egerton as a writer or as an actor, I certainly can’t fault him as a director of this type of set piece. There’s beautiful artificial light in all the right colours, more than enough fun blood and gore (also in all the right colours), there’s a feel for the sets as physical locations. Even though I wasn’t exactly gasping in excitement, the loud stuff is certainly the film’s strong suite.


There is one bit of writing in the film I liked quite a bit, too. It’s that Egerton actually realizes making a horror film that poo-poos people who hate horror but then puts them in the right when horror fandom does indeed lead to mass murder and madness makes little sense at all, so he does something about it. What he does (I’m not going to spoil it here for those who haven’t already realized) isn’t overwhelmingly clever, nor was it terribly surprising to me, but it certainly suggests more thought than some of the by the numbers elements of the film otherwise suggest.

Sleight (2016)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Without parents, any visible family, or a decent system of social care – particularly for poor and black people like them - available, young Bo (Jacob Latimore) has to take care of his sister Tina (Storm Reid) all by himself. So he works as a street magician by day, and sells drugs for the seemingly personable – as far as it goes in this business - drug lord Angelo (Dulé Hill) by night. Bo has secrets, though. For one, he does what amounts to actual magic with the help of a home made electromagnet device he has implanted in his arm, like a low key junior gadgeteer superhero. Secondly, and much worse, he is skimming off Angelo’s drugs in an attempt to scratch together to take Tina and leave Los Angeles for somewhere where they can live the life of normal people. That’s particularly unfortunate since Angelo would really rather pull Bo deeper into the Life, doing his best to involve him in more than just dealing, and so has a rather more careful eye on him.

So, at about the same time as Bo’s life changes for the better when he meets and falls in – reciprocated – love with Holly (Seychelle Gabriel), a young woman who we will later learn to have a high tolerance for pretty shitty secrets in her boyfriend, thanks to the difficulties in her own life, things with Angelo start to unravel. Soon, Tina’s and Holly’s lives are threatened, and Bo’s only way out might be to turn his invention for letting coins float into a weapon.

So yes, and obviously, J.D. Dillard’s Sleight can very easily be read as a low key superhero origin story, just one that concentrates on the kinds of people contemporary big budget superhero films still tend to ignore or short-change. This is a film about black, poor people who feel forced to do some pretty shitty things to survive; indeed, some viewers might find Bo “unsympathetic”. He sure as hell does a lot of morally inexcusable things, but like any good film about someone seeking some form of (in this case non-mystical) transcendence, Sleight needs to show what their protagonist has to transcend. And that he does indeed manage to transcend a situation resonant with the way many people actually have to live in one way or the other rather seems to be the film’s core concern to me, a very classical use of the fantastic as a means as well as a symbol for the wish to change and to escape.

As for me, I can’t say I actually ever found Bo unlikeable or unrelatable, but then, there but for the grace of mere chance go I, or really, everyone, so who am I to judge? It does of course help that Latimore’s performance is as warm as it is conflicted, portraying Bo as a guy who thinks he does the best he can in his situation, and who is in the end willing to risk himself for others, and achieving actual change for others and himself in the end.


Formally, Sleight as an entry into the growing number of US films of the fantastic by black directors is very much a contemporary indie (the sort with a budget, but not riches) movie. It is carefully staged, deliberately paced, with a sometimes carefully hidden sense of poetry next to a much more obvious idea of realism, demonstrating a willingness to work with genre elements in ways that’ll annoy some viewers because it makes so little of a thing of them, but which delight me because their use feels so personal and individual and through this, actually meaningful.