THE FORTH ESTATE
There’s a feast of horror and SF at Edinburgh International Film Festival...
The Edinburgh International Film Festival is a regular highlight of Scotland’s film calendar. June sees it return for two weeks of screenings across a number of cinemas throughout the city. EIFF artistic director Mark Adams has selected a few films on offer that will be of particular interest to SFX readers.
One of the festival’s hottest tickets is the second feature from The Eyes Of My Mother director Nicolas Pesce. Adams describes Piercing as a “stylish and retro” thriller adapted from Ryu Murakami’s cult novel of “sexual mania and violent madness.” Expect lush design and a cool soundtrack as well as lashings of gore.
Adams says John McPhail’s horror musical Anna And The Apocalypse is “a glorious genre mash-up horror.” The film finds Anna (Ella Hunt) and her friends banding together to take on ravening hoards of zombies. There’s more undead action with Zombillenium – a macabre French animation about a theme park staffed by the undead. Adams says the film makes “plenty of jokes at the expense of Twilight and its ilk” when the vampire staff decide to take over.
The horror continues in Possum, where a puppeteer (Sean Harris) must face his evil stepfather and a sinister hand puppet, while Blood Fest is “a knowing and rather diabolical” horror comedy that, Adams says, blends Scream with Cabin In The Woods, as best friends Sam (Seychelle Gabriel), Dax (Robbie Kay) and pal Krill (Jacob Batalon) must try to survive a horror movie festival that takes a nasty turn.
On the SF front there’s Solis from first-time feature director Carl Strathie. The Walking Dead’s Simon – aka Steven Ogg – plays an astronaut trapped in an escape pod drifting towards the sun. Alice Lowe is his only hope as Commander Roberts who, through a weak radio transmission, tries to keep him calm while organising a rescue. WS