Boring horror offers a fright-free zone
Baghead (M, 95 mins) Directed by Albert Corredor Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett *½
Here’s the set-up. Iris is a young woman in London on the bones of her arse. A solicitor calls to tell Iris that her dad, with whom she has had no contact for years, has died, and that he unexpectedly owned a building in Berlin. Will Iris go there to sign some paperwork so the building can be sold and she can collect her inheritance?
Iris travels to Berlin with best friend Katie close behind. But the building turns out to be a sublimely creepy old pub, with dusty rooms behind every door and a securely locked basement.
Iris signs the forms, tells the solicitor she will spend the night, and then settles in to watch the video tape that dear old dad left behind as some sort of parting gift to his daughter.
From which she learns the reason the basement is locked is that there is an ancient witch in residence down there, and it is now Iris’ responsibility to make sure she never escapes. Gee, thanks Dad.
Look. I’ve sat through some pretty arduous old codswallop on this job. But the truly daft films are at least usually easy to follow. What distinguishes Baghead, I reckon, is that despite being dumber than wood from first frame to last, it is also pointlessly convoluted and impossible to make much sense of.
Why is Iris’ dad an elderly Scotsman? Why is there a British pub in Berlin? Why are there seemingly no people in Berlin except Iris, Katie, the solicitor and one clearly delusional fruit-bat, who turns up out of nowhere and says he wants to commune with the witch?
And, did anyone actually read the film’s script before they agreed to finance it?
Most of these questions go unanswered. The film sputters into life whenever Dad – the great Peter Mullan, from My Name Is Joe and our own After The Party – is on screen, but apart from Mullan’s presence, Baghead is mostly a damp slog. Freya Allan (The Witcher) barely registers as Iris, while Saffron Burrows (Troy) and Svenja Jung (The Palace) struggle to be heard over the general incoherence of the writing.
A late twist offers up a limp thrash at a feminist sub-text, but it feels tacked on and nonsensical as everything that has preceded it.
There are several attempts here at delivering a scare, but the visuals are unimaginative and the writing is so howlingly daft that I’d long stopped caring enough to jump. The soundtrack occasionally dropped into a kind of exuberant flatulence that caught me napping, but Baghead is mostly a frightfree zone. Avoid.
Baghead is screening in select cinemas nationwide.