You’d be forgiven for not expecting much of a Christopher Smith film as the opener to FrightFest’s ‘09 schedule, what with him being the chap who made the lacklustre Creep and the amusing but silly Severance.

Throw in the fact that an ex-soap star – Melissa George of Home & Away fame – takes the lead and you might even allow yourself to walk in the other direction. But Smith has clearly been given more creative control with this, his latest and undoubtedly best film, because it’s actually shocking just how good it is. The poster gives nothing away about the quality of the movie. With an image of George on a liner holding a bloodied weapon and a strapline that reads ‘the forecast is EVIL’, you might expect a schlocky slasher effort, but from the moment the credits roll this is an altogether different kind of beast.

The premise is difficult to explain without giving too much of the complex narrative away, except to say it features Melissa George and a friend going on a boating trip, along with some people she doesn’t know. From there onwards, things turn dark. As confusingly dark as Donnie Darko, with a whole lot of Time Crimes thrown in.

Referencing those two films would be unfair, however, simply because they deal with a similar kind of theme. With a trippy opening that feels like a less coherent but far superior Morvern Caller, Smith marks out his own style, deliberately throwing the viewer completely off-kilter. By the time the action begins, you’re already begging a few hundred questions. In addition – if you’re as cynical as yours truly – you’re expecting there to be a million unresolved loose endings by the time the film’s over. Happily, as far as I can work out, everything is tied up pretty well indeed.

But much working out is required. This is less a film than a complex equation designed to distort your ability to comprehend the fabric of time. At various points I found myself looking at my hands, counting fingers and trying to solve the puzzle onscreen on my hands, wishing I’d taken a notepad and pen into the theatre rather than a coca cola and a bag of pick ‘n’ mix. It took a couple of post-cinema drinks to suss out among our party exactly how the plot worked and still we were left with a couple of questions.

Smith mentioned in the introduction that it took him four years and lots of post-it notes to write Triangle. George said the role of Jess was her most challenging to date – which makes her technically harder to handle than the man-eating bundle of neuroses she portrayed as Laura in HBO’s In Treatment. When watching Triangle, you’ll feel the cranial anguish they experienced creating it as it manifests in your head, itself trying to slowly plug the jigsaw together. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the mental exercise involved.

Though I can’t quite believe I’m typing it, Triangle is definitely a contender for film of the year and, for me, the best and biggest surprise of FrightFest 2009.

And, no. It’s got nothing to do with the British soap opera of the same name from the 70s.

The third in our series of kids movies that weirdly never quite made the grade…

Bartok The Magnificent

You might remember Don Bluth’s 1997 movie, Anastasia. You might even remember that there was an albino bat called Bartok in that movie. However, you almost certainly don’t remember Bartok the Magnificent – the straight-to-video spin-off devoted to that aforementioned, tiny bat.

This film is unusual before you even start watching, because it’s the only spin-off of a Don Bluth film that the man himself actually directed. (NB – In other Don Bluth news you can now buy Space Ace, the follow-up to Dragon’s Lair for iPhone). Also, Hank Azaria voices Bartok, which in itself is pretty cool.

The movie charts the adventures of Bartok before he becomes Rasputin’s assistant and includes references and allusions to Russian folklore. This means a lot of it is pretty surreal, but Bartok is very lovable and pretty bad-ass. To prove it – here’s a little segment from the Wikipedia plot summary:

After Bartok’s show, a violent bear suddenly attacks. Bartok saves everyone by stunning the bear with dust and then knocks him over and traps him in a wagon.

A bear? Seriously?!

That’s pretty cool. Although I should point out that the bear later turns out to be Bartok’s friend and trusted companion. Still, a bear as a best friend is pretty good going for a bat. Bartok also does battle with demons, dragons and floating skulls – the latter voiced by Tim Curry who is apparently at once the saving grace and the kiss of death for any children’s film. Bartok also has to face puzzles and challenges along the way.

It’s good solid fun, with a decent story and some nice voice acting, the only downside being the short length of the movie – it clocks in at just over one hour. At the time of writing, it’s available to view in its entirety on YouTube, so you’ve no excuse not to go and watch it.

The second in our series of kids movies that weirdly never quite made the grade…

Ferngulley: The Last Rainforest

If there’s a film on this list you’re likely to remember, it’s this one, as it didn’t perform too dreadfully. Whilst it’s no masterpiece, it’s still kind of underrated. It tells the story of fairies living peacefully in the rainforest, whose harmonious existence is suddenly interrupted by a logging corporation systematically tearing up the whole place. One of the ne’er-do-well tree-haters is radical 90s everyman Zak, who is accidentally shrunk to fairy size and learns to love the forest, be at one with nature and so on…

Robin “not so funny since I stopped taking all that cocaine” Williams provides the voice of Batty, the inventively named bat whose echo-location is scrambled thanks to evil animal experimentation. Indeed, the film takes an amazingly aggressive stance against animal testing and deforestation. At one point we see, in silhouette, a crazy scientist mutilating some small furry creature before spinning round and screaming, “get me another one! Get me another ANIMAL!”)

Extraordinary.

Sometimes you can be forgiven for suspecting the movie you’re about to sit through is going to be woeful claptrap. Cemetery Man seems, from the cover, to satisfy every criteria for this kind of low expectation. It stars Rupert Everett, for Christ’s sake. But then, through sheer insanity and stupidity, it three-sixties into one of the most wonderfully over-the-top showcases for madness you’re ever going to see. When a film goes so far out of its way to make you look at the screen aghast, it has to have something going for it. And it’s this kind of care-free idiocy that marks Cemetery Man as a cut above other overlooked zombie flicks. It simply doesn’t seem to care what you think of it. It’s a bloody-minded lunatic of a film.

For starters, this Italian production mentions Berlusconi in a production capacity as the credits roll. And after they’ve rolled, you realise the sound mix is so creakily dubbed that you’re going to be spending the next hour or so watching mouths move just out of synch with what you’re hearing. Add to this Everett’s overpowering voiceover, his usual plummy tones overridden by a strange attempt at a mockney-ish drawl, and you’re in very dodgy territory indeed. But then the premise is explained and, with Everett as resident zombie-killer at a cemetery where the dead suddenly walk again, seven days after burial, the first killing brings the fun to the fore fantastically quickly.

Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte and his comic foil is his chubby gravedigging co-worker, Gnaghi – an irritatingly stupid, semi-mute tit. Gnaghi is responsible for a great deal of the trouble Francesco finds himself in, though most of his woes stem from the libido he’s rumoured not have. He’s an impotent outcast as far as the townsfolk are concerned, and the scenes whenever Francesco leaves the cemetery for town are unintentionally hilarious, with extras who are clearly Italian – with scooters, greased ponytails etc… – speaking in obviously dubbed Dick Van Dyke accents. The dialogue is terrible whenever there are more than two people onscreen, and even then it’s shaky. But your forgive it because you know another glorious set piece is right around the corner. The frantic tone is set from the off.

By the final third, things go from fast to frenetic and it begins to feel like the wilful insanity of Evil Dead II has been reborn in an Italian movie version of The Bold & The Beautiful. With hilarious action juxtaposed with brilliantly bad dialogue and one-liners, it can’t fail to be the an almost completely improbable winner. Who’d have thought it?

The Unborn arrives still-born, confused, overwhelmed by its influences and riddled with incidental music that seems designed to inflict the viewer with its own brand of barbarous audio-vandalism.

Classic horror, this is not.

We’re plunged headlong into an ill-conceived dream sequence in which Odette Yusman finds herself jogging along an autumnal scene, only to be stopped in her tracks by a spooky child with bright blue eyes. The spooky child turns into a dog wearing a mask. The dog runs off and our heroine idiotically follows its path into a plot haunted by endless, unrelated and supposed scares that are less likely to make you touch cloth than a quarter-bag of imodium.

They don’t let up on the sub-Exorcist set-pieces and the choreographed shocks become so familar you can set your watch by them. One minute it’s insects climbing out of lavatories, the next the small boy is thrusting his hand into a stomach, then the dog reappears with its head on upside down (disproving Shaun of the Dead’s theorem that ‘dogs can’t look up). We get contorted old men, back-snaps and a bemused looking Idris Elba, fresh out of another career wrong-turn in Rocknrolla and, what’s more, we get Gary Oldman’s first memorable screen appearance in ages – and it’s memorable for all the wrong reasons.

In his role as an American rabbi he not only looks completely out of place, he appears to spend the rest of the movie trying to find the right place, before failing and giving up.

Things come to a head at the exorcism he was dead against, but then decided to perform after a rush of blood to the head. This final set piece is overblown, underwritten and mercifully brief – its happy brevity only soiled by the insipid promise of a sequel.

And what, exactly, have we done to deserve that?

Firstly, a confession. When I was a bogey-encrusted, bad-breathed 10 year old boy, I was obsessed with The Punisher. Blissfully unaware that there were far cooler superheros for a youngster to be fascinated by, I had my bedroom wall painted black, with a lovingly rendered white skull emblazoned over the top. I had my school lunch box similarly repainted. Where once there was a spot colour, as-purchased and off-the-shelf Mask Crusaders logo, there was soon a Punisher emblem perfected in Dulux paint once I’d had my way.

Looking over my primary school exercise books, every other story I wrote for creative writing was about The Punisher. By far my proudest possessions were a few shoeboxes stacked with dog-eared and knackered copies of the British editions. The fact that I later used these old comics to hide copies of Mayfair and Whitehouse don’t change one iota the fact that, for an important period of my childhood, I bloody loved the Punisher.

I am no longer 10 years old and am now wise enough not to be disappointed by the news of another attempt to bring Frank Castle’s raging alter ego to the screen. It couldn’t be any worse than the Dolph Lundgren disaster, after all, let alone the more recent one with John Travolta. I was enthusiastic to see what they’d done with a character who, along with quite a few other comic book heros, will never, ever suit Hollywood – being just too amoral (or morally simplistic), way too violent and far, far too cold-blooded to suit the big screen.

A quick catch up might be necessary if, quite reasonably, the idea of a man in a black spandex suit with loads of massive guns never interested you and The Punisher passed you by. Frank Castle served in Vietnam, raised a family and then saw that family die at the hands of the Mafia during a botched execution. Thus, The Punisher was born, swearing to avenge the death of his wife and child by murdering every single gang member he encounters using a variety of automatic and non-automatic weapons.

Firstly, this new outing probably warrants its 18 certificate. Endless scenes of violence include a pensioner’s blown-apart cranium, a man losing his face in a bottle-crusher and a kidney being bitten out of an obese man’s ribcage. We’re witness to a the full range of GBH indecency to the point where faces being split open with gunfire become a bore. It’s so relentless it becomes, aptly, a fading cartoon.

Aside from the violence, the only thing of note (aside from, for once, a half-decent portrayal of the big man himself) is the presence of The Wire’s Dominic West – or McNulty to his friends in Baltimore. Here he plays Jigsaw – a gang leader with a reconstituted face. How West made the transition from a carefully nuanced police drama about gang-bangers to a to completely ludicrous version of the same is something only he could know.

Punisher: War Zone’s main problem is that the audience it best suits won’t be able to get in to see it. Any kid can get his hand on all the two dimensional gunfire gut-puncture imagery he fancies, but that 18 certificate means the only people like to see this are either hardcore comic book fans who weren’t disappointed by the first two efforts, a handful of children donning false moustaches or, more shamefully, nostalgia-seeking, thirty-something adults who should know better.