Frightfest 2012 Day 1: 23.8.2012

The Seasoning House directed by Paul Hyatt was the opening film. Set mainly in a house used as a brothel to which girls captured by soldiers in an unnamed Balkan conflict (presumably Serbia/Bosnia) are brutalised and used sexually, often after their parents have been killed in front of them. The young female lead is a deaf-mute who has been orphaned and is made to care for the prostituted girls, cleaning them and keeping them drugged. Unknown to her captors, she moves around the spaces between wals and floors to comfort some of the girls when she can. While the man in charge is as brutal as anyone, he seems to have a soft spot for her but when the man who killed her family arrive, she uses her knowledge of the secret passages to exact revenge before escaping - but she ends up at the home of the doctor who has been used to treat the girls in the brothel. A reasonable first effort. Cockneys vs Zombies directed by Matthias Hoene was the second film and a complete change from the first. Two brothers decide to rob a bank to save the care home where their grandfather lives at the same time that an underground vault is opened on a nearby building site releasing the undead entombed there for centuries. The delight of the film is seeing elderly actors like Honor Blackman, Dudley Sutton and richard Briers deal with the zombies when the care home is attacked. Alan Ford plays the grandfather somewhat reprising his role in recent British gangster films not that I recognised or had heard of him. While there is ample gore, the tone is light with the highlight surely being Richard Briers using a zimmer frame trying successfully to outpace slowly an attacking zombie. All ends happily with them riding upstream to safetly.