'The Pack', a Franck Richard debut feature, starts with Emilie Dequenne driving south through the French countryside with her
picking up Benjamin Biolay as a protection after a run in with three bikers. Stopping at Mama Spack's truck stop (though it
did seem rather off the road) for refreshments, she finds her companion has gone missing. Mama Spack, the incomparable
Yolande Moreau, does not help at all and she soon finds herself captive, having been the victim of a plot to lure her there.
The stop is near an old mine which has long since closed down following a major disaster and her presence is required to sate
the appetites of the dead miners who return. After many twists in the plot she survives. A dark film with an interesting plot and some nice touches.
Colm McCarthy has directed 'The Outcast' which deals with Celtic myth on a Scottish housing estate. Despite a cast of well-known British actors who acquit themselves as well as can be expected in the circumstances, this was not really involving.
We Are What We Are' is Mexican, directed by Jorge Michel Grau, about an urban cannibal family facing the problem of getting their food when their father dies in the middle of a shopping mall. Perhaps I might have enjoyed this more had it been on earlier in the weekend's showings but, apart from the opening sequence which was nicely filmed, it pressed no buttons and
certainly did not ring any bells.
'Amer' is a Franco-Belgian feature directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Although the setting and filming were very
interesting, the story of three episodes in a woman's life starting with childhood provided an example of style without substance. An hommage to the giallos of the 1970s, it was a rather plale imitation of the best of that decade.
'Buried' was a substitute for 'A Serbian Film' which ran into censorship problems and was withdrawn. The film has a single actor playing a captured American soldier buried in a coffin somewhere in Iraq. He can communicate with outside world and
the film is a slow unfolding of the apparents efforts to find and rescue him before he dies. Wow(?)
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Surprisingly the first film was the pick of the day with the two discovery films leaving me bemused: couldn't make head nor tail of the British one and Amer was one third good and two thirds awful. As for the two in the main cinema, the Mexican cannibal film was I thought the worst of the fest and Buried was not a satisfactory substitute for the pulled fright film.
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