Phonegate: Why Turning Off Your Smartphone Benefits Everybody

I love Film4 FrightFest. Horror audiences care about movies a lot. So much so, if anybody dares to use their smartphone during a screening, they’re likely to be shouted at and harangued until said person is shamed into either leaving the auditorium or being a good cinema-goer and switching off the phone. Seriously, the zero tolerance policy is brilliant and Alex Billington would love it.

One year, I heard somebody bellow out across the cavernous Screen 1 of Empire Theatre, “Turn your phone off, you fucking c*&t!” FrightFest run slightly less abrasive (but often gory) adverts before each screening at the festival. The ‘Turn Your Bloody Phones Off’ idents are most amusing. If you haven’t got the message then there’s grouchy Scottish FrightFest co-director, Ian Rattray, to threaten you into compliance. The organisers have cultivated a policy regarding mobile phone use that totally works.

FrightFest Day 2: It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times

After the appetiser of day 1 with only two films, came the piece de resistance, a day of 4 films back to back. This is what I love about FrightFest, the way the screenings are concentrated in one place, making it much easier to watch them back to back, as well as enhancing the social factor greatly. There is nothing I enjoy more than coming out after each screening to discuss the film we have just seen with my fellow festival-goers. On this full day, there were no half-measures. Out of the four films I saw, two were brilliant, and two were rubbish.

My Picks For The London Film Festival 2013

Under The Skin

The London Film Festival line-up has been revealed earlier in the week, and it's a cornucopia of riches, a smorgasbord of delights, and one of the strongest, most inventive selection in years. While not up there in the big league alongside Cannes, Venice & Toronto, the LFF has grown in popularity over the last decade, offering a selection that offers a catch-up from the other film festivals in the calendar year, as well as unearthing some true treasures of its own. Indeed my favourite thing every year is to flick through the programme and discover all these new films I knew nothing about yet I am dying to see.

Riddick Review

Plot: Betrayed and left for dead on an inhospitable planet, Riddick has to contend with a hostile and deadly wildlife. Activating a rescue beacon, he attracts the attention of two different groups of mercenaries and bounty hunters, with some very different reasons to go after him. And just as you think it cannot get any worse, an even bigger threat looms at the horizon...

The first film in the Riddick franchise, Pitch Black, is a classic as far as I am concerned, a terrifying and smart sci-fi horror, with some real depth to it, and some unusually fleshed out characters, especially its main protagonist, the anti-hero Riddick, with his ever shifting moral principles. Then came its sequel, Chronicles Of Riddick, a film which can be lauded for at least attempting to go on a completely different direction, and not doing a bigger reboot of the first one, which so many modern sequels do. Sadly there is little else you can praise it for. Larger in scale and budget, it was an attempt to extend and explore the universe of Riddick, but it turned into a dour and rather boring space opera which satisfied nobody.

Exclusive Interview With Matila Malliarakis - Beyond The Walls

Most of the British audience will have only recently discovered Matila Malliarakis in the French serie The Returned. But in Beyond The Walls, out in the UK on dvd, he shows a different side of him, and in an exclusive interview with FilmLand Empire, he has come up with some very thoughtful answers about the film making process, LGB cinema and French tv series.

1) Your characters in Beyond The Walls and your relationship in it feel incredibly real. Did you have any input in the script? 

Most of it was already written into the screenplay, but David had a very clear idea of the characters, and is one of those directors who knows how to let the actors invent in the moment. Once we all agreed on the heart of the film, he trusted us enough to let us propose things, even if they didn’t initially correspond to the storyline.

FrightFest 2013: Day 1 - Haunted Houses & Haunted Tapes

Ah, FrightFest! My guilty pleasure among the film festival circuit. More than any other films, horrors demand to be watched in a huge, packed screen, with an audience who laughs and screams at all the right parts. And the audience at FF is probably the best in the world, the most fun, and also the nicest there is, respectful of any cast & crew which comes up on stage, and happy to put it with some truly atrocious films, as long as there is a fun decapitation involved. Last year brought us the unforgettable Tulpa, and the Chinese banquet incident I wrote a poem about. While this year did not have such memorable moments, or any films as exceptional as two I saw in 2011 (The Woman) and 2012 (Berberian Sound Studio), the general quality was higher. It was to be a year to remember for a sad reason, in an end of an era kind of way, but more on that later.

Beyond The Walls

In Beyond The Walls, what begins as an impromptu one-night stand between Illir (Guillaume Gouix), an attractively scruffy man with little time for romance, and Paulo (Matila Malliarakis), a confused and more sensitive young man, evolves into a more long term relationship due to unexpected circumstances. But no relationships is ever immune to what life throws at you and the trials of time.