Grimm in 2011 and Submissions

We've got some big ideas for 2011 for Grimm Up North. We can't reveal too much right now as we're busy finalising and confirming the details, but announcements will follow soon, so stay tuned.

We will be opening the call for submissions very soon. As always we will be looking for horrific hits and sci-fi shockers in both short and feature length movies. So if you've got anything truly original in either the horror, sci-fi or fantasy genres that you're burning to show then keep an eye on the Grimm channels for news on this front.

So keep your ears to the ground Grimmlins. Grimm Up North is back and we'll be keeping you up to date with the plans for this year's festival as they unfold.

Prepare yourselves...

Grimm Knows Best

Last year our eagle-eyed team spotted the potential in the grindhouse gore-fest Dead Hooker in a Trunk and held its UK premiere at Grimm up North 2010. Since then Dead Hooker has become an underground hit, securing UK distribution with Bounty Films and due for release on May 23rd. The film has received praise from critics but has also courted controversy recently in Canada; the film was pulled from a screening after public outcry over its sensational title, but hey there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?


Other films gaining success since the festival include slowburning Mexican cannibal shocker We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau), which achieved a nationwide cinema release and great critical acclaim. Praise for Amer (Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani), an homage to classic Italian masters like Argento, continues to pour in from numerous sources, including Mark Kermode's Movie Round-Up noting its "broiling visual style" and "splatter-tastic end".

We would also like to support Sushi Typhoon, the makers of the insanely hilarious Alien vs. Ninja (Seiji Chiba), screened at Grimm 2010, who are travelling the USA screening their back-catalogue of films in a campaign they've titled "Splatter Matters" to raise funds for the victims of the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami.

Trash Cinema @ The New Continental

In my largely forgotten childhood, The Continental (my local pub) was best known for monkey bars, Captain Coconuts and its proximity to a scenic park. Flashforward (Joseph Fiennes style) and I’d be hard pressed to believe that a pub could be transformed into a stage for plays, a cinema for films and an exhibition space for artists. However on a cold rainy night in Preston, seeing was believing.

Chaired by serial blogger and cinephile Robyn Talbot, we were treated to a viewing of Sergio Martino’s 1973 gory Italian exploitation masterpiece Torso. Tables with candles were set out in front of a 14ft high definition screen and with a bar nearby, I haven’t seen a film in a more relaxed and sophisticated setting.

The night was also the national launch of the upcoming ‘Lucio Fulci’s Box of Terror’ set, which for ethical reasons I was not able to win in the raffle but nevertheless I was privy to Torso, a cult horror masterpiece that never skimped on the blood, nudity or murderous and largely inventive set pieces.

The night was capped off with a chance for me to plug Grimm Up North but even without an ulterior motive, it was nice to see film and culture brought to Preston (which is a mere 35 minute train ride away from Manchester I’ll have you know). The north will forever be in the shadow of the south but its endearing that people like Robyn and venues like The New Continental are willing to take a chance and put on a good show.

For more information on all the events The New Continental has coming up visit www.thenewcontinental.net

JD Douglas-Walton
Writer for Grimm Up North

Steve's Review - Alien Vs Ninja

Grimm Up North Movies: ALIEN VS NINJA (Seiji Chiba)

The title pretty much writes the review. This really is exactly what is says on the box - Ninjas fighting Aliens.

No subtleties of characterisation, no intricate narrative set ups. Just 80 minutes of martial arts mayhem and cartoonish gore; a delirious pop-pulp-trash mash-up, harking back to the much-loved catchpenny monster slugfests of Toho Studio’s golden era. The plot, such as it is, is simple to the point of idiocy. Essentially, it’s the set up of PREDATOR in the landscape of THE WATER MARGIN. Two parties of Ninjas are sent out into a large forest to investigate a mysterious meteorite which has fallen close to a neighbouring, rival Han. Their Feudal Lord fears it might contain something of value that he does not wish his enemies to get hold of. In reality, however, it contains - yeah, you guessed it - alien beasties.

From there on in, it’s one long wire-work-enhanced fight to the death. The Ninjas, clad in black leather armour and sporting rockstar haircuts, look more like members of a Japanese heavy metal band (Except, obviously, for the fat, bald, screaming, cowardly comic relief character, who has to be the world’s most unlikely assassin). The aliens look like men in rubber suits - but let’s face it so does Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, probably because that’s what it was.

However, ALIEN VS NINJA director Seiji Chiba is far less concerned than Scott was with creating a credible alien menace. In fact, he’s less concerned than Edward L. Kahn was in IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE. AVN is all about the ass-kicking. This is cinema as Pro Wrestling. It’s a mindless monster manga come to life and coming to a midnight movie screening near you. And it’s a laugh a minute.

Prepare to choke on your popcorn.

Steve's Review: All About Evil

ALL ABOUT EVIL (Dir: Joshua Grannell)

Why do we love horror movies? What is it that we love about them? What needs do they fulful for us? These are the questions posed by Joshua Grannell’s outrageous feature film debut ALL ABOUT EVIL, which interrogates even as it celebrates the wilder excesses of genre cinema.

The film tells the story of Deborah Tennis (Natasha Lyonne), a mousy librarian, who inherits a grind house cinema specialising in cult b-movies and gory 70s and 80s horror flicks. Haunted by her failure to become the child star her beloved father dreamed she would be, tormented by her cruel and rapacious mother, Deborah is driven over the edge into committing murder. But her crime is caught on camera, and accidentally screened to her cinema audience to rapturous applause. Suddenly, all of Deborah’s dreams of cinematic success start to come true. She is feted as a visionary director; her screenings become the hottest ticket in town. The only problem is the continual need to find new performers to appear in her films. Fortunately, however, Deborah has a lot of rage issues to work out. Enlisting the aid of her embittered elderly projectionist Mr Twigs, degenerate hustler Adrian and psychotic twins Veda and Vera, she quickly builds the ideal crew for her cinematic endeavours, and sets to work. Meanwhile, horror film buff Steven, her biggest fan, longs to get to know her better…

Were I pitching the idea to Hollywood Executives, I’d probably describe it as WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE directed by Hershell Gordon Lewis… And of course they wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about, because the people financing films today have no sense of Cinema History - particularly the less “respectable” parts. ALL ABOUT EVIL, however, is steeped - soaked! - in that bloody history. Grannell is better known as his demonic drag diva alter-ego Peaches Christ, host of San Francisco’s infamous “Midnight Mass” screenings, celebrating all that is camp, gory, and gloriously tacky in cinema past and present. Grannell’s love for the horror genre is evident in every frame of his film. Opening with a beautiful title sequence, incorporating re-imagined versions of dozens of classic B-movie posters, and crammed with visual and verbal in-jokes, arcane allusions and mischievous references galore, this is a cult cineaste’s delight, a multi-layered slice of self-referential meta-cinema, with even the title being a cheeky bit of wordplay on the seminal Joseph L. Mankiewicz / Bette Davis movie ALL ABOUT EVE.

Yet however post-modern the film may be, this is not at the expense of narrative, character and sheer creative chutzpah. Grannell never forgets that first and foremost his film should be fun. ALL ABOUT EVIL’s purpose is above all to entertain, and in this it is a roaring success, both as a fast-paced 80s-style slasher movie thrill-ride, and as a blackly comic parody, with the cast catching the tone perfectly. Natasha Lyonne’s star turn as Deborah is a cunning compendium of filmic femmes fatales, skilfully leaping from Mae West, to Bette Davis, to Joan Crawford (or perhaps Faye Dunaway’s nightmarish caricature thereof in MOMMIE DEAREST), to Queen of the New York Underground Lydia Lunch. The rest of the cast deliver equally well-judged turns. Cult character actor Jack Donner (you name it, he’s been in it!), exudes seedy, gleeful malice as Mr Twigs, and there is a magnificently witchy turn from the Amazonian Julie Caitlin Brown, as Deborah’s vile mother. Ironically, but altogether appropriately, it is the stars most associated with camp who are given the warmest, most sympathetic roles: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark herself, Cassandra Peterson, is effectively cast against type as Steven’s bemused but understanding mother, while John Waters regular Mink Stole brings unexpected humanity and pathos to the role of the elderly spinster chief librarian whose well-meant interference Deborah so resents.

The result is a riotous splatter-satire, which is not afraid to mix laugh-out-loud black comedy with some genuinely queasy moments of violence and gore. The casting nod to the “Pope of Trash” John Waters is entirely fitting. The film’s closest relative is probably Waters’ CECIL B. DEMENTED - another lament for everything that has been lost in this blanded-out world of pre-sold, pre-tested, corporate-sponsored, product-placement-stuffed multiplex fodder. Joshua Grinnell - or is it Peaches Christ? - offers us a chance to enter a world where the carnival barker antics of William Castle, and the blood-drenched excesses of H. G. Lewis, the cartoon bawdiness of Russ Meyer and the huckster genius of Roger Corman, are not forgotten. Where Cinema remains…magic!

- STEVE BALSHAW,Film Programmer, GRIMM UP NORTH

Noel's Review: Amer

Directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, Amer is a Belgian, French language movie that I've been lucky enough to see ahead of FrightFest. Going in, I was aware of suggestions that it owed much to the work of directors like Argento, Fulci and Bava and was something of a love letter to the giallo style of horror film making. Of course, this was enough to peak my interest, but I have to say that ultimately I was in no way prepared for what lay in store for me.

Without going in to too much detail on plot, what I can say is that Amer evolves over a very tight 90-minute, three act narrative. In its first section, which is arguably its most heavily inspired by Argento, we follow a young girl exploring the creaking hallways and rooms of her childhood home. As she wanders from one place to another, catching the tail-ends of her parents' conversations and hiding from her terrifying lace-clad grandmother, we're treated to some of the most compelling and engaging cinema I've seen in as long as I can remember. With a light dusting of Guillermo Del Toro, this thrilling exploration of childhood fear and confusion moves comfortably between outright creepiness and mind-bending surrealism.

For the second act, we rejoin our heroine - although this time she is in her teens and outside the confines of her large and imposing family home. However, this new freedom brings with it a level of burgeoning sexuality that regularly seems as if it might explode on the screen at any moment, but manages to be intermittently subdued by moments of tension and the intervening touch of her authoritative mother.

In its final third, we return the house that had such a presence in the film's first half hour, along with the giallo-esque aesthetics that made it so powerful. However, this is not before a beautiful and hazily-paced taxi ride in which the threat of overwhelming desire is ramped up to new heights for its lead, this time a fully-fledged woman in her sexual prime.

In its first five minutes, Amer had me absolutely gripped and I stayed that way for every remaining glorious 85. Sure, in parts it more than a little reminiscent of 1970s European horror, but this is by no means the only trick it has up its sleeve. As a piece of art, this is a film that is as visceral as any I've ever seen. It has a visual style that is surpassed only by its stunning sound design, making every breath, every gasp and every bead of sweat as tangible for the viewer as it is for the characters on screen.

Elegantly paced, infinitely watchable and by far one of the best films I've seen this year, Amer is a film I cannot recommend enough. While the plot will undoubtedly leave some scratching their heads, this is an exercise in arthouse cinema that is as sensually involving as anything else you are likely to see this year - possibly even longer.

- Noel Mellor, Web and Social Marketing Co-ordinator, GRIMM UP NORTH

Josh's Review: Inception

For a film supposedly ten years in the making, writer and director Christopher Nolan delivers a complex and engaging sci-fi/action film that's original as it is epic.

The premise is complicated but easy to understand, its a heist movie at heart but instead of criminals breaking into in a bank, Leonardo DiCaprio is breaking into people's dreams by the process of extraction. DiCaprio heads up a stellar cast of award winners and Hollywood heavywieghts including the handsome Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine.

DiCaprio is Dominic Cobb, an extractor, who specialises in subconscious security. Aided by his pointman Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), Cobb and Arthur break into a subject's dreams in order to steal their secrets. The film opens with a botched extraction of businessman Saito's (Watanbe) dreams. Saito has an alternative offer and employs Cobb to perform inception. Instead of stealing information, he has to implant information in a subject's mind, a complex and near impossible feat to perform.

After the brief set up, the film settles into its rhythm, exploring Cobb's past, his relationship with his deceased wife Mal (Cotillard) and the nature of subconscious theft. Cobb assembles of crack-team to infiltrate Fischer's (Murphy) dreams and implant the idea that dissolving his father's massive empire is a good idea.

The majority of film deals with the actual inception and the complications that arise from creating a dream, inside a dream, inside a dream. Despite the slightly convoluted nature of dreams, Nolan carefully weaves in layers of philosophy and narrative complexity. Inception is never overly difficult to understand and comprehend which serves it well but it also never reveals the full picture which kept me hooked from start to finish and constantly had me wanting more answers.

The film's gun play and action is well choreographed and always exciting to watch. Coupled with sublime editing, gripping music from Hans Zimmer and superb direction and vision from Nolan, Inception is one of the most interesting and exciting films I've ever seen. It's visually rich and beautifully shot.

Looking back at the film its hard not to slide into sensationalism and hyperbole when trying to describe Inception but the best comparison I can make is to The Matrix (and by extension Ghost in the Shell). I remember the first time I saw The Matrix and the way it drew me in with postmodern questions about the nature of the 'real' and how it candidly boiled down complicated subjects. Inception outstrips The Matrix in terms of narrative fidelity while the philosophy is still there but it isn't so overt and it seems less pretentious for it.

Ultimately Inception is one of the best films I've ever seen and it certainly is the best blend of sci-fi/action out there.

JD Douglas-Walton
Writer & Networker for Grimm Up North.