After hitting the big-time with Get Out Jordan Peele returns with his highly anticipated Us which he has written, produced and directed. Early reviews have been very positive however, I’ve avoided reading much of anything about the film as I invariably get disappointed overindulging in advance. All I was aware of was the rather intriguing basic premise: a family are stalked by a group of doppelgängers. That hook was enough to entice me to the cinema.

I was not a big fan of Get Out which was entertaining but ultimately overrated, and I have much the same opinion on Us. It was very watchable, but let’s not get carried away and trump-up a flick that has plenty of flash, but in other places had me scratching my head, particularly in the very long final twenty minutes where I drifted off somewhat. One of the things I really loved about It Follows was the fact it reveals absolutely nothing about the supernatural entity, Us does the complete opposite and bombards the viewer with a really boring information dump, before winding-up with a twist I saw coming.

The prologue takes us back to 1986 where a young girl is separated from her parents in a seaside fair and wanders into a house of mirrors where she sees a little girl who looks almost exactly like her. So, the doppelgänger concept is revealed before the opening credits begin, flashforward to the present day the little girl is now married, has two kids of her own and is heading to their holiday home which is on the side of a remote bay. We quickly realise this is in the close vicinity of the childhood seaside incident which she still has issues over in recurring dreams. The film only has a few other characters and is mainly set over one single night, much of which is very familiar territory to any home invasion movie, except for the doppelgänger angle. The scene when the twin family make their debut appearance was terrific, the son spots their shadows first “there is a family standing on our lawn” he says before things kick off. It was reminiscent of the famous pose of Alex and his ‘droogs’ standing in the tunnel in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, as were the boiler suits the doppelgängers wore.  Lupita Nyong'o was a stunning leading lady, bringing high intensity to the role, particularly when her kids are threatened, and in acting two very contrasting roles.

The middle-class family dynamics is nicely drawn and the acting is excellent, both children in particular were superb, and their doppelgänger counterparts were suitably different, but still almost identical, to add a certain level of creepiness. It was both very stylish and visual with powerful use of music, and because of this I felt it lacked old fashioned scares and the highest levels of threat came when the kids were being stalked by their doppelgänger counterparts. However, the tough teenager daughter was not to be messed with and the audience will be rooting for her in no time. There were a few jumpy moments and a couple of kill scenes which happen abruptly, but apart from that I would not call it a white-knuckle ride.  
I recall Get Out getting more outlandish as it went along and in some ways Us follows a similar pattern, however, this film does have a clever plot shift in the final third, which goes ultimately unexplored and was a tad frustrating. There is a scene in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead where the besieged characters watch TV to see about the attacks in the outside world, it’s a bit like that, it might even be deliberately referencing it?  I’m sure there will be lots of experts out there trying to decode the inner-meaning of some of the film and the symbolism used but I would not bother looking for deep social sub-contexts. Long term horror fans will pick up on the odd sly reference to other films such as C.H.U.D. which sits on a video shelf in the prologue story and has some foreshadowing on what is to come.  Something about the way the doppelgängers communicated reminded me of the very final scene featuring Donald Sutherland in the late 1970s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, again I don’t know if that was intentional or not.   

Jordan Peele seems to have become one of those directors who has risen above criticism, he’s directed two imaginative films, but neither have been complete successes. There are lots of things that do not make sense in Us, but as I want to limit spoilers you can find them for yourself. I will be interested in seeing what he does with the new episodes of The Twilight Zone, however, I do not see the point in remaking Candyman, another project he is currently involved it, I’m sure many in the horror community agree that it’s a pointless exercise.  
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High concept horror-films have their fans, and often reach a wider market with their style over substance approach, I recall shaking my head at the plaudits The Cabin in the Woods received and feel the same about Us. It’s a decent film, but if it had appeared in a streaming service I’m not sure I would have got too excited about it or pegged it as anything out of the ordinary.
3/5   

When you think of great zombie movies, what comes to mind? Dawn of the Dead? Night of the Living Dead? 28 Days Later?

All reasonable picks, but I’d like to add another to that list: Japanese comedy One Cut of the Dead.

Though the genre may give you flashbacks to 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Shinichiro Ueda gives us something refreshingly different, but still utterly hilarious.

You’d be forgiven for disagreeing with me after seeing the first act. Much of it – lasting around 40 minutes – plays out like your run-of-the-mill apocalypse flick. Zombies have infiltrated (where else?) the set of a zombie film. There’s the dingy warehouse, a cast of stock characters, and more jump scares than you can shake a severed arm at.

The opening section has many bright spots in its own right - Takayuki Hamatsu goes all-in as the perfection-obsessed director, Chinatsu becomes a heroine you can’t help but root for, and all of it is filmed on a camera that’s constantly shaking. However, throughout this first half you can’t help but sense that something is wrong.

For example, the aforementioned camera falls to the ground during one chase sequence. You expect it to be picked up again after a few seconds, but it stays there for half a minute, filming fragments of the scuffle. Why?
These are questions we don’t get the answer to – at least, not in the first half.

I can’t give too much away about One Cut’s brilliant second act without ruining the whole film. In a nutshell, a flashback to one month earlier shows how what we’ve just seen was created.

The film’s structure is deliberately confusing. After seeing the cast as actors-playing-characters for almost a quarter of an hour, they’re now actors-playing-characters-playing-actors.... It was a change that I initially struggled to wrap my head around.

For many, this back-to-front storytelling might be a deal breaker, but I encourage you to stick with it. My five minutes of puzzlement was worth it for what came afterwards.

Act 2 is when One Cut begins to evolve into something more. We see the director Higurashi’s humble beginnings creating karaoke music videos. His teenage daughter Harumi is attempting to follow his path with little success; he recruits her, and his wife Mao, for a TV channel’s ambitious launch alongside many other acquaintances. The pace slows down here, but for an important reason – it gets you to care about these characters as more than just archetypes.

The switch into family drama pays off in the final part. Knowing the story of these people, we see the first film again – but this time, from behind the camera, with all the roadblocks involved. That’s also where the comedy ramps up; details from the second act that seemed irrelevant suddenly become pivotal. TV Tropes calls that a “Brick Joke”, and rarely have they been executed so well.

(Also, for the record – the dropped camera is one of these reframed events. You’ll have to see it to believe it.)

That being said, some aspects of One Cut’s comedy didn’t resonate with me. Yamakoe is the subject of toilet humour at one point; it’s bound to raise laughs from some but seemed out of place compared to the sophisticated jokes that followed. This will, of course, be a matter of taste.

Something else that may also throw people off is the lack of music. It’s largely confined to chase scenes in the first half, and comedic moments in the second. However, this wasn’t a huge distraction for me – the generic action movie soundtrack is just another way in which genre conventions are parodied throughout the film.

Make no mistake, though, this is a comedy that ribs on its subject with love. Nothing captures that feeling more than the climax of the movie, where the crew pulls out all the stops to grab their closing shot.

The scene is equal parts funny and sweet – much like One Cut as a whole. However, it also leaves you appreciating the work of film production crews; fitting, considering One Cut’s road to festival glory.

It was filmed in just eight days, with a cast of unknowns scouted from Tokyo’s Enbu Seminar drama school. It was originally shown on just two screens in Japan – but interest from the European festival circuit led to a re-release. Helped by a tactic of giving free tickets to moviegoers dressed as zombies, the film made more than ten times its 3-million-yen (roughly $27,000/£21,000) budget. It makes perfect sense to compare One Cut of the Dead with the likes of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, but the latter’s an indie production done good, in a way the other two could never claim to be.

Of course, despite the critical acclaim, One Cut didn’t get off scot-free.  There’s been some controversy in Japan about the story’s similarity to Ghost in the Box, a 2011 play by Ryoichi Wada. Ueda has openly admitted that Wada’s play inspired the structure of his film but denied copying it wholesale. Whatever its origin, worldwide audiences seem to love it regardless.

After such success, it’s only natural Ueda’s trying to follow it. At the time of writing this, he’s begun work on his next film. All we know is that it’s another comedy, with plans to start shooting in the spring – but if One Cut is anything to go by, it should be another masterpiece.
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One Cut of the Dead is not your typical zombie film. It’s got a wacky structure, but this is more than compensated for by the sincerity at its heart. For those who like their undead hordes to be self-aware rather than serious, this is the perfect tonic and earns an 8/10.

Tia Owen is a student of English & Creative and Professional Writing, currently in her second year at the University of Derby. Since getting a certificate for a thoroughly derivative superhero story at the age of six, she has been published in several Young Writers anthologies (including 2014’s War of Words) and written articles for the University’s newspaper The Phantom. She also runs her own blog, The Scribbling Student (https://thescribblingstudent.wordpress.com/), chronicling her adventures on the road to publication and giving advice to other writers.  She’s not fussy when it comes to genres, but her current big project is a historical vampire romance tentatively titled Blood Devotion. ​

Saturday began with a 10.45am screening of THE RUSALKA (aka THE SIREN) and thank goodness they showed it in the morning and not late at night, when it would have surely put me to sleep. About as pretentious as indie arthouse horror gets, the film actually opens with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, which rightly got my alarm bells ringing. It concerns a man who visits a lake where lots of people have been drowning, encounters a young woman who apparently lives in the water and completely fails to put two and two together. He's a mute water-phobe who's desperate to get laid. She's a living ghost who likes to drown random men. Could they possibly be any more perfect for each other? Very much paddling in the same pool as the superior SPRING, THE RUSALKA aims to win hearts with its shallow romance, but arrives pretty much dead in the water. For me, it was probably the low point of the festival.
 
Talking of low points, for a number of attendees, AUTOMATA was theirs. And while I would suggest that many of the comments I heard voiced about it were a little unfair, it is certainly a frustrating viewing experience. To independently produce a film this daft and idiosyncratic in Scotland is a true achievement and deserves respect, but it still feels compromised. Following an academic and his stepdaughter as they attempt to verify the authenticity of a 17th century automaton while being slowly seduced by the perverted spirits that surround it, AUTOMATA doesn't lack for ambition, but feels like it is constantly holding back, never daring to pursue its own dark heart. While it boasts gorgeous visuals, great locations and costumes as well as some “interesting” performances, it is much too tame to succeed as an erotic horror. But at least it's never boring.
 
Talking of boring (last time I use that segue), FINALE... is. A film about a couple of petrol station attendants kidnapped and forced to appear in an online snuff show, it is unusual in that it is Danish and Danish horror films are, so I'm told, fairly unusual. But in all other regards it's pretty standard stuff. We know from the opening scene that the girls have been abducted but we're forced to sit through flashback after flashback of them being tediously menaced at the petrol station before we're finally plunged into the horror in the third act. While the violence is at least gruesome and gory, it's not very inventive and even those who have yet to get their fill of torture porn flicks will probably be getting impatient long before the end. (A brief note: Walking home after FrightFest had finished, I was trying to recall each of the 11 films I'd seen, but I could only get to 10. I was racking my brains for ages trying to remember the missing film that I knew I had seen just a few hours earlier but had already completely forgotten about. FINALE was it.)
 
The 1000th film to be screened at FrightFest, THE WITCH: PART 1 – THE SUBVERSION is much better than its exhausting title makes it sound, though it is still – in parts – pretty exhausting. The story of an amnesiac girl living on a farm in Korea who, when she participates in a TV talent show, reveals herself to be an escapee from a super-soldier programme, it is, for the first half, a fairly heart-warming family drama. After the villains show up, the exposition endurance test begins, with much of the rest of the film playing out like one of those interminable METAL GEAR cut scenes or a foreign soap opera where the dialogue is comprised of characters saying the same things to each other over and over again, but in slightly different ways. There's no denying that, when it comes, the action is electrifying and bloody as hell, but there's not nearly enough of it. Maybe in PART 2.
 
The biggest hit of the night, the festival and, for me personally, one of the best films I've seen in the last five years, FREAKS is a true joy that everyone should see – ideally knowing as little about it as possible. Avoid the trailers, avoid the reviews, just go see it. That should be my review. But I'll say just a little more, for anyone who's not convinced. A young girl is being raised by her father in a dilapidated, possibly haunted old house, where he teaches her to lie about her circumstances and warns her never to go outside or interact with any of the neighbours – especially not the creepy old ice-cream man. The mystery of what the hell is going on is captivating, but eclipsed by the masterful reveal, unfolding a fantastical, almost Spielbergian adventure with a serrated dark edge all of its own. It's a small film set in a big world with big themes, emotional to watch, easy to fall in love with and the only film that made me forget I was at a festival or that I had to write a review afterwards. It even made me forget all about the pain in my knees, which by this point had spent the better part of two days being constrained by the Glasgow Film Theatre's slightly-too-close-together seats. An ingenious, nail-biting, furiously exciting story told with seemingly no budget, I have no idea how FREAKS got made, but I'm delighted it was. All I have left are superlatives. Go see it.
 
Rounding off the FrightFest experience was THE HOARD, a parody of a hoarders reality TV show that is so perfectly executed it would not surprise me if the crew from one of those shows made it on their weekends off. The team from EXTREMELY HAUNTED HOARDERS (which I'm frankly surprised is not a real show) undertake their toughest assignment yet. High jinks ensue. After a barnstorming first half hour, the jokes come fewer and further apart, but it's harmless stuff and made for a nice way to wind down at the end of the festival. The only better way to watch it, I think, would be happening across it by accident on the TV after coming home from the pub. If that ever happens to you, watch it.

John McNee is a writer of numerous strange and disturbing horror stories, published in a variety of strange and disturbing anthologies, as well as the novel PRINCE OF NIGHTMARES. He is also the creator of twisted sludge-city of Grudgehaven and the author of GRUDGE PUNK, a collection of short stories detailing the lives and deaths of its gruesome inhabitants, plus the sequel, PETROLEUM PRECINCT. He lives on the west coast of Scotland, where he is employed as a journalist. He can easily be sought out on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and YouTube, where he hosts the horror-themed cooking show A RECIPE FOR NIGHTMARES.