FrightFest 2013: You're Next, Hatchet 3, VHS 2 & More Reviewed

Daylight

rating: 1.5

A distinctive though fumbled effort to reinvigorate the found footage genre, Daylight revolves around a team of Child Protective Services officers who investigate a spate of strange child abuse cases in the sleepy town of Daylight, Indiana. As the parents, social workers and local clergy all try to get their oar in, a more disturbing truth is slowly unraveled. Sadly, this extremely amateur found footage flick can't make much sense of it, suffering through inept performances and a truckton of risible dialogue, while the central conceit - that a CPS team runs around with a camera - is utterly ridiculous. If the irritating artificial video artifacting doesn't wear your patience thin - in a vain attempt to resolve that the footage was fished out of a lake - then the cringe-inducing attempts to satire today's youth and blatant obviousness of the whole endeavour surely will. Co-directors David McCracken (who also stars in the film), Joel Townsend and Kaidan Tremain milk shopworn found footage and horror tropes - running through a forrest, Blair Witch-style, and creepy girls - to death, while the film's second half, though ambitious - as various recordings appear to bleed into one another - collapses in on itself through its sheer incoherence. The final reel, though certainly an avant garde take on the genre, is close to incomprehensible. It's certainly not boring, and it gets a few points for its technical audacity, but at times Daylight borders on senselessness.

Sadik 2

rating: 2.5

This Turkish horror flick is not, as you might expect from the title, a sequel. Rather, Sadik 2 is a movie being made within the film, and when the production team behind the first film need a way to up the ante for their sequel, they decide to just kidnap some local youngsters who are renting a house in the country for New Year's Eve, and subject them to a night of torture and murder. Absolutely dripping in meta humour, Sadik has a clear reverence for the Scream franchise, opting for the same blend of blood-letting and self-aware gaggery. The mildly amusing banter that comprises much of the film references a litany of classic movies that run the cinematic gamut, including its meta forebear Scream, Driler Killer, Sleepy Hollow, The Sims, Top Gun, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, , Jurassic Park, Blair Witch, and Cannibal Holocaust. In spite of this, there's an unexpected amount of attention paid to character development also, which is perhaps slightly misguided given the super-brisk pacing of the film, which is also needlessly divided into chapters. The final act, in which the real and cinematic world truly collide, is suitably demented, and yet while it's a nice idea, director Robin Entreinger doesn't convey it with much flair, nor even begin to go far enough. It's a film that, incredibly, is too much like hanging out with film buff friends, to the point that there's really not much incident for most of the run-time. Where is the horror? Though wearing its meta tone on its sleeve, Sadik 2 takes far too long to engage with its twisty concept, and is painfully subject to a subterranean budget.