Ten Best Films at Abertoir: The International Horror Festival of Wales

Kurt Russell Bone Tomahawk
Kurt Russell stars in ‘Bone Tomahawk’

Abertoir: The International Horror Festival of Wales just concluded six days of genre films this past Sunday, November 15, 2015. The festival lists Vincent Price as its official patron saint and that reflects the programmers’ dedication to paying as much respect to horror’s past as to its future. To reflect the festival’s agenda, here’s a list of the ten best films that played at the festival with half being films from the past and half being new releases.

Best of the Classic Features:

1. Deep Red (1975)
Dario Argento’s giallo – brimming with bold style – never gets old. David Hemmings plays a musician who witnesses a murder and then gets involved in tracking the killer. Each murder is a set piece from the brutal murder of a man dragged by a truck to the insanely creepy puppet prelude to death scene. The music by Goblin endows the film with an over the top energy. One of Argento’s best.

The Descent Poster

2. The Descent (2005)
This film about a group of women on a spelunking adventure has lost none of its claustrophobic tension. Director Neil Marshall uses editing and cinematography to slowly collapse the world of these women until the audience finds it hard to breathe. Then just as we think the cave is their worst enemy, Marshall throws us a curve and turns the film into something even more terrifying. At the festival, attendees got to visit a mine and experience the darkness, cold, and claustrophobia firsthand before watching the film. Perfection!

3. The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
What a joyride this Vincent Price starrer is! Robert Fuest gives this B-horror flick a gaudy sense of style with outlandish costumes and production design. It also has the kinds of ingenious kills that put the Saw movies to shame. And Price takes absolute delight in his role as a husband exacting revenge for the death of his wife.

4. Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)
There’s not much real history in this “biography” of the Russian mad monk Rasputin but Christopher Lee has a field day devouring the part. Best line in the film from Rasputin: “When I go to confession I don’t offer God small sins, petty squabbles, jealousies… I offer him sins worth forgiving!” Lee is hypnotic to watch.


5. Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
Not as good as its predecessor and rushed into production for the following year, this sequel is still a hoot to watch. The kills once again are highly imaginative.

Best of the New Features

1. Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Wow! Just wow! This is a beautifully paced slow burn of a Western. Writer/director S. Craig Zahler understands something many modern directors seem to have forgotten that if you take the time to build our empathy for the characters you can ratchet up the tension to unbearable levels because we care about what happens to them. Grueling, brutal, and brilliant. Plus, it’s always great to see Kurt Russell get a role that’s worthy of his talents. And just as Howard Hawks twisted genre expectations with Rio Bravo (he mocked High Noon by having his sheriff accept the help of a drunk, a cripple, and a young kid), Zahler too provides some surprising twists. But while Hawks tweaked genre tropes with a wink, Zahler is deadly serious about his Western. Which is not to say it is humorless. Stunning work all around.

2. Robbery (2015)
This serves up Asian extreme in a most unusual manner. It’s deliriously nihilistic yet oddly endearing. Think of the end of The Beyond but with a Hello Kitty cuteness. My head is still spinning. It suffers from a few too many endings but overall this Hong Kong film by Fire Lee is an extreme delight. And it was the perfect midnight movie to open the Abertoir film festival.

Deadman's Inferno Poster

3. Deadman’s Inferno (2015)
Just when you thought there was no way to reanimate the zombie genre along comes this yakuza versus the living dead to prove you wrong. The chief pleasure was in how it played cleverly off of both the yakuza and zombie tropes. Good mix of action, humor, and appealing characters.

4. The Witch (2015)
Knowing how to end a film is a true skill and The Witch would have been infinitely better if it ended just a few minutes earlier. But despite a frustrating ending, director Robert Eggers delivers a beautifully crafted period film that draws on real accounts of witchcraft in New England decades before the infamous Salem Witch Trials. It pairs up well with Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are for pairing horror and beauty, and for detailing ritual and religion within an increasingly dysfunctional family unit. It perfectly captures a growing sense of hysteria within a family that takes its religion a bit too seriously. An appropriate film to be coming out in today’s climate of political hysteria about so many things.

5. Hollow (2014)
Hollow is not a great film but kudos to Ham Tran (who did the exquisite Journey From the Fall) for delivering a solid genre film from the small Vietnamese film industry. The film also mixes a very Asian style ghost story with a very current sense of social commentary. The film reflects how Asian cultures accept the supernatural in a different manner than American films do (unless they are remaking an Asian film!). Some genuinely creepy moments.