I arrived early. In a move of cunning journalistic smarts and having just heard of him, I’d picked up Jay Slater’s book on the way and settled into a corner of the IFI bar to try get a protective layering of food and information down before people started to arrive.

I would have been prepared; I would have had more of Jay’s book read. Had a little old English man not sat down beside me and started to talk of Italian cinema and the weather. Drinking tea and discussing what years had been good summers was not exactly the way I had envisioned my time at the Horrorthon.

Jay Slater was the first to arrive, followed in quick succession by a party of Scandinavians, which included Anders Banke (Frostbite) Tuomas Riskala (Journalist and member of the board for the annual Finnish Espoo Ciné Film Festival), Magnus (the distributor) and Mike Hewitt (EatMyBrains.Com) who wasn’t Scandinavian but whom I had to fit into the list somewhere.

The wine reception was a blurry affair as between the assembled mass it was hit like a lame buffalo in a swarm of piranha. I think I only turned my back for a matter of seconds to roll a cigarette, as behind me there came the tinkling of empty wine bottles left spinning on the floor.

I quickly discovered that Rachel Belofsky, the producer of ‘Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film’, would not be attending the festival for the screening of her feature. Outside forces had conspired against her to prevent her appearance. Which in many ways would probably be a good thing as by the fifth day when it was to be shown. With little sleep and the cumulative effects of abrupt bouts of heavy drinking, I probably wouldn’t have had the best or most tactful things to say about her largely American-o-centric piece that at times felt just like a collage of gore scenes with some witty sound bites by the people involved.

For much of the wine reception, I was beside Pete Walsh (Irish Film Institute) and one of the Horrorthon’s original co-founders and festival directors, Michael Griffin. While he may be a little taken aback at how big their festival has grown over the years. From when it started out as movie nights in Ed King’s, back when Michael was working in Ed’s local video shop. Michael is an absolute pleasure to talk to, a real fan that just loves the movies and the good times they bring. We discussed the history of the Horrorthon; from the various pubs it had called home to its early days as a small club and on to the very first Horrorthon. With that and the last of the wine, he did a good job of putting me at ease within the surroundings of being a fish out of water.

I have much the same praise for Pete, who informed me the Dublin Horrorthon was the biggest festival the Irish Film Institute held. An older, very friendly man, its good to see that even in his capacity within the IFI, Pete does not seem to have lost any of his appreciation for films however obscure weird or gory. I saw him at many of the screenings, which is always a good sign.

At some point, within the debris of what had once been a wine reception, it was time for the first two films of the festival.

Opening the Horrorthon was the multi-award winning Irish short:

The Fairies of Blackheath Wood Screening in Dublin at the same time as it would be during the Kerry Film Festival, it is easy to see how this short has won awards.

Clocking in at four minutes, it is quite short even by short standards. It features a family out on a picnic and a little girl with mother problems that lead her to run off into the forest after fairies.

There’s little else I can tell you without giving the four minutes away, this short must be seen to be believed. It is lovingly put together and a joy to watch. I can only hope it’s director Ciaran Foy finds the time and the money to either to follow-on in its style or get a full length feature.

I rarely enjoy shorts to say the following but; track it down if you can, email the Horrorthon people, email the IFI, find a copy.

Taking into consideration it is a short I give this: (4 1/2 out of five)

The Host

Released on the 27th of July 2006, this South Korean blockbuster had already been seen by over six million people by the morning of August the 6th 2006. By the 10th of September 2006 Bong Joon-Ho’s ‘The Host’ had been seen by over twelve and a half million people in Korea alone. Making it the highest grossing film in South Korean cinematic history.

Based around supposedly true events from six years earlier in which a U.S. military mortician dumped a large amount of formaldehyde down a sewer drain. After the discovery of this a large number of U.S. military bases were returned to South Korea whereupon they were found to be littered with poorly dumped toxic waste. A series of events that have caused both environmental problems and a seriously negative view of the American military within South Korean society.

From this dumped formaldehyde we get a tadpole mutation that has to be seen to be believed. With some of the best CGI I’ve seen in years provided by Kevin Rafferty (Star Wars), the monster that stalks the Han River and it’s bridges, is absolutely stand out.

The first five minutes of this movie come slow, with elements of suspense and humor and the unsettling feeling that you’re just about to be fucked by another goddamn useless monster movie. It builds and it builds and when the monster and the movie hit their stride this thing runs like Tank Girl landing on the bonnet of your car after smoking a big fat bag of crack and angry juice and it doesn’t fucking let up for the next twenty minutes.

At its heart, ‘The Host’ is a monster flick with some strong socially conscious morals. One that pays close respect to the greatest of its genre ‘Gojira’ (Godzilla) while at the same time managing nods to other classics of the genre such as ‘Q the winged Serpent’ and ‘Alligator’.

But its more than this, just when you think ‘The Host’ is going to allow itself to be pegged a straight out monster movie, it takes several swerves in content and genre that I’ve come to expect from sterling South Korean fare such as the stunning directorial debut of Joon-Hwan Jang, ‘Save the green Planet’.

My only problem with this movie is the hammering of its messages. The biggest of which is DO NOT MINDLESSLY FOLLOW AUTHORITY QUESTION IT DO NOT BE A SHEEP. While a good message, I did leave the film feeling slightly like someone had skull fucked me with a political manifesto. Something that can hamper a general feeling of satisfaction. I understand the need for these messages, if the truth wasn’t that alotta fuckers gotta learn the hard way then we wouldn’t have these messages throbbing through films. But they do and we do. So I guess; if this movie makes some poor drone somewhere take that broom handle and beat that corrupt policeman or politician into a permanent vegetative state where the only sign of life is the shit dribbling down his pajama leg to pool about the wheels of his chair or makes some jaded hooker finally strike back and cut that mark whose been beating her, cut him good and proper. Ye know the sort of cut, the one that looks like an extra smile. If this movie’s relentless message gives that back to the world, then I advocate it whole-heartedly.

(3 Stars)

Having sat through ‘The Host’ swilling from a half bottle of Baileys, when the house lights went up it was a disorientating experience and I spent several minutes alternating which wall I was walking into. When I was finally knocked toward the right direction, I found a parting in the crowd and got myself out for a cigarette as fast as possible.

As I mainlined a Player, I still had to figure out how to break the glass wall that could technically be taken as the important people at the Horrorthon and get talking to people. Which is initially harder than it seems.

Random acts of violence get you nowhere in these situations and hopping the bar to do a rendition of “Twisted Schteels and Leathar Donuts” to get attention would probably just end up with me getting arrested and having to provide a rather lengthy explanation as to why I had brought so much bondage gear to a Horror Festival.

Finding myself at the bar, I decided to queue and try to appraise the situation of where the film related folk were sitting and how best to get myself there, sitting and talking. I was getting agitated at the length of time it was taking me to get to the bar when I realized I was standing behind a waitress waiting for a food order.

Always nice of reality to point out to you how fucking stupid you are, just before you’ve got to do something important.

The stand out point of watching this group of people would be the faces of Jay Slater, Magnus (The Distributor) and a man I am going to call Mark-with the camera. These were easily separable as Jay demanded bar orders from a grinning Magnus and a Mark-with the camera who gave as good as he got from this crazed South Londoner who threw about his birthplace like a Blaxploitation hero talking about the South Bronx.

Having finally broken free from behind the waitress, I managed to order myself a beer just as Jay Slater strode to the bar screaming things like “Geezer” “Big Fella” and assorted cockney gibberish at random and frankly terrified looking patrons.

Deciding there was no other way in, I caught Jay’s eye and Said “Yer the guy who wrote that thing, that book, Jay Slater” It wasn’t the best intro, telling someone their own name never is, but it raised me slightly from the depths of just another passing pub going mongoloid to a possible horror-nut who might hassle him until a good solid punching was delivered. The exchange was brief, I told him I liked the book, Jay insisted on buying me a pint and invited me over to sit with them.

I was in. The flying mole-eagle creature had landed.

It’s at this juncture, at 4:41 AM, while I ignore everything I was taught in the various English things I took at various places of learning, using numbers in a piece and generally ignoring every convention of whatever the rules of that stuff of letters is that I have to state. I liked Jay Slater. This is a man who deserves to have a little bit of mythology built up about him. Horror, Cult, Sleaze, Exploitation, everything dirty wild and crack addled about cinema that your mammy warned you about, it needs this man and others of his ilk. It needs them, because they are the blood that keep the genres alive and pulsating like some cancerous pus filled thing on the ass of something slightly more cancerous and pus filled.

These people keep it alive when the genres have died their second third or fourth deaths and these people, the likes of Carl Daft, Jay Slater, Mike Hewitt, help oversee their hideous rebirths.

So all you fuckers that bought Emmanuelle in America when it was released as intact as possible or tracked down Blastfighter based around the crazed gabblings of some South Londoner or had a greatest animals in horror movie night, these are the fuckers that do it and they deserve your respect. If you see them, buy them pints and evil steaming shots that burn through wood then skitter off screaming like the blood in ‘The Thing’.

While Jay had enjoyed the first twenty or so minutes of ‘The Host’ he had hated the rest and walked out of the movie. A fact that was leading to a heated discussion around the table as Jay sought other people who’d thought it was awful. I think he might have found one, but for the most part there was quite a few people relatively happy with ‘The Host’.

The next film was Bernard Rose’s ‘Snuff Movie’ and it began far quicker than anyone had expected, so half finished pints were smuggled in. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of ‘Candyman’, I preferred Rose’s earlier effort with ‘Paperhouse’, but at the same time, oh how the mighty have fallen. Frankly, I found ‘Snuff Movie’ to be a piece of self-pleasing fluff only kept afloat by the performance of Jeroen Krabbé, who is as always, reliably entertaining. In short, I found it deeply referential of such superior fare as ‘Holy Mountain’ by Jodorowsky, referential being the nicest way I can put it. I’d probably rather have ‘The Toxic Avenger’ piss into my still open eyes than watch it again.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of anyone else’s displeasure with the movie, although I spent much of the movie flooring my pint, Baileys and whiskey into myself. Much of the offending material being passed back to a rapidly degenerating Jay Slater, who had slumped into the sidewalk of the theatre to occasionally mutter drunken incomprehensibles as “geezerbigfellajesus” before falling off into laughter at either the situation or the drivel on the screen. Due to the continuous thumbs up at getting whiskey, I didn’t find out until later that it was the latter.

Mike (EatMyBrains.com) couldn’t remember Snuff, one of those drunken small mercies, like going to the toilet just as the gunmen burst in go postal and leave. It was at this point, with people generally either making faces about Snuff or taking the time to spit scorn on it, that myself, Michael, Jay and Tuomas headed off to find beer at Eamonn Doran’s.

In my defense, we only went there because they wanted the closest pub, not because we wanted to be tortured with overly loud crap music and beer that leaves you wondering how they got that many cats to squat over the keg. With bouncers prone to throwing people at the ground face first, questions later, underage drinkers and cider that tastes like you got a troupe of traveling circus dwarves drunk on cheap vodka and fed them only apples and asparagus for seventy two hours before asking for urine samples, Doran’s is not my idea of a great night. But it has a late licence and sometimes you can’t argue with that.

There’s much of the Horrorthon drinking nights that will remain forever off the record. Then there’s things probably that should have remained in the pub, like Mike getting so drunk he kept drinking other people’s pints then wondering why when rounds were got he ended up with two pints. Or Jay trying to pick birds up by getting their boyfriends to help him teach them cockney rhyming slang. There’s a bet involving Harry Knowles and a bottle of fifteen-year-old scotch and an unpublished female Australian poet who decided Jay had no right getting published.

At some point we got entangled with a Dublin hip-hop group called C4 who somehow (possibly at our invitation) got into all our photos and tried to insist everyone make a C and a 4 with their hands. Something that if you offer it even a moment of drunken thought seems so difficult and lent a “wait a fucking minute why am I promoting you if you’re in the photo doing it anyway” air to things that all they got was laughter and a “fuck no…I’m not a gymnast.”

With only one lighter between us, Jay striding about like a giant on the pull between boyfriends and the girlfriends he was trying to sneak back to his hotel room (possibly under his coat) and Mike swaying back and forth like a happy drunken candle in the wind, the night had quickly descended to blackout levels for some. Have you seen Orgazmo? You know that song ‘Now You’re A Man’? That could well have been the theme song to be played for many of the participants as they strode about the various pubs of the week.