The Festival

Year:  2018
Director:  Iain Morris
Screenplay:  Keith Akushie and Joe Parnham
Starring:  Joe Thomas, Hammed Animashaun, Claudia O'Doherty, Emma Rigby, Jemaine Clement, Hannah Tointon
Running Time:  98 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Nick (Thomas) is dumped by his girlfriend, Claudia (Tointon) on the day of their graduation.  To make matters worse, he makes a fool of himself by begging her to take him back on stage during the ceremony.  Claudia refuses and Nick falls into despair for days.  To cheer him up, his best friend Shaun (Animashaun) suggests they go to a huge open-air music festival, where Shaun, an aspiring DJ, hopes to give a sample of his music to his idol DJ Hammerhead (Noel Fielding), who performs wearing a hammerhead shark mask.  On the train Shaun befriends chatty Australian Amy (O'Doherty).  However, when Nick discovers that Claudia and her friends are also at the festival, the stage is set for a succession of humiliating disasters.

This marks the solo directorial debut by Iain Morris, who is best known for co-creating the British TV comedy series The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) which also starred Joe Thomas, and featured Hannah Tointon as his girlfriend (incidentally, Thomas and Tointon are together in real life too).  In fact there are so many parallels with The Inbetweeners that this film at times feels like some weird spin-off, Joe Thomas plays basically the same character in both, and the film opens with almost a reprise of a gag from an episode of The Inbetweeners.  The film is packed full of crude, gross-out gags, and there is one sequence involving a nipple ring and a fence that I found genuinely hard to watch.  It is a funny film though.  If you like crude humour then there is plenty to laugh at here, and it goes form one set-piece to another, so it doesn't really drag.  The main problem the film has is that Nick is such a deeply unlikeable character: selfish, whiny, boorish and rude, so it's really hard to care about what happens to him.  In contrast Hammed Animashaun and Claudia O'Doherty provide the heart of the film, funny and genuinely likeable, I wanted to see more of them than Nick's self-involved moaning.  It's the kind of film that is fine for some late-night post-pub viewing, and it is an enjoyable romp, although not as good as The Inbetweeners.  I have never been to a music festival, so if you are a fan of camping out in a muddy field with a few thousand other people you may see it in a very different light.  It has a few fun cameos from comedians including Noel Fielding, Jemaine Clement and Nick Frost and rapper Big Narstie. 

             
Joe Thomas, Claudia O'Doherty and Hammed Animashaun are at The Festival

What We Do in the Shadows

Year of Release:  2014
Director:  Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Screenplay:  Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Starring:  Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stu Rutherford, Jackie van Beek, Rhys Darby
Running Time:  85 minutes
Genre:  Horror, comedy

Wellington, New Zealand:  A documentary film crew follow several months in the afterlife of four vampires who all share the same house: uptight 369 year old Viago (Waititi) who vainly tries to maintain some kind of order, 879 year old former tyrant Vladislav (Clement), 183 year old young rebel Deacon (Brugh) and savage 8,000 year old Petyr (Fransham).  Aided by Deacon's "familiar" Jackie (van Beek), who aspires to become a vampire herself, the gang spend their time hunting victims and trying to avoid sunlight and occasional scuffles with the local werewolf gang led by "alpha male" Anton (Darby).     

Horror comedies are very difficult to make work, because there is the risk of the comedy overshadowing the horror, meaning there is no edge or drama to it, or the horror overshadows the comedy and makes it just bleak.  This however really works well.  It's filmed in the "mockumentary" style familiar from movies such as This is Spinal Tap (1983), or TV shows such as The Office or Parks and Recreation.  It pokes fun at various vampire tropes:  Vladislav is like a parody of Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Petyr, the most brutal and least human looking of the group, is obviously based on the vampire in Nosferatu (1926).  Much of the humour comes from how vampires would function in the modern day, and the problems of living with vampire powers (how do you look stylish when you can't see yourself in the mirror?, where do you go when you can't enter a building without being invited?)  The film is never really scary, but it is quite dark, there is no getting away from the fact that the vampires are killers.  The film is irreverent but celebratory of the vampire genre, and is fresher and more imaginative than any vampire movie for a long time.  Most of all it is genuinely and consistently funny.

The Fang Gang:  From left to right: Jemaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Taka Waititi, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer and St Rutherford in What We Do in the Shadows