Hostile Dimensions & HERD (Frightfest 2023)(Review)

HOSTILE DIMENSIONS

After Death of a Vlogger, Graham Hughes takes another stab at making a distinctly modern found-footage film, and it begins with what you might call a Blair Witch speedrun. A pair of documentarians exploring a derelict house find something uncanny and disappear without a trace. It’s then revealed that the footage is being watched by a different couple of filmmakers who are planning to make a feature about this abandoned video. If that sent you cross-eyed, opt out now as this is a found-footage take on multiverses – a bold choice of subject matter for a film made on a budget that wouldn’t cover two seconds of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Like many multiverse films, it ends up as a shaggy dog story, but the journey is certainly fun. A common problem with found-footage movies is that their naturalistic visuals cruelly expose any over-rehearsed performances, and there are some of those in the supporting cast. But Hughes’s decision to keep making films with his regular actors pays off spectacularly with Joma West’s lead performance as Ash – the beleaguered, unsuccessful documentarian thrown into a series of strange worlds. Even in the movie’s most chaotically random moments, she never stops feeling like a real person thrust into the middle of this madness. There are some subtly unnerving moments, as well as some unsubtle jump scares, but mostly this falls strongly on the “comedy” side of “comedy-horror”. It won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it further confirms that Hughes can create something sprightly, inventive and individual from even the most mined-out subgenres.

Graham Williamson

HERD

Zombies are part of the furniture in any genre film festival, but instead of chastising filmmakers who trade in tired tales of undead aberrations, it’s more interesting to find those rare occasions where they’re used as a storytelling tool beyond the usual gore and apocalyptic fetishism.

HERD is one such example, directed by Steven Pierce and written by James Allerdyce.

Jamie Miller (Ellen Adair), and her wife Alex (Mitzi Akaha), are attempting to save their marriage by taking a camping trip without any modern distractions to rural Missouri, during which Alex has an accident while out rowing and brutally breaks her leg. They end up in Jamie’s hometown where her aggressively old-fashioned father lives (Corbin Bernsen), only to find themselves amid an infectious outbreak of “zombies” that the locals call ‘Heps’. After having Alex’s leg set by a local vet, the pair are thrust into a power struggle between two heavily armed militias – one led by Big John (Jeremy Holm from Brooklyn 45), and the other run by Sterling (Timothy V. Murphy).

HERD may be a zombie movie in essence, but it’s the other concerns that make this far more interesting than the usual horde of cannibalistic apocalypse movies. First and foremost, it’s a simple movie about a woman returning to her repressive, deeply conservative hometown and coming to terms with who she has become, cross-cutting bad memories of her father with the situation she and her wife find themselves in. The commentary on gun culture and its political ramifications are also a concern of Pierce and Allerdyce’s film, and its gut-twisting nadir comes in the form of a 10-year-old child being given a weapon and placed on a frontline of the good old boys making. The most interesting aspect in the assemblage of genres though, is the fact that the “zombies” aren’t the undead but people with a disease.

I’ll leave that there, as learning the true meaning of these infected people who have been weaponised in a game of bravura, gung-ho Americana is HERD at its most fascinatingly divergent, and that late-game revelation changes the context of the movie. All I will say is this – those aren’t guttural rasping noises.

A worthy and always interesting character study of fractious relationships (father/daughter, wife/wife, person/hometown), HERD also tackles the value system of fighty Republican corners with quiet observation rather than hot-headed ranting. Sadly, it’s not all smooth sailing as it takes a long time to get where it’s headed, and in the interim, it’s a sluggish, stop-start movie that often draws any momentum to a dead stop before picking up again. Thankfully there are far worse sins for a movie to commit than being awkwardly paced, abrupt, and intermittently dull – sins that this movie largely avoids.

With a doomy musical score and naturalistic cast, this emotional character piece that examines the political fragility of rural America during an extreme situation proves to be a real palate cleanser.

Rob Simpson

Graham’s Archive – Hostile Dimensions

Rob’s Archive – HERD