The horror! The horror!

I'm talking horror again. Yesterday I spent much of the day at the Glasgow Film Theatre where the Glasgow Film Festival (in association with horror festivals Frightfest and Dead by Dawn) were laying on a day of new horror films. The day opened with a double bill of Korean horror in the shape of THE RED SHOES and OUIJA BOARD.

THE RED SHOES is an oddity. Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale had already been the basis for the rather lovely film by Michael Powell in the 1940s. It seems bizarre that the same tale that inspired such a great British romance could also inspire a modern Korean horror, but it has, so there you go. A woman finds a pair of lovely red shoes which turn out to have mystical properties and weird things start happening. This latest effort plays out like a mixture of the original story and the horror film RING, but with more legs being chopped off.

OUIJA BOARD is a more straightforward ghost story in which a group of school girls try to use a ouija board to get revenge on the school bullies. Funnily enough, weird things begin to happen, most notably a spate of shool girls putting plastic bags over their heads and setting fire to them for no apparent reason. Strange way to die, but it does lead to one of the few moments of genuine chills in the film, as a school room full of kids watch helplessly from a window as a girl in the playground sets herself on fire.

There are two major details that both films share, and neither is a positive one. The first is that both films go on far too long - THE RED SHOES seems to reach a logical conclusion but somehow finds another half hour of meandering nonsense to lay on top of it; OUIJA BOARD on the other hand just keeps piling on the weird happenings until what was a reasonably effective ghost story is a confused mess.

The other detail is that since they're both Korean horror films they both feature white-dressed, pasty-faced girls with long dark hair obscuring their face. I know it's a cultural thing but come on, surely not all weird apparitions can look like this? It's come to a point where a man with a sheet over his head would actually be a refreshing change.

Also served up on the day was REEKER, a low budget American affair that is due to hit UK cinemas in June. It sees a group of youngsters driving across the desert on their way to an outdoor party only for them to run into trouble with a strange monster intent on picking them all off one by one. There is a healthy dose of gore (joy!) and a funny vein of very black humour running throughout that means even when the "twist" ending arrives and turns out to be a bit transparent (it is signposted very early in the film and probably isn't much of a twist to anyone who ever saw an Amicus horror film from the 70s) you've at least had a lot of fun getting to it. It also has the best opening five minutes of any film I've seen this year, though guaranteed not to be as popular with animal lovers.

WILD COUNTRY opens in UK cinemas this week after a lengthy tour of festivals across the world. A Scottish movie about teenage backpackers being attacked in the hills, this offers nothing in the way of originality and the monsters are a little cheap looking but the film is funny, unashamedly Scottish and at less than an hour and a half never outstays its welcome. It helps that it has a likable cast too, including SWEET SIXTEEN's Martin Compston and the Oscar-winner Peter Capaldi.

The cast and crew were all in attendance for what was the first screening in Scotland - it made for an interesting sight since half the crowd were here for the event and the other half were folks like me who were there for the horror marathon. The upshot was a crowd that was split between people in tuxedos and posh dresses and guys in hoodies and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD t-shirts. One day all premieres will be like this.

Like REEKER, it's got some great gore effects and often amuses. You also have to applaud it just for being a Scottish horror film. We seem to be against the idea of doing genre cinema in Scotland (Richard Jobson's futuristic martial arts movie THE PURIFIERS is the only other one that springs to mind) so it's nice to see something like this. It should be noted though that the film does begin with an unmarried teenage mother giving up her unwanted baby for adoption - the number one rule of Scottish cinema is, after all, that nobody is allowed to have a happy and contented life.

The night finished with a showing of BOY EATS GIRL, a horror film from the Emerald Isle. When her young lad is accidentally killed, a mother uses the power of voodoo to resurrect him but makes a slight cock-up which results in him coming back to life with an unfortunate thirst for human flesh. Irish singing starlet Samantha Mumba is the closest thing to a big name in this latest Irish zombie film (yes, there is actually more than one) but like its Celtic cousin WILD COUNTRY, the cast are all likable enough, nobody takes it too seriously and once again there is a healthy balance between laughs and dismemberment.

All in all a day well spent. But it didn't quite end there, because I still had to get back to the 24-hour car park to retrieve my car for the journey home. So forget about the spooky films I've just watched - have you ever walked the streets of Glasgow at 1am? Now that's what I call scary.