EIFF: MIDNIGHT MOVIES

Though the Edinburgh International Film Festival this year rebranded their Late Night Romps strand as Night Moves, the essential concept remains unchanged: great, unashamed entertainment for thrill-seeking movie lovers.

One of most enticing of the titles in this section is Shrooms, the latest from Irish helmer Paddy Breathnach, which has its world premiere here in Edinburgh tomorrow. Breathnach made his mark with the dark, literate gangster comedy I Went Down (1997), in which he proved what a smart and talented director he is. Though Shrooms is an unexpected career choice for him, it could quite possibly be a career-altering one. The movie takes five American college students and their English friend and puts them in an eerie wood in a deserted corner of Ireland, adds some near-lethal mushrooms, inbred locals and some seriously pissed-off ghosts and has a lot of fun with the situation.

This is very much genre fare, with strong echoes of The Blair Witch Project and Cabin Fever, and has some of the humor of the latter. Though the plot elements, characters and dialogue are very familiar, there is a vitality and enthusiasm that means that Shrooms never feels like it’s just going through the motions. It is shot and edited with an inventive vigor that manages to make it seem like a much bigger budget film than it is. Indeed the whole viewing experience is so enjoyable that, if it were to find the right U.S. distributor, Shrooms could be so successful that a potential franchise might even be in Breathnach’s reach.

Another film in the Night Moves strand which should be a big hit with Edinburgh audiences is Weirdsville. Canadian director Allan Moyle‘s movie, which opened Slamdance earlier in the year, is much more unconventional than Shrooms but has a sweet-natured, offbeat charm that I personally found irresistible. Though Moyle is 60, he has always shown an unusual ability to tap into a youthful mindset — particularly in such films as Empire Records and cult classic Pump Up the Volume — and here vividly portrays the lives of junkie best friends, Dexter (Scott Speedman) and Royce (Wes Bentley), in Weedsville, a nothing town in Ontario. The concept of the film is familiar: Dex and Royce owe a lot of money (much more than they have) to their drug dealer, a man with a penchant for cutting off thumbs, and have only one night to get the cash. But rather than being a film which gets caught up in the guys’ desperate attempts to find the money and escape harm, Weirdsville veers off into gloriously silly, surreal territory after their prostitute friend, Matilda (Taryn Manning), dies of an overdose, an event which sparks a series of bizarre encounters involving Satan worshippers, an unintentional resurrection, the theft of a millionaire’s safe, a dwarf security guard, a stoner housesitter and a group of Medieval battle re-enactors.

The reason Weirdsville works so well is that the Moyle’s direction and the script by Willem Wennekers temper the broader comic moments with just enough reality to keep it from becoming too ridiculous. The relationship between Dex and Royce is played out nicely by Speedman and Bentley, two actors who have never quite lived up to their early potential but here are clearly enjoying themselves with Wenneker’s keenly observed dialogue. Weirdsville is on limited release through Magnolia Pictures on October 5; if it’s playing at a theater near you, it’s definitely worth checking out.