07.10.09 – DAY 5 – He´s Jim Bowen´s Son You know…

Following on from a large and late night, getting up this morning was always going to be a stretch, and it certainly proved so for one of us. After skipping breakfast completely, Shaun managed to do his own version of the Sitges Zombie walk for most of the day.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL – PRADO – 11:00HRS

In hindsight, I don´t know what we were even thinking when we decided to check this one out. A few years ago we´d had the misfortune of seeing West´s TRIGGER MAN in the exact same cinema and it was such an absolute howler that we ended up walking out after about half an hour. This (incredibly!) slow-burning homage to ´80s devil worshipping movies was so far wide of the mark that it even bored people who were just passing the cinema. Amazingly enough we didn´t walk out but I suspect that was purely down to laziness.

………Following a half hearted attempt to do some writing (Colin) and catch up on some much needed sleep (Shaun) we were a short walk to El Retiro to catch weird French apocalypse flick LES DERNIERS JOURS DU MONDE.

LES DERNIERS JOURS DU MONDE – EL RETIRO – 14:00HRS

It´s hard to put into words my feeling on this film. It wasn´t bad, but then again I certainly wouldn´t say it was a good film. Fairly self-indulgent and a lot of the time non-sensical, I never really recovered from seeing (the lead villain from “Quantum Of Solace”) Matthieu Amalric´s cock in the first few seconds. The male member seem to be making a frequent (sometimes too frequent) appearance in the films at Sitges this year, it´s put  us right off the hot dogs.

………….With only a short time before our next film, we hightailed it up to the Auditori to watch the Philip Ridley / Jim Sturgess film HEARTLESS. Just as we arrived at the theatre, we ran into CS hall-of-famer Sam Rockwell, previous best actor and star of Duncan Jones´s MOON. Following a brief handshake and a confession of our undying love we headed into…

HEARTLESS – AUDITORI – 17:15HRS

This one definitely got a thumbs up from us. A strange and dark tale of a disfigured loner who enters into a Faustian pact with the devil in exchange for the thing that will make him happiest, but ultimately everything is not as straightforward as it seems. An excellent performance from Jim Sturgess is almost overshadowed by brief cameos from Joseph Mawle as The Devil and the always excellent Eddie Marsan as ¨The Weapons Man¨.

……Still buzzing from meeting Sam Rockwell we hit the town for drinks and dinner (Sobresada Pizza, a Corridorstyle favourite) before the final film of the evening, Vincenzo Natali´s SPLICE.

SPLICE – EL RETIRO – 22:45HRS

We hadn´t been able to find a great deal on the web about this so we went into it fairly open minded although both having reservations about the acting of Adrien Brody. It turned out that we needn´t have worried. Brody kept his performance fairly low key and good performances from the remaining cast, an interesting story of cloning spiralling out of control and a great looking film meant that we both really enjoyed this and couldn´t really pick it apart in any way.

…….With this in mind we retired to bed early(ish) in anticipation of tomorrow´s early morning head scrambler – Gaspar Noe´s ENTER THE VOID.