Autumn Big Scream film festival promises a demon car, a killer tree, giant bugs, alien invaders and plenty of spiders

The second edition of the Forbidden Worlds Film Festival‘s smaller horror spin-off fest The Big Scream returns to Bristol’s biggest cinema screen in October for a two-day ‘spooky season’ celebration of ‘popcorn horrors’ that most people will only have seen previously on TV or VHS.

Taking the form of two triple bills screened over two nights in the former IMAX cinema on October 13 and 14, The Big Scream kicks off with Fred Dekker’s cheap’n’cheerful B-movie homage Night of the Creeps. “I’ve got good news and bad news, girls. The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is . . .they’re dead!”  Yup, horny, barely-dressed ’80s teens are inconvenienced by the arrival of slug-like alien brain parasites that turn people into zombies.

That’s followed by the director’s cut of Guillermo del Toro’s ill-fated first Hollywood feature, Mimic. New York husband and wife boffin team Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam team up to eradicate an epidemic that is slowly killing thousands of kids. Their cure is a genetically engineered roach but – surprise! – this turns out to be an even worse evil, which possesses the power to imitate humans. So it’s down into the sewers for the brainy duo, complete with streetwise cop, cute kid, and a bunch of stock characters ripe for disembowelment. The title might apply equally to the film’s own reworking of generic bug movie cliches, but on the plus side it’s all fairly stylish and contains enough seat-edge viewing to satisfy, despite boasting rather too many loose ends.

Concluding the first triple bill is The Guardian. No, not the Kevin Costner thriller but a pretty damn awful 1990 supernatural horror from the late Exorcist director William Friedkin, in which Jenny Seagrove is menaced by a killer tree. No kidding.

Saturday’s line-up kicks off with the splendid, Spielberg-produced Arachnophobia. Dashing pony-tailed entomology professor Julian Sands and an expendable photographer sidekick encounter a fearsome species of deadly latex spider deep in the Venezuelan jungle. The snapper is promptly bitten and shipped back home to sunny California in a wooden crate with his arthropod assassin, who leaps out at the far end and copulates with a presumably somewhat surprised domestic arachnid. Their multitudinous progeny then terrorise Dr and Mrs Jeff Daniels and their charming children, who’ve just moved down from San Francisco. Director Frank Marshall plays the whole thing strictly by the bug-horror book. Arachnophobes will be suitably repulsed by the spiders-in-the-shower, spiders-down-the-toilet and spiders-crawling-out-of-dead-victims’-noses shots; everyone else will be rooting for the little fellas in their battle against these bland smalltowners. The plot has more holes in it than the stiffs have skin punctures, which may be due to extensive and fairly desperate cutting to get it a ‘PG’ cert. But much cheer is provided by John Goodman as the lovable, lardass, beer-guzzling exterminator Delbert from Bugs R Gone.

After that, the festival has a preview screening of the brand new 2K DCP of John Carpenter’s Stephen King adaptation Christine, which gets a 40th anniversary re-release later in the month. This 1983 killer car flick was considered the apogee of auto eroticism until David Cronenberg’s censor-baiting adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash came along.

Saturday concludes with a terrific twist on the then-ubiquitous mismatched buddy cop flick in the form of 1987’s The Hidden. A pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan plays the space alien half of an NYPD duo who are charged with investigating a series of weird crimes. Turns out the perp is a slug-like critter from MacLachlan’s home planet, which has the ability to inhabit earthlings and cause them to go psycho. This is a rarely seen gem that’s well worth reviving.

Co-programmer Anthony Nield says of the line-up: “We wanted to keep things punchy for this year’s Big Scream, and so we settled on two nights of triple-whammy horror thrills. All of the films were made to be screened to the biggest crowds on the biggest screens, though many have only seen them at home on their televisions, and we are more than happy to oblige.”

“It’s a fortuitous and spooky sign that this year the festival starts on Friday the 13th,” adds festival director Ti Singh. “While we won’t be showing any films from the Vorhees-starring franchise, we have a great selection of horror films, from supernatural vehicles to alien monsters to killer tree demons!”

Full festival passes (£35) and day passes (£20) are on sale now. Go here for details. Tickets for individual screenings will be available in a few weeks

Main pic from Night of the Creeps: © 1986 TriStar Pictures, Inc. All Rights Reserved.