Tuesday, 18 July 2000

International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival 2007

Back in 2007, I was googling around trying to find what cultural events were happening in the Phoenix area. My mistake was to assume that Phoenix and 'the Phoenix metropolitan area' were the same thing, as little happens in Phoenix itself but plenty happens in the towns around it, like Glendale, Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, Scottsdale and so on.

Somehow I managed to find some sort of publicity about the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, which was in Tempe rather than Phoenix, and it seemed like fun, so my better half and I drove over to see what it was all about. Neither of us had been to a film festival before, so it was an eye-opening event for us, but we found surprises before we even made it into the Harkins Centerpoint, the host theatre for the third year. Our first stop was to buy tickets, which was handled in a disused storefront nearby, and that's where we met Brian Pulido. My wife was a fan of Lady Death, Pulido's most famous creation as a comic book writer, and so we were happy to discover that he'd co-founded the festival.

There were no less than four special guests in attendance to present major films that they'd been in. Linda Blair presented The Exorcist, Michael Beck The Warriors, Ken Foree the original Dawn of the Dead and Claudia Christian an overlooked gem from the eighties called The Hidden. We managed to win a 27x40 event poster in the charity auction that was signed by three of the four. I wasn't able to finish that set until FearCon de la Muerte in 2015 when I had Foree add his signature.

While we didn't meet any of those special guests back then, we did experience the joys of meeting filmmakers for the first time, such as Chris Power & Nathan Hynes, whose film, Long Pigs, we didn't actually see. We merely bumped into them in the corridor after we left our respective screenings on neighbouring screens and chatted for a while. Their openness and passion rubbed off on us and is one of the chief reasons we became hooked on this event and film festivals in general.

The early years were great events for short film fans. In 2007, there were three sets of horror shorts all of which we caught, along with two sets of sci-fi shorts and one set of local horror films called Seven Deadly Films. This volume of short films has not been matched in any successive year. The six competition features and fourteen showcase features haven't been matched since either.

Here are all the films that screened in 2007, with titles linking to my reviews and the IMDb pages added for reference.

Rating System
1 - Abysmal | 2 - Bad | 3 - Poor | 4 - OK | 5 - Good | 6 - Excellent | 7 - Classic

Horror Features
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Brain Dead 2007 5 5 Kevin Tenney IMDb
Frayed 2007 Norbert Caoili & Rob Portmann IMDb
Long Pigs 2007 5 5 Chris Power & Nathan Hynes IMDb

Sci-Fi Features
Title Year H D Director IMDb
11 Minutes Ago 2007 Bob Gebert IMDb
Nobody 2007 5 4 Shawn Linden IMDb
The Lost Princess 2005 2 3 Duncan Pace IMDb

Showcase Features
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Dark Places 2005 5 5 Guy Crawford IMDb
Dawn of the Dead 1978 7 5 George A Romero IMDb
Days of Darkness 2007 4 4 Jake Kennedy IMDb
The Exorcist 1973 7 7 William Friedkin IMDb
The Hidden 1987 6 5 Jack Sholder IMDb
Malediction 2007 4 4 Kevin R Phipps n/a
Monster Camp 2007 Cullen Hoback IMDb
Murder Party 2007 Jeremy Saulnier IMDb
Netherbeast Incorporated 2007 5 5 Dean Matthew Ronalds IMDb
Southland Tales 2006 Richard Kelly IMDb
The Terminator 1984 7 7 James Cameron IMDb
Trapped Ashes 2006 4 5 Sean S Cunningham et al IMDb
The Warriors 1979 5 7 Walter Hill IMDb
Witches' Night 2007 Paul Traynor IMDb

Seven Deadly Films
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Asylum 2007 Austin Nordell IMDb
Blood Moon Rising 2007 Brian Skiba IMDb
Executioner 2007 Jason Bustard IMDb
Figment 2007 Jay Lee IMDb
Room 602 2007 Jon Bonnell IMDb
Sweet Memory 2007 Kai Staats IMDb
Twisted Soul 2007 Brenton Covington IMDb

Horror Shorts A
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Anesthesia 2006 4 4 Adam Kargman IMDb
The Butcher 2006 4 4 Joseph A Garcia IMDb
The Lycanthrope 2007 4 4 Lucas Peltonen n/a
Nightmare 2007 5 5 Brent Nowak IMDb
The Sitter 2007 3 5 Angel Ruiz n/a
The First Vampire: Don't Fall for the Devil's Illusions 2004 5 5 Jason Todd Ipson IMDb
Summer Job 2007 6 5 James Pounce IMDb
Gay Zombie 2007 6 6 Michael Simon IMDb

Horror Shorts B
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Criticized 2006 5 5 Richard Gale IMDb
Harbinger 2007 3 4 Walt Bost IMDb
Revelation Nine 2007 2 4 Vance Null n/a
Para-Normal 2007 5 4 Lauren Timmons IMDb
Dara 2007 6 5 Kimo Stamboel & Timothy Tjahjanto IMDb
Psycho Hillbilly Cabin Massacre! 2007 5 5 Robert F Cosnahan III IMDb
Itsy Bitsy 2006 5 5 David May IMDb

Horror Shorts C
Title Year H D Director IMDb
The Toll 2006 6 6 J Zachary Pike IMDb
Pig Tale 2007 5 5 Adrien Van Viersen IMDb
We're Closed 2007 3 4 Troy Wilson IMDb
The Descendent 2006 5 5 Bobby Glickert IMDb
Gourmet 2007 5 5 Mark Oguschewitz IMDb
AWOL 2006 6 6 Jack Swanstrom IMDb
Of Darkness 2006 4 5 Gary E Irwin IMDb
Coming to Town 2006 6 6 Carles Torrens IMDb

Sci-Fi Shorts A
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Mogadon 7 2003 Philippe Roberge IMDb
The Un-Gone 2007 Simon Bovey IMDb
ELI 2007 Josh Lee Kwai IMDb
The Nothing Pill 2008 Yu Gu IMDb
Haunted Planet 2007 Danielle Stallings IMDb
Glitch 2007 Peter Ricq n/a
Face Machine 2006 Justin Simms IMDb

Sci-Fi Shorts B
Title Year H D Director IMDb
Epicac 2008 Will Tully IMDb
Other Worlds 2006 George Graham IMDb
Víctor y la máquina 2006 Carlos Talamanca IMDb
Menagerie of Space 2007 Mack Duncan IMDb
Maklar, Anyone? 2006 Phil Guzzo IMDb
La Lluvia 2006 Nofre Moya IMDb
Auto Da Fe 2007 Steve Rainbow IMDb

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