Day eight has passed me by, and it seemed so fast, perhaps it's because it's getting to the end of the third Edinburgh International Film Festival for me, or perhaps it's just because I spent all afternoon in the videotheque and there was no running from cinema to cinema.

Today was Boogie Woogie, a film with a huge cast, then a small Scottish film called The Dead Outside, and finally a horror film that was supposed to be comparable to Wolf Creek (Filmstalker review), now that was a joke.

Boogie Woogie carries a pretty big cast, Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston, Stellan Skarsgård, Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Alan Cumming, Heather Graham, Amanda Seyfried, Charlotte Rampling, Jamie Winstone and Gemma Atkinson. Now with a list like that you might be thinking that the film would be good, wrong, it wasn't.

The film struggled trying to pull multiple story threads together around this central thread of various characters trying to buy the same painting. Not only is the main thread lost on the way but so are the other threads, story lines appearing out of nowhere and going that way suddenly afterwards too.

Poor, poor film which had Gillian Anderson in a toilet indulging in oral sex with a character, none of which you actually see, Amanda Seyfried's amazing legs, and Heather Graham, Gemma Atkinson and Jamie Winstone all showing us their lovely lady bumps. Now when that's the best part of the film then you know it's bad.

The Dead Outside is a Scottish horror film which takes a similar position as Signs did, a global event affecting the entire population, and viewing the events from a very small angle, just three people in a house in the middle of Scotland. It's a clever film, well shot and with good characters, and it really does manage to keep the viewpoint small but the scope huge, and it works.

Finally there was Long Weekend, a film which has been compared to Wolf Creek (Filmstalker review) by the festival write up, and that's a terrible crime if you ask me. This film is terrible. The characters flip around for no reason, the story line is incoherent, the ending is predictable, and anything that suggested something interesting was lost by the wayside. A huge sea animal which slowly creeps up the beach at about twenty feet per night is not very scary. It's very poor.

After that I attempted to watch another film in the videotheque, but after four aborted attempts at some horrendous opening ten minutes, I dumped them all and decided to hit the beer in the sun! Cheers Stuart.

Boogie Woogie is showing on the 26th June at 19:30, 27th June at 15:45 and 28th June at 10:00 all in Cameo 1, and doesn't have any release dates.

The Dead Outside isn't showing at the Film Festival neither does it have any release schedule.

Long Weekend is showing on the 27th June at 18:00 in Cameo 1, if you'd like to mourn Jim Caviezal's career, and thankfully doesn't look like it's getting a release.

Filmstalker at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2009