Forbidden Worlds film festival unveils 2024 programme

Killer queens, anniversary screenings of genre classics, a focus on director Peter Hyams . . . Curated by a dedicated band of local cinephiles and now in its third year, the 2024 Forbidden Worlds Film Festival celebrates classic and obscure genre films on the biggest screen in town at the former IMAX cinema – now with improved sound and picture quality.

With Mad Max spin-off Furiosa on the horizon, a key strand of this year’s festival is Killer Queens – celebrating the inspirations for the new generation of female action stars. The programme includes fifties B-movie classic Attack of the 50ft Woman; Kathryn Bigelow’s outstanding 1990 thriller Blue Steel, starring Jamie Lee Curtis; cult seventies Japanese prison flick Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion; Geena Davis as an assassin with amnesia in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996); blaxploitation heroine Pam Grier in the Tarantino-inspiring Foxy Brown (1974); and the UK premiere of the new 4K restoration of Luc Besson’s genre-defining Nikita (1990), which he’s effectively been remaking ever since.

“Powerful female characters were few and far between in films made in the twentieth century,” says the festival’s Tessa Williams, “and that is best put into words by one of our Killer Queens herself, Geena Davis: ‘Identifying with a character is one of the best parts of seeing a movie, but as women, we’ve had to train ourselves to experience the male journey.’ I’m really excited for our audience to experience the high-octane journeys of these six iconic characters kicking ass on Bristol’s giant screen.”

Versatile director Peter Hyams is this year’s Festival Legend, with screenings of three of his films: the never-more-topical conspiracy thriller Capricorn One; space western Outland, which sends Sean Connery to one of Jupiter’s moons, where there are sinister goings-on in a mining colony; and daft time travel romp Timecop, which gave Jean-Claude Van Damme his biggest hit.

“Peter Hyams, along with John Badham, is one of the first filmmakers I became aware of,” says the festival’s Anthony Nield. “Discovering a love for film in the late eighties and early nineties, which was mostly focused on genre cinema, the credit ‘Directed by Peter Hyams’ cropped up regularly. And it always guaranteed a lean, efficient, no-nonsense approach to the thriller, or the action movie, or science fiction, whether that be with Running Scared, Capricorn One, Narrow Margin, 2010, The Star Chamber, Outland, and so on. With so many options to choose from, we decided to limit ourselves to one film per decade, thus showing off Hyams’ consistency over the years and demonstrating his skills as a consummate storyteller.”

It’s anniversaries a-go-go in the festival’s Inner Worlds & Outer Spaces strand, which includes a 40th anniversary screening of The Last Starfighter and a 30th anniversary one of the TV series-spawning Stargate. Also included are Joe Dante’s Oscar-winning (for visual effects) Innerspace and a rare outing for the Soviet-era science fiction black comedy Kin-dza-dza! (1996), in which a pair of ordinary proles are whisked accidentally to the planet Pluke in the eponymous star system, where they befriend a pair of space aliens.

The From the Video Shop Archives strand raids 20th Century Flicks’ vast collection for a premiere of a brand-new restoration of Indonesian swords and sorcery curio The Devil’s Sword (1984), which sees action star Barry Prima battle wizards that can shoot lasers out of their hands, an army of crocodile soldiers and warriors who surf flying rocks.

There’s also a 30th anniversary screening of the 1994 action classic Speed, which was the film screened at the gala opening of the Showcase Avonmeads.

In a first for Forbidden Worlds, this year’s festival is hosting a Genre Filmmakers of the Future Short Film Showcase. Filmmakers were invited to submit their work for screening and these submissions have now been whittled down to just 12 titles. These will be judged by a panel of professionals, including We Are Lady Parts and Polite Society director Nida Manzoor and Host producer Jed Shepherd. Audience members will also be invited to vote for their favourite

Among the shortlisted submissions is Badger! – a comedy-horror film about a killer badger, shot on location in Portishead and around Bristol. It’s directed by Barry Wilkinson, who gave us the Jurassic Park fan film Stegosaurus – in which Bristol woodland doubled for the Costa Rican jungle.

Badger! was made on a budget of £600 (most of which was blown on fake blood), with 22 crew and one dog (who doubles for a running killer badger) giving their time for free on evenings and weekends. It’s already proving quite a success, being selected for several film festivals and winning both Best Comedy Short and Best Original Soundtrack at the Robinson Film Awards.

“This Forbidden Worlds, we wanted to do something totally different from the monsters and martial arts mayhem of last year and look forward to unleashing everything from Soviet science-fiction to weird Indonesian fantasy flicks to classic crowd-pleasing blockbusters like Speed and Stargate upon our audiences,” says the festival’s Timon Singh. “Plus, hopefully, we’ll have a few surprises as well.”

The Forbidden Worlds team have also spent the last six months upgrading a lot of the venue’s audio and visual equipment so the films will be even bigger and louder than before.

“We’ve spent loads of hours tinkering and calling in several favours to get the picture and sound in the best shape it can possibly be in. Amps have been replaced, speakers fine tuned and we have a new 1:1 lens that will fill the screen even more than before,” notes the festival’s Dave Taylor. “It has to be seen and heard to be believed!”

Forbidden Worlds 2024 runs from May 16-19 at the former IMAX cinema in Bristol Aquarium. Go here for the full line-up and to buy tickets.

Main image from Stargate: © 1994 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.