From California Literary Review:
The biggest discovery of the festival, though, was the world premier of writer-director-editor Julian Gilbney’s terrific, nerve-racking thriller A Lonely Place to Die, starring Melissa George, which follows a group of mountaineers in the Scottish Highlands who discover a young girl buried in a box beneath the ground and are discovered by her captors while trying to reach safety. The film’s first set pieces, set entirely on the side of the cliffs in Scotland, feature some harrowing and impressive stunt work as the characters dangle thousands of feet off the ground blow clinging to nothing but exposed rock (there’s no CGI to help them out here.) After taking an entirely logical yet out of left field trip into the local town, it becomes yet another exercise in suspense and features some of the more beautiful bizarro imagery (one character in a pig mask walking through a fire-centric pagan parade in particular) I’ve seen. It won the Jury Award for Action Film of the Year, and it totally deserves it. It’s crazy this film doesn’t currently have distribution in the U.S. because it’s really good and really taut, with some tight editing. There’s not a single wasted frame in the whole thing.
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ActionFest is fast becoming one of the most prominent genre festivals in the world. Hopefully for the next few years it will still be held in the lovely Carolina Theater in Asheville before needing to extend into other venues. I have no doubt they will continue to program top-notch films, and attract some terrific talent to work their panels. For all of these reasons, ActionFest is worth your time and money, and I can’t wait to get back next year.