Frightfest Halloween 2025 – Film Review – THE BITTER TASTE (2024)

In The Bitter Taste, a disgraced hunting guide, desperate for cash, uses her rusty pentathlon skills to survive after getting entangled in a bizarre plot that threatens humanity.

Marcia has a dodgy leg that needs expensive surgery. In the first of many terrible life choices, she steals a valuable document from a heart attack victim after losing her job. Her quest to sell it is hampered by ludicrous coincidences that leave her stranded in a spooky village.

Confused by circumstance and muddled from painkiller abuse, she encounters a cavalcade of characters straight out of old-school Hammer movies and stumbles into a supernatural salmagundi of The Most Dangerous Game.

Marcia teams up with Josh, a fisherman out of water, and George, a disgruntled policewoman. Josh has a nonsensical backstory and a not-so-hidden agenda, and George has a cold cynicism at odds with her fucked up surroundings, but they are all she has to work with.

Together, they must defeat a menace transcending the grave and an evil villain with a one-eyed chainsaw-wielding henchwoman.

Guido Tölke‘s infectiously bonkers action horror picture was never meant to be this ambitious. It is a production that spiralled outside its initial boundaries and could have been disastrous. However, the commitment and ingenuity of the filmmakers, plus the fantastic locations and inventive effects, make for a highly entertaining, if utterly preposterous, ride.

The Bitter Taste is so eager to welcome us into its world of lunacy that it is just as eager to send logic into exile. It is a world of undead countesses with sinister physicians, black face veils, misused meat hooks, and rampaging wraiths, where eternal life is king and cannibalism is the currency.

The screenplay is so delightfully chaotic that it makes James Wan’s Malignant look grounded. Its kitchen sink ethos took five years of intensive toil to tame, and its can-do attitude is a credit to the filmmakers’ apparent influences of cave adventure pictures, splatter flicks, and creature features from the 1980s. Add a dash of low-budget Verbinskiesque flair, and The Bitter Taste manifests as a mad beast determined to run amok, looking to scratch every horror itch imaginable.

The meat in this all-you-can-eat potboiler is Clemens Damerau’s astonishing score. He embraces the requisite tone with flamboyant excess and produces one of the most bombastic soundtracks of the year.

Sure, the film is over-edited, but that adds to the sense of snowballing insanity, and there is an undeniable energy and enthusiasm that refuses to be dampened. It’s all such eye-rolling fun it just seems churlish to unpick the flimsy stitches of its patchwork narrative.

Once the pentathlon-inspired section of the film unfolds in all its glorious disbelief, you will already be won over by its inherent desire to please. The Bitter Taste has such an all-encoming compulsion to engage with horror fans that it could quickly become a cult favourite with some.

After viewing it, I felt sorry that I was covering this Frightfest remotely because I would have loved to experience the audience’s reaction firsthand in a packed festival screening.

Despite financial limitations, The Bitter Taste is a fine example of what independent cinema can achieve. It is visually gorgeous, with exciting set pieces, practical gore, and a transmittable sense of fun.

★★★

                                                                              UK Premiere

Frightfest Halloween 2024 / Julia Dordel, Nicolo Pasetti, Anne Alexander Sieder, Christiane Ostermayer / Dir: Guido​​Tölke / Dorcon Film / CERT. TBC