By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week I take as much advantage of Fantastic Fest’s absolute bounty of genre and horror flicks as possible. More to come!
899. Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It
This horror-comedy comes from Kazahkstan- yes, that Kazakhstan- and if your knowledge about that country comes from a particular Sacha Baron Cohen persona, well, you’re not alone. I’m not going to say that this will give you a great idea of what the real Kazakhstan is like, but it will demonstrate the country has a thrilling and hilarious cinema scene at least personified in director Yernar Nurgaliyev. The story starts with The Hangover-style hijinks as an expecting father whose wife is driving him up the wall escapes to the countryside on a fishing trip with is two eccentric buddies, but quickly enters slasher territory when they witness three gangsters commit a murder. There’s something more dangerous than even them out there, though… This a horror comedy that truly delivers on both of those elements. Two Beers.
900. The Execution
This is my big winner so far of Fantastic Fest- a Russian crime drama that clearly worships at the feet of Fincher with the intricate story construction and twistiness of a good Shyamalan flick. Lado Kvataniya shows serious stylistic flair and formal control in this story of an obsessed police detective who sent the wrong men to prison for a string of brutal serial killings but now believes he’s found the right man. Kvataniya cuts back and forth in time between the interrogation and previous moments in the investigation, building up to a denouement that pays off your attention in spades. A Toast.
901. Zalava
This Iranian horror also played TIFF, and it’s easy to see why Arsalan Amiri’s film has attracted so much festival attention- to start the story and setting are quite unique. Zalava is a town of seemingly inbred villagers that insists demons arrive once a year and need to be exorcised- via metal inserted below the waist via gunshot or knife wound at worst. The local police sergeant would prefer they stopped shooting and stabbing each other, and arrests the exorcist along with the simple jar he’s captured a demon in. Amiri keeps things thrillingly subjective, and you’ll find yourself as torn between the forces of superstition and modernity as the protagonist all the way to its seemingly inevitable conclusion. Two Beers.
902. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
It’s also easy to see why this one has attracted plenty of festival attention (also playing TIFF and others), but I can’t say it did it for me nearly as much. Bertrando Mandico’s film is an absolute powerhouse of design and style- constructing a literal alien world where humanity has relocated but decided to return to a small community, hunting and foraging lifestyle, and where all men quickly died, unable to adapt. A young woman makes the mistake of freeing a woman she finds buried up to her neck in sand, and is sent with her mother on a quest to kill that anarchist murderer. Unfortunately, it’s more committed to being a trippy visual experience evoking a 70s softcore idea of the future than telling an actual story, and I kind of wanted both. Four Beers.
903. NR. 10
The latest from Borgman director Alex van Warmerdam is about a small theatrical production that’s generating plenty of drama- one actor can’t remember his lines since his wife is on a breathing machine, while another is cheating on her husband, the director, with the play’s lead, Gunter. This is a Warmerdam production, though, and soon elements of some kind of conspiracy involving the Catholic Church start to bleed in around the edges. You may not always like the ride that Warmerdam takes you on, but it’s always going to be a ride unlike any you’ve taken, which is enough reason for me to keep climbing on board. Three Beers.
904. The Found Footage Phenomenon
Sarah Appleton & Phillip Escott’s documentary about found footage horror films as a genre does an admirably comprehensive job of exploring the history of this much-maligned yet also often quite lucrative corner of the horror world, often told by the principals themselves. It’s pretty conventionally and linearly delivered, but it will give you a greater appreciation of the unique challenges of the genre (and interestingly, how the vagaries of distribution can affect critical reception of a film). Three Beers.
905. Hunger
A quick detour to the Urbanworld Film Festival landed this screening- a barely more than hour-long Korean drama about a social media influencer who is kidnapped, likely by the social media debunker who has been behind the public shaming and ensuing suicides of other influencers in recent months, or somebody else taking issue with her flaunting her wealth and lavish lifestyle. Lee Ye-Rim Rey directs with flair in what appears to be her debut, and considering the length, possibly even student film, although star Ahn So-Hee is a quite recognizable singer-turned actress. Whatever the case, this surprising and sharp edged stuff. Three Beers.
906. Barbarians
Longtime producer and first-time director Charles Dorfman delivers a slick darkly comic drama that starts as character-driven conflict between Tom Cullen’s alpha-male developer and Iwan Rheon’s (yes, Ramsey Bolton) more beta-ish friend and film director married to a renowned sculptor (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who’s boosting the value of Cullen’s development and Irish manor house they’re residing in. The flick takes a turn that makes it Fantastic Fest fare, but Dorfman does a great job weaving it into the story already ongoing and using it to reveal even more about his characters. Nicely developed, taut stuff. Two Beers.
907. Glasshouse
I saw one review stinger describing this film as “The Beguiled set in a dystopian future” and, well… that pretty much nails what South African director Kelsey Egan is bringing to the table here. The threat keeping the family of young women and their mentally disabled brother isolated in a greenhouse is The Shred, a memory-stealing virus that gradually strips the humanity of its victims away. When a very Bradley Cooper-looking Hilton Pelser shows up and begins to tell each what he thinks they want to hear, their equilibrium is broken… so, yeah, The Beguiled. Egan has some interesting visual, sci-fi, and storytelling ideas to add to the mix, though, even if there’s a whole lot more incest than feels strictly necessary… Three Beers.
908. Baby Assassins
This entertainingly low-key action-comedy from Yugo Sakamoto is about a couple of high school girls who happen to be assassins. Unfortunately, they’re about to graduate and for dryly corporate reasons (preserving cover, and insurance-related factors) they need to get at least part-time jobs, which is a lot more difficult for them than the occasional hit job. Akari Takaishi and Saori Izawa are a great comic pairing and they and Sakamoto get great mileage from the droll criminal world they establish via background details and every character’s matter-of-fact shared acceptance of it. Two Beers.
909. Luzifer
The name of Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl as producer probably should have been enough to warn me off of Peter Brunner’s film about a real life exorcism gone horribly wrong spurred on by unscrupulous developers facing off against a bizarre and disturbing family made up of an ex-addict convert to a self-made religion incorporating Christianity & Germanic paganism (Susanne Jensen) and the son she’s kept in a state of a childlike perversion of innocence and codependence with her (Franz Rogowski). It’s a film full of human ugliness captured in far more detail than you’d wish juxtaposed against the great natural beauty of the German Alps, and the latter doesn’t quite mitigate the former, at least for me. Four Beers.
910. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
This is another Japanese movie, and another one-shot genre flick for those taken with last year’s One Cut of the Dead. The genre this time is lite sci-fi, as the employees and customers of a small café discover there’s a time tunnel with a two minute delay between the manager’s upstairs computer and the CC TV monitor in the store, and director Junta Yamaguchi really delves into the mechanics and implications of that in a low-key, winningly amusing way. These are characters it’s a pleasure spending time with and in a scant 70 minutes there’s no danger of their overstaying their welcome- a little gem of a film. Two Beers.
911. Foxhole
This wasn’t actually a Fantastic Fest title, but rather a Woodstock one (Eventive is great, folks). The premise caught my eye- a film consisting of three vignettes set in foxholes or the equivalent in three different wars of American involvement. It wasn’t until the opening credits that I realized the director was Jack Fessenden, 21 year old (and not his first feature, either) son of Larry, and while the budget is clearly modest, he makes the most of it, finding interesting ways to contrast and echo the three scenarios. It’s at times apparent it’s the work of a young man, but it’s a damn interesting one. Three Beers.
912. Homebound
This quite short horror film is fairly straightforward- the fiancée of a divorcee takes a weekend trip to the manor where his ex-wife and children reside. They find the wife has already left, and his three children are quite a bit less than receptive to their prospective new step-mom. This is a tight horror that gets in and gets out once it’s made it’s point and delivered its twist, all of it delivered with polish by the cast and director Sebastian Godwin. Three Beers.
913. Samuel’s Travels
It’s a bit hard to characterize this unique Latvian film- ‘twisted fairytale’ is overused, yet somewhat fits. Director Aik Karapetian brings together disparate elements like an omniscient drolly English-accented narrator, the best little pig actor since Babe, and a Hostel-lite vision of Eastern European depravity in a way that shouldn’t work, yet does. Samuel accidentally clips a pig while driving rural backroads, and ends up deciding to stay the night in the farmhouse of its attractive young owner- which ain’t a great decision. I won’t say more, but will say that this bizarre meditation on the elements of true happiness is oddly captivating. Two Beers.
914. The Visitor
Where to start with this one? What other 70s B-movie cast featured not one, but two legendary directors as actors in John Huston and Sam Peckinpah (alongside other luminaries such as Shelley Winters, Franco Nero, Lance Henriksen, and Glenn Ford), or a plot about a space-Christ who sends Huston to take down a profanity-spewing 8-year-old girl who’s the embodiment of his universe’s Antichrist and her vicious pet hawk. This is utterly cuckoo yet played entirely straight-faced, an alien The Omen with a hearty dose of New Age crystal mysticism. It’s a trip. Four Beers.
915. I Am a Knife with Legs
This past FF selection may well be the cheapest ever to play the festival- if star and “writer/director/producer/composer/editor/sound designer” Bennett Jones spent more than 10k on it, there’s some Producers shit that went down here. It’s not hard to see why critics loved it all the same, though- Jones’ madcap energy playing international Europop star Bené, hiding out in an LA apartment with his manager Beefy from the fatwa against him among other existential worries, is hard to hate, and this animated/musical/action flick keeps that energy up until the bitter end. Three Beers.
916. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
Benedict Cumberbatch plays another brilliant, eccentric, and likely maybe mentally imbalanced Englishman here in this unconventional biopic of the artist Louis Wain, whose psychedelic imagery of cats at the turn of the century helped turn them from mousers and alley animals into the beloved housepets they are today. Director Will Sharpe layers on a bevy of stylistic touches, some more effective than others, but Cumberbatch and Claire Foy, playing his not-long-for-this-world wife and soulmate, locate the emotional core of the material and deliver outstanding, nuanced performances to keep it all together. Three Beers.
917. Titane
No, I didn’t get to a Fantastic Fest in-person screening, but rather this year’s controversial Palme D’Or winner is playing my local theater, and I wasn’t going to give it another week to disappear on me. Julia Ducournau doubles down on the savage violence, neon-lit aesthetics, and curious psychology of her debut Raw in this story of a sociopath with a titanium plate in her head from a childhood accident who dances in car shows for a living and has carnal relations with them in her off hours. I won’t go further in my description than that, because this film and the yet stranger places it goes are worth discovering on your own. While not all of them cohere for me as well as they must have for Spike Lee and his jury, I have the utmost respect for Ducournau and her cast’s utter cocky fearlessness and the bizarre beauty among the chaos they are able to conjure up. Two Beers.
918. Alone with You
Emily Bennett & Justin Brooks directing a progressively more disturbing tale about a young woman (Bennett herself) awaiting the arrival of her girlfriend on their anniversary who starts to realize that she’s cut off from the outside world except for her phone and the perpetually crying woman next door she can hear through her vents. This is a bit of a psychological mindfuck that makes as much hay from the cracks showing at the edges of her relationships as it does the more direct horror elements, which could have been tightened up a bit even at this shorter runtime. The involvement of Barbara Crampton, playing her mom, is always a good sign, too. Three Beers.
919. King Car
Yes, this is another film about the dark eroticism of human + car pairings and a cult-like fascination with pistons and carburetors- it’s just a year for those, I suppose. This one comes from Brazil, and is about a young man who can speak with cars- particularly one old taxi with malicious intent. He doesn’t want to take over his father’s taxi business, instead wanting to joint an environmentalist collective, but when he reveals his skill to his not quite right gearhead uncle, the gears of an infernal plan are set in motion… Renata Pinheiro shows excellent control and real talent for fashioning grippingly bizarre imagery- it’s almost a shame this film is getting a release in the year of Titane (although that’s likely on purpose), or else she may be getting more heat for it. Two Beers.
920. Let the Wrong One In
This Irish horror comedy looks to Shaun of the Dead up a vampire story, and it starts promisingly enough in that vein- with an ominous shot of a Transylvanian square whose peace is broken by a rowdy Irish bachelorette party. It turns out there are vampires there, though, and soon the scourge awakes in the form of a good-for-nothing partier who gets bit in a club, then runs back to the house he got kicked out of to see if his high-school aged brother can help him out. The comedy crosses the cheese line here and again, but hits more than it misses, and even the jankier effects work has its own particular charm. Three Beers.
920. Preman
Indonesia has been asserting its genre bona fides for several years now, to the point that if it’s getting a release or festival play and from Indonesia I’m already on board. A “preman” is a bit of a cross between a gangster and a vigilante- a community policing organization that often becomes more of the problem than the solution. Director Randolph Zaini tells a relatively common tale of a gangster forced to fight his former mates when they go after those he loves, but puts his own twists on things. Our protagonist is deaf, and haunted by visions of murderous-looking mascots that tie into his past. His weapon of choice is a ball-and-chain mace, and he faces off against a terrifyingly competent professional assassin/hairdresser among others. If you’re an action fan, you’re going to find plenty of interest here. Two Beers.
921. Masking Threshold
Johannes Grenzfurthner delivers one of the more unique, and more horrifying (if not the most horrifying) experiences at Fantastic Fest this year with a nearly entirely first person recounting of a man’s research and experiments in curing the tinnitus he insists he has yet no doctor can diagnose. Grenzfurthner’s mixture of first-person narration and close-up footage (much of it stock) of increasing grotesqueries makes everything hit much harder than you’d ever expect only 15 or 30 minutes into this. Not for everyone, but damn if it doesn’t represent everything FF is about. Two Beers.
922. The Timekeepers of Eternity
This is another more idiosyncratic offering that I wasn’t expecting to like as much as I did. Aristotelis Maragkos, for reasons only known to him, printed every frame of the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Langoliers and then reshaped and reanimated it as a black and white collage. The effect is pretty straight up amazing, adding a trippy psychological element to what’s pretty generally held to be a not so great flick, and particularly Bronson Pinchot’s dialed up to 11 supercamp central performance. Maragkos has managed to make it into something more interestingly complicated though- anyone interested in what a reimagining with real imagination looks like, this is it. Two Beers.
923. Eyes of Fire
Fantastic Fest doesn’t just bring contemporary films- it’s got a pretty great side hustle as a purveyor of hard to find and undistributed cult films as well. This 1983 film is about a group of pre-Revolutionary War settlers who follow a pompous preacher into a valley the local Native American tribes won’t set foot in, told by possibly the only survivors- a group of children led by a teen with psychic powers. It’s a trip, and though all the day for night & photo negative effects maybe haven’t aged the greatest, it’s definitely got a unique milieu and a sense of imagination. Three Beers.
924. Dealer
Belgian filmmaker Jeroen Perceval made his bones acting in dour Belgian arthouse dramas about privation and crime like Bullhead and The Ardennes, and here he gets to make one of his own in this story of a pubescent drug dealer who meets up with a renowned actor on the downswing while selling in a club and impresses him with his chutzpah. What starts as a lark of a friendship starts to look like a chance at salvation for the both of them, if they can keep from falling into old habits. While this may feel like social issues dramas you’ve seen before (and it’s frankly odd that this is debuting at Fantastic Fest of all places), Perceval and his committed cast find new angles into the material that make it worth your while. Two Beers.
925. Devil Story
This is the kind of Alamo-endorsed cult film that’s not good- at all- but not good in a uniquely fascinating way. It’s hard to really say what the plot of this low-budget 1985 French horror film (available in English for the first time) is supposed to be, but after 15 minutes of a Nazi SlothfromdaGoonies stumbling around, groaning and murdering, it doesn’t really matter. It also doesn’t matter why that horse keeps showing up, rearing up on hind legs, and emitting the exact same canned neigh (I learned from the film description that Mr. Ed is possessed by the devil), nor why that farmer keeps shooting at him with his shotgun at point-blank range and missing. Oh, and there’s a mummy. If that won’t convince you to watch, I don’t know what will. Six Pack.
926. Mad God
Phil Tippett is a legendary stop-motion animator- the man behind the special effects that blew your mind as a kid and even now in RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Jurassic Park, and yes, even Star Wars. Here he presents his 30 years in the making magnum opus about a lone traveler traversing a dark and disgusting Hades full of grotesque creatures, horrific violence, and moments of strange yet undeniable beauty. It’s an incredible technical achievement, but a pitch black, even despairing one. Not for the faint of heart. Three Beers.
927. Some Like it Rare
What’s with the French and surprisingly sympathetic depictions of cannibalism? Following in the footsteps of Delicatessen and the differently pitched yet fitting Raw, Fabrice Eboue (who also co-stars) creates an unambiguous comedy about the pleasures of long pork. Vincent and Sophie are married butchers whose business and marriage are on the rocks- until they luck into a new meat sensation- Vegans (basically grass-fed, right?) This is the kind of movie in which just about every character is more reprehensible than the last, yet you find yourself enjoying the ride anyway- it helps when the humor and storytelling are this catchy. Two Beers.
928. Black Friday
This more conventional horror comedy was a bit of a surprise inclusion, and it’d not at all be surprising to see it take off on VOD when it inevitably hits it. Director Casey Tebo has a juicy premise- a toy store is overrun by shoppers turned extraterrestrial zombies on Black Friday- and a cast of comic ringers led by Bruce Campbell, Devon Sawa, and Michael Jai White, and lands it right in line with your expectations. The gore is practical and perfectly gross, and while there’s a few groaners in there, the humor hits its mark more than it misses. It certainly helps when you have Campbell delivering some of those lines- the matter of fact way he points out that one of his employees is both the slowest and the juiciest still has me chuckling. Three Beers.
929. DIGITAL VIDEO EDITING WITH ADOBE PREMIERE PRO: THE REAL-WORLD GUIDE TO SET UP AND WORKFLOW
In the grand tradition of late-night Adult Swim infomercials, this Korean long (40 minute) short film is not at all an Adobe product manual- well, I suppose it is a little bit. A director and the crack editor he’s brought in to salvage his latest film are tackling a unique problem- a ghost is haunting the negative of his movie, and he doesn’t have a ton of excess footage on hand to easily edit it out. This is an interesting inside look at filmmaking nuts and bolts, a spoof of gauzy melodramatic K-dramas, and also somehow an effective horror film. Two Beers.
930. Rock, Paper and Scissors
This Argentine psychological horror film centers on a lady returning to her home after years spent living in Spain after her father’s death, only to find him cremated and her brother and sister who lived with and cared for him looking a bit worse for wear. She quickly helps make arrangements to sell the house in order for them to be able to split the inheritance, but while leaving takes an fortuitous tumble down the stairs. There’s not a little Misery to this film, and the mindgames that ensue don’t feel unfamiliar, but the execution by the filmmakers and actors will keep your attention. Three Beers.
931. The Medium
Na Hong-jin, the director of one of my favorite horror films, and likely just films period in the last decade, The Wailing, put his imprimatur on this Thai film from director Bangjong Pisanthanakun as an executive producer, boosting it to sixth place in the healthy Korean box office this year. It’s easy to see what drew him to the material of a mockumentary/found footage tale of a Thai shaman whose niece starts to act awfully possessed. It’s like that creepy as hell shaman scene from The Wailing drawn out to feature-length and suffused with the DNA of the Blair Witch Project, and it’s properly freakin’ scary in its own right. A must for horror fans that want to keep their fingers on the pulse of the world scene (and it’s going to be on Shudder soon!). Two Beers.
932. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
There’s a lot of pretty standard Marvel-ness to Marvel’s latest, but they’ve been quite successful lately grafting interesting directorial and cultural specificity onto the house style, and that continues with the Chinese-American iconography in this one (think photorealistic Chinese lions). My favorite part was the whole beginning part with Simu Liu and Awkwafina playing unambitious parking attendants in San Francisco and first start to discover his true heritage, but it’s pretty fun throughout and there’s some quality character/actor cameos later on. It all ends in a bloodless orgy of CGI violence, but this time there’s dragons and Tony Leung, which frankly pushes it into the better half of the non-team up movies at least. Three Beers.
933. Wyrm
I’m going to let the standard imdb description speak for itself, here:
“Wyrm is falling behind. His twin sister, Myrcella, has become a woman after she and the Norwegian foreign exchange student did fingering at the cinemas. She wants Wyrm to move into their dead brother Dylan’s room so she can have privacy and space for her personal items.”
And thus begins Christopher Winterbauer’s feature-length expansion of his 2017 short film, all awkward side-ponies and braces a la a Todd Solondz joint or even Napoleon Dynamite (with quite a bit of that strangely pitched adolescent awkwardness without all the darkness coursing underneath), but also with admirably unexplained and matter of course social strangeness like a collar that doesn’t pop off until a teen has their first kiss and clears the first hurdle of healthy sexual development that’s a bit more Yorgos Lanthimos. If you like any of those films, then this will be up your alley. Two Beers.
