1st Annual Fantastic Fest 10/6-9/05
“I’m not letting you go home until you get some pussy!”
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA PANEL
MOON GIRL
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DORKS
POPEE THE MAGIC PERFORMER: GREAT MAGIC
So we all know that I’m a big ol’ horror fiend. Any chance I get to see blood, guts and machetes I’m there. So when I heard that Harry Knowles, Tim League and Matt Dentler were getting together to do a genre film festival, I was in line before they even formed one. Then they said that, if we bought our passes early, we would get to see Serenity with a couple of the actresses. That actually got my ass off the line and onto the website so I could buy the pass. (I also got to see Domino because of it, but that’s neither here nor there. Plus it wasn’t nearly as good—although Richard Kelly is fuckin’ awesome.)
Then, last Tuesday, I found out that I was going to be working the festival. My company rented the Alamo a big-ass projector and needed a babysitter for it. I was going already, so why not make some mad OT?
Yeah. Thanks, fate. Give me lots of money, but make me spend lots of money upfront that I didn’t need to spend. Awesome.
But, anyway, enough bitching. How was the festival?
It was awesome! Even though I was (sort of) working, I got to see a lot of movies. Of course, that was mostly because there was nothing besides movies. (Ok, there was one party for Zathura, but that was almost an unofficial thing. Almost.)
So, after nearly eight hours of setting up one projector, I finally got to start the movies.
The very first thing that I saw at the Fantasic Fest was this short by Henry Selick, director of A Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach. He’s always used stop-motion before and this is supposedly his big sellout short. He’s moved on to CGI. (GASP!)
As far as CGI shorts go, this was alright. The story of a young boy who is pulled to the moon by the titular character because of his fireflies was pretty cool, but somehow it just didn’t grab me the way it should have. Maybe it’s because the characters looked like some ungodly mix of the James And The Giant Peach characters and balloons. I did, however, like the monsters who were trying to steal the moon’s light. And the end was predictable, but really good for some reason.
Not a bad short, but not a great one, either. Definitely one to seek out if you’re a fan of Selick’s work.
This film, on the other hand, was fucking amazing. I has characters that you grow to love, action, adventure, romance, intrigue, heartwrenching death and everything you could ever want from a fantasy film.
And it’s all told with puppets.
That’s right. Puppets. Just like Team America. But better. And VERY serious.
The story starts with the suicide of Kahro, King of Hebalon. His last wish is that his son, Hal Tara, carry on the way he couldn’t—in peace. He also wants Hal to take care of his sister, Jhinna. She is more important that even she knows.
Unfortunately for all involved, Kahro’s evil brother tells Hal that Kahro was killed by the Zeriths, an “unruly band of savages” that live outside the gates of Hebalon in the woods. Hal is told that he must avenge his father’s death at all costs. Of course, this is only to get him out of the way so that the brother can take over.
Here’s the catch to all of this: these guys all know that they’re puppets. And they never question it. There is talk of the “head string” and how important the ties to the heavens are, but they never talk about God or any real entity in the sky that controls them. It’s obviously there, but it’s not overtly mentioned. It mainly seems to be something that binds them all together.
This is, despite a semi-routine base story, an amazing film. The puppetry is perfect and connection that the characters have to this puppetry is really intriguing. There are some obvious political overtones that are interesting, but they’re not overbearing.
Unfortunately for us, this movie will not be released theatrically in the US. No distributor knew what the hell to do with it, so they decided that it would be best to just throw it onto DVD and hope for the best. Maybe they’re right. I’m not so sure that the US is quite ready for a Danish film starring and about puppets. But definitely look for it on DVD. You may have to search for it, but it’s there. And it’s well worth it. This was my favorite film of the festival until…well…we’ll get to that.
For the big premiere of the festival, Jon Favreau let us see a slightly unfinished version of his new family film based on the new book by Chris van Allsburg, author of Jumanji and the The Polar Express.
It’s kind of funny how this film got to the festival. Jon had his premiere for Made here because of Harry and the Alamo. He had a lot of fun with it and Harry knew it. He had heard that Zathura was pretty close to being finished, but really didn’t think that he would be able to screen it at the festival. Jon, because he had so much fun with Made at the Alamo, decided to give him the unfinished film and come in for the festival. After about a week or so, Jon ended up being a co-worker of Harry’s because he is going to direct John Carter Of Mar, which Harry is producing. (Yeah, Kerry Conran is gone. The IMDb, for now, is wrong.)
The “unfinished” tag on this film is kind of misleading…almost. Jon said that there were a few bugs in the special effects that needed to be worked out, but I don’t think anybody noticed them. It was really a pretty fun movie. I can imagine that, as a little kid, you would think it was totally awesome. Even as a semi-adult, I had a lot of fun with it.
The only problem, and I think it’s going to be a BIG problem for the movie, is that it’s JUST LIKE FUCKING JUMANJI!! The ONLY difference is that it takes place in space instead of in the jungle. And because Jumanji is, for some reason, universally derided, people will probably stay away from this one in droves.
Here’s the story: two brothers, Walter and Danny (Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo—Josh, by the way, was the unsung Hero Boy model for The Polar Express…poor kid got cut out of the credits on the preview just before its release) find a game in the scary basement of their dad’s (Tim Robbins) house. Danny, the younger one, is all into it, but Walter, who is too old for silly things like that, doesn’t want anything to do with it. But once Danny turns the knob and a card pops out that says that they are in a meteor shower, things start to go horribly wrong. And Walter has no choice but to keep the game going with his little brother else they may never see home again.
Of course, they learn to work together without fighting and they meet up with a lost astronaut (Dax Shepard, who is the funniest part of the movie). The boys’ sister, Lisa (Kristen Stewart from Panic Room), is hardly in the movie, but she does manage to look like hot jailbait throughout the end of it. DAMN MY YEARS!!
The screenplay by David Koepp (Spider-Man, Panic Room, Jurassic Park and his criminally forgotten debut, Apartment Zero) is pretty good and, along with Favreau’s style, helps to keep this movie interesting for kids and adults. But the whole Jumanji thing is it’s real downfall. I think that if this movie had come out first it would be a big hit. But, since it has the word “Jumanji” attached to it, it’s probably not going to do so well. And Koepp did so much to keep this from being a real sequel, too. In the original book of Jumanji, the kids left the game in a park and these two boys picked it up. Twenty years later van Allsburg decided that it was time to tell their story. All of this is left out of Zathura, though, just to keep the ties to Jumanji to a minimum. It just doesn’t work so well since the story itself is a nearly exact carbon copy of the first book.
Hopefully, though, people don’t let the connection worry them too much. Zathura is a good flick and deserves an audience. Then, if this does well, maybe it won’t take van Allsburg twenty years to do a third book to make it a trilogy. Maybe Jumanji under the sea.
All of the kids were good, too. And it looks like Josh is set to play Damien in the new Omen remake. We’ll see how that goes. Jonah, however, is an Orthodox Jew and they had to set up a…um…I forget the word that Jon used. But it’s like a small place of worship for Jewish people. Not a synagogue. Smaller than that.
Anyway, it was soon used for Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments. Heh heh. Gotta love that.
The next program started with this awesome little Australian short about a man trying to escape from a hospital where the doctors are evil madmen who experiment on their patients. I say little, but it was 14 and a half minutes long…one of the longer shorts at the festival.
It really played with the conventions of the genre all with claymation, which was really cool. It was my favorite short of the festival and one that I’m thinking about buying. Hell, it even had some Cthulu type stuff going on in it!
Yeah. You’re right. I’m buying it.
The feature that went along with Ward 13 was almost as good. Wolf Creek is the story of three Australian kids who are on a road trip in the Outback. Liz (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi) seem to have just kind of picked Ben (Nathan Pillips) up along the way. I think they needed someone to help with gas and he happened to be going the same way and mutual friends hooked them up. Whatever, Liz and Ben have a crush on each other, but they’re both too shy to do anything about it. Kristy wants them to hook up, but she’s also very protective of her friend.
When they finally make it to the Wolf Creek Crater, they not only find out that their watches have stopped, but their car won’t start either. Good thing Mick Taylor (no, not the Stones’ second guitarist. This one is played by cult Australian actor and Tarantino favorite John Jarratt. Think of him as an Australian R. Lee Ermy.) comes along. He offers to fix their car for free, but he has to pull them all the way back to his place miles and miles in the opposite direction. They concede and start their long journey.
That’s when the screaming starts.
The rest of the film is filled with brutality and violence of the highest order. And the really scary part of all of this is that it’s supposedly all true. The movie starts off with statistics of how many people go missing in the Outback and how about 10% of them are never heard from again.
This movie really made the Outback look beautiful. If it weren’t so apparently dangerous, I would want to visit tomorrow. It’s really like a fifth character here. But if this kind of shit is going on all the time…pass.
There were a few people who thought that the movie was too slow. I think they just didn’t really want to get to know the characters. Fuck ‘em. I thought this was a great movie. One of the better slasher type flicks of the past few years, anyway.
It opens on November 18th, so get in line now. Hopefully this will be a pretty big hit. It’s not the “fun” horror flick that we’re all used to, though. It’s a brutal movie. It was compared to Irreversible, actually. Not quite all that, but close. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart. (The “head on a stick” scene is particularly bad. And, no, it’s not what you think. It’s actually worse.) But check it out if you’re up for it.
Remember how Project Greenlight had never made a really good movie? I haven’t seen Stolen Summer, so I can’t speak for that one, but The Battle Of Shaker Heights couldn’t even be saved by Shia LaBeouf, and he’s a pretty cool kid.
Luckily the crew teamed up with Wes Craven and put aside the coming of age drama. This time they made a pretty kick-ass gore flick with no redeeming social values at all. (Unless, of course, putting a motivational speaker in harm’s way is a social value, which I think it is.)
Sort of reminiscent of From Dusk Til Dawn, Feast takes place in a small bar in the middle of nowhere. But this one doesn’t try to be a road/crime movie first. It starts off bloodthirsty. And as each character is introduced we get a rundown on their name, occupation and life expectancy. (Everybody’s favorite was Grandma.) But keep in mind that they sometimes lie. No one is safe.
The folks in the bar are suddenly besieged by hideous monsters who are hungry for anything they can get their huge fangs on. And not even Jason Mewes is safe! (He plays himself and, strangely, NOT Jay.)
The only other two people I recognized were Balthazar Getty, who plays the asshole of the group and Henry Rollins, who plays the aforementioned motivational speaker. (And, if you’ve ever wanted to see Henry in pink sweats, this is the movie for you.)
No, it’s not a great film. But it a LOT of fun. And it hits all the stops for a horror flick: humor, gore, scares, disgust, a little bit of sheer disturbance. The only thing it didn’t have was nudity. But DAMN did Jenny Wade look good in cleavage and blood! (Yeah. I’m a real sicko. Shut up.) Who cares, in this case, if we didn’t care about the characters? This movie was fun as hell and is the first really decent Project Greenlight movie. Yay, Matt, Ben and Wes!
This is the only revival movie I saw at this festival. They did a series of Post-Apocalyptic movies that all looked really cool (The Last Wave was the only other one that I had actually heard of), but this is the only one I had time to see. Hell, they’re all available in some form…I think. Right? Right, Harry?!
I have been hearing about this one for about ten years now and, for some reason, have just never gotten around to seeing it. And more’s the pity. It was pretty damn awesome.
For those of you who don’t know (and, unfortunately, that seems to be most of you), this 1988 movie is the story of Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards years-and hair follicles-before he became a doctor). He’s a lonely swing trombone player who can’t seem to find just the right girl. Then he stumbles into Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) at a museum. He knows that she’s the girl of his dreams and, lucky for him, fate allows him to meet her and hang out with her for a few days.
But one night he oversleeps his alarm and misses his chance to meet her for a late night of dancing after she got off work. When he finally does wake up he goes to the diner she works at (dressed in his finest blue silk suit, red shirt and weirdly art deco tie), finds out that she’s gone home and gets a very strange phone call. It appears that the Russkies have sent their bombs to greet us and LA is one of their first targets. Harry walks back in the diner, tells everybody what just happened, aaaaannnndddd FREAK OUT!
The rest of the movie (after Denise Crosby verifies their fears—don’t ask, I’m still not sure) is Harry trying to get to Julie’s place to save her life and get her on the chopper out of town and to Antarctica.
After the cheesy 80s beginning (that fuckin’ suit, man! And why was Tangerine Dream ever popular for scores?) this movie turns into a tense piece of cold war awesomeness. LA turns into a ball of stress (not that it isn’t already) and people start lootin’ and shootin’.
This is probably one of the better “droppin’ the bomb on us” movies from the 80s. It was obviously made on the cheap (the biggest special effect is probably the gas station blowing up), but it’s all the better for it. And Anthony puts in a great performance as a guy who is just trying to stay sane long enough to get his new love to safety. It’s something no man should go through, but we all would if we had to. Hopefully.
Check this out now. It’s definitely worth it. Hell, even if you remember seeing it on HBO over and over again, I bet it’s been a few years. Find it again.
THE MAKING OF THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
I just recently re-read these books so that I would kind of remember what I was getting into when I saw the movie this December. (Ok. Shut up. I re-read the first three and a half and read the rest for the first time.) The series is pretty awesome (except for The Magician’s Nephew and the very, very end of The Last Battle) and it’ll be interesting to see if they make all of the rest of them into movies.
I’ve also seen the trailer quite a bit, so I didn’t really expect to have much of a reaction to the ten-minute preview that they were going to show us. In fact, when I saw it from the projection booth, I didn’t have much of a reaction except, “That was pretty damn awesome!”
But once I got into the theatre, the lights went down and the sound went up (WAY up), HOLY SHIT! This is going to be the most awesomest movie in the history of awesomeness! It’s going to be the Lord Of The Rings of this half of the decade.
And then Aslan took the screen. And when I say “took the screen,” that’s exactly what I mean. When he’s on screen, no one else is there with him. My breath was literally taken away. They managed to put all of the God-like regalness into a CGI lion that the characters in the book must have felt when they first saw him. Hell, I wanted to bow down to him. Then it happened again when he roared from on top of the mountain. I haven’t had an emotional response to a trailer since, well, LOTR.
Then Howard Berger (the B from KNB EFX, who did all of the prosthetics and make-up effects for the film) came out and talked to us about how they did a lot of the effects. He said that a lot of the effects shots weren’t done yet (they look pretty awesome to me), but that they were getting close. (I should hope so. They only have a couple more months on it.)
He also told a couple of funny stories. Of course, he did. They always do.
One of them is the same story we always hear about movies like this: the different “creatures” always split up amongst themselves for lunch. So, all the Ogres would eat together, the Hags would sit together and so on. But the good guys would all eat together no matter what creature they were. The Dwarves would kind of do whatever they wanted, much like the Dwarves in the books. It’s a real psychological study when you start getting a lot of creatures together on a set.
The other story was about James McAvoy (“Band Of Brothers”), who plays Mr. Tumnus, the eventually friendly Faun. They originally wanted Ewan McGregor to play the part, but things didn’t work out. Then they called on James, who really wasn’t available. He was doing a tv show in Australia that he couldn’t get out of. He wanted to do the movie really badly, though.
So he got on a plane one Friday after the show was finished and flew to LA so he could do make-up and screen tests. As soon as he walked in the door of KNB’s studios and saw the Aslan puppet, he walked to it, got down on one knee and said, “My Lord!”
At that point they knew that they had the right guy.
This is going to be fucking amazing. They’ve obviously added a LOT to the story (the book didn’t have much about WWII at all, but there’s a big bombing scene in the film), but it’s a short damn book that mainly involves kids telling their little sister that they don’t believe her. It’s hard to make that into a two-hour movie without a little embellishment. I’m for it. And I’m already in line.
Werner Harzog is a freak. That’s not an opinion. It’s a well-known fact. He’s done some really freakish things in the name of filmmaking. Just look at Fitzcarraldo. Or, better yet, look at Burden of Dreams. That’ll give you the full scope of his insanity.
This is his second film this year and, even though I haven’t seen Grizzly Man, I know that Wild Blue Yonder is a much stranger film.
In this film he has taken clips of real footage. Some of it is from inside the Space Shuttle of astronauts going about their daily lives. Other bits are from a deep-sea diving expedition. And then there’s footage from telescopes of other planets and stars and such. He’s also interspersed bits of interviews with physicists who are explaining their theories on space travel and the space-time continuum.
What’s so weird about this is that it’s not a documentary. He’s taken all of this footage and strung it together within a story that’s being told by Brad Douriff…who says that he’s an alien. He (and others) has apparently been here for years. He and his people were running from their home planet that was on its way to being a frozen wasteland. Some of them found Earth. Some of them, as far as Brad knows, disappeared. All he knows is that, for the most part, aliens suck.
I love how Herzog is using actual footage to tell a completely different story from what is being told in the footage itself. It’s a great way to play with what a documentary really is. He also seems to be showing us that a filmmaker can tell us anything and make us believe it; even if they have real footage. Of course, it helps that he has Brad Douriff doing the telling. When Brad Douriff tells you that he’s an alien, you believe it. It’s kind of like having Crispin Glover come up to you to say, “Hey, man! I just killed 15 people and buried them in your back yard, ok?! Great!” You had better fucking believe him.
So that means that I liked this movie a lot…to a point. But no matter how much I like a story or a way of telling it, ten minutes of astronauts reading is FAR too much. Watching this movie was a bit like watching the ink dry in a really interesting book…but you can’t turn the page.
A lot of people hated this movie. I, obviously, didn’t, but I did think it was WAY too slow. Phillip Glass’ music was great, though. One guy said that it was doing an hour and a half of yoga without the exercise. If you’re a Herzog fan, you have to see it. You know you do. Others beware. It may just not be your cup of meat.
For the second German program of the day they chose a short that I had actually seen before. It’s a parody of German industrial films of the past. Now, all industrial safety films are a little on the harsh side. They have to be in order to get the point across. But the Germans always took it about fifteen steps further. They showed all kinds of blood and gore in their films.
Klaus has just gotten his certification to drive a forklift. It’s his first real day on the job and he’s trying to do everything right. Unfortunately, things don’t go according to plan. In fact, things go horribly bloody wrong.
If there’s any way for you to see this film, see it. I was NOT upset to see it again.
Sadly, I didn’t get to see all of this movie. It’s the only one that I had to leave in the middle of. I missed the middle 25 minutes or so. BUT what I saw was really funny in a cheesy 80s teen comedy way.
In Haiti a family burns a zombie to a crispy critter. They put his ashes in a sacred pot. Unfortunately for the students of Fredrich Nietzsche High, the urn is stolen and taken to Germany.
Fast forward three months to our three heroes: Philip (Tino Mewes), Wurst (Manuel Cortez) and Konrad (Thomas Schmieder). Philip is in love with Susi (Julia Fischer). Unfortunately, she’s not only dating a big guy, but she’s one of the most popular girls in the school. She’s also a giant bitch.
On the other hand, he’s got his childhood friend Rebecca (the amazingly beautiful Collien Fernandes). They’ve grown apart a little bit in the past year because she’s gone goth and he’s gone geek. She and her friends, actually, are performing a little ritual at the graveyard. Philip gets the idea to go check it out because he knows that they can make a love potion that will make Susi fall madly in love with him
Things, of course, don’t go as planned and the ashes of the dead zombie get thrown onto the boys. Then the boys die in a car wreck. Then the boys become undead.
Comic hijinks ensue as Rebecca tries to help them live again with the help of a little voodoo magic.
After the shock of realizing that Germans could be funny, I started to really like this movie. It’s no Shaun Of The Dead (and not nearly as gross), but it’s still really funny. The guide for the festival says that “If John Hughes made raunchier, Porky’s-style teen comedies in his 80s heyday and had a distinctly Germanic sense of comedy…” And I can totally see that. This is an 80s teen comedy with a 00s punk soundtrack.
Don’t let the title fool you. It’s a terrible title, but it’s a really cool movie that I can’t wait to see all of.
Watch for Max von Sydow in a small role (or maybe a picture in a magazine…I don’t actually remember seeing him). Also, I swear to Hitchcock that one of the orderlies at the end looks exactly like Tobey Maguire. Does he know German?
Have you ever taken your action figures (you know you still have some) and made them act out your favorite song? Well Kirk Christiansen has. And now he’s inflicting it on all of us.
Kirk has taken his Star Wars figures and made a music video for The Geto Boys’ “Mindtrix.”
It’s as good as it sounds like it is. It’s funny for a little while, but I think five minutes is a bit much to put a general audience through. But it is pretty funny to see Luke Skywalker talk about his “bitches.”
Have you ever been on a subway all alone and though, “I could be killed at any moment and no one would know”?
Yeah. Neither have I. But the maker’s of Creep are hoping that you have that fear somewhere in you.
Kate (Franka Potente) is a woman who should have had that fear. She is on her way from her own party so that she can go meet George Clooney. (Yeah, this whole movie hinges on a woman’s need to star fuck.) But, instead of meeting her idea of the perfect man, she falls asleep in the train station.
By the time she wakes up, the station is closed and the last train has already taken off. Shit. No Clooney dick for Kate. She runs around the station in her impossibly yellow dress looking for a way out. Instead, she finds what seems to be an abandoned train pulling into the station. She gets on and is nearly raped by one of her “friends” who happens to have found the same train.
Lucky for her, someone is watching over her. He grabs her attacker and pulls him under the train.
Um….what?
I guess it wasn’t so lucky for her after all.
For the next hour, Kate is running for her life away from a creature that dwells in the caverns of London’s Underground. She befriends the occasional homeless kid who tries to help her get the fuck out. She also spends a lot of time NOT killing the titular creature. She has plenty of opportunities, but she passes them up every time.
Dumbass.
Of all of the disturbances that this movie tries to pass off on us, it basically boils down to the Yellow Bastard running around the London Underground chasing after a woman who stole his color. There were lots of jump cuts and one intensely disturbing scene involving one of the homeless kids, a giant ugly knife and the poor girl’s privates. Trust me, it wouldn’t have been pretty if it had been shown. (This festival seemed to have a LOT of “doctors” performing some rather unorthodox surgery or tests on their “patients.” Keep reading.)
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie wasn’t nearly as scary. In fact, it was mostly laughable. Kate was WAY too weak to be very interesting. All she did was scream, run away and drop weapons for the Creep to use. Franka did a good job with what she was given, but she wasn’t given much.
A lot has been made about her yellow dress apparently. I’ve made reference to it more for the sake of a joke than anything. I didn’t really think it was all that striking. Hell, it matched her weirdly yellow hair. It just looked like a retro-60s dress that any “fashionable” woman would have worn to a party. I was, however, surprised that, as often as said dress got wet, her boobs never popped out. There was a bloody great hole in the front of the dress that was well over breast size.
Oh well. I guess tape does wonders these days.
So, not a very good one from our British friends. Better luck next time.
Sin City is one of those movies that really brings back the joy of making movies. Everyone involved looks like they’re having the time of their lives and many of them are doing the best acting they’ve done in years. (Mickey, I’m talking to you.)
This is the extended cut of Robert Rodriguez’ best movie since From Dusk Till Dawn. The festival set aside three hours for the film, and DAMN were we all excited. Imagine our disappointment when it was only two hours and eleven minutes.
NO MATTER! The new scenes were cool and unobtrusive. The best of them was the scene between Marv (Rourke) and his mom. The only other one that I can remember is a scene where Hartigan (Bruce Willis) calls up Lucille (Carla Gugino) to tell her to come to the station. She’s in bed with her girlfriend…who is played by one of the set designers. Or somebody like that. Robert basically told her to get naked and get in the bed. AND SHE DID! It’s good to be da king.
The only problem I have with this cut is that it’s all re-edited so that each story is a stand alone instead of being intercut.
Other than that, the movie is still amazing. And the guys from Troublemaker say that the special features are even better than the new cut and make it almost worth double-dipping.
THE MAKING OF A SCANNER DARKLY
We’re all excited about this one. We got to see a couple of scenes, a new trailer and a demo of the rotoscoping program. I can’t wait to see it and I hope that people embrace the animation like they nearly did with Waking Life.
And, is Winona Ryder naked in the new trailer?! Can’t be!
One thing that I STILL don’t like: Woody’s “infamous Beatles’ song” line. That’s just dumb. Nobody talks like that.
I don’t remember too much about this short except that it was LOOOONNNNNGGGGG. It had something to do with a kid who was going to die from an incurable disease and he ended up being an orphan and…maybe psychic? I don’t know. It was supposedly bade 1941 and 1943. I don’t know about that. There’s no indication of the movie being made then on IMDb, but it certainly LOOKED that old.
I fell asleep more than once in its 12 minute run time. I just couldn’t get into it at all.
I did NOT come to Fantastic Fest for complexity! I came for blood, guts and gore! Thrills! Chills! Kills! Boobs being splattered on walls! Not in depth psychological drama!
This was actually the best movie that I saw at the festival. The girl who introduced it is Canadian and she hates Canadian films. This one, however, completely blew her away. I think it blew all of us away.
Dr. Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) is dying. She has an inoperable brain tumor that has just started growing again. In order to tell her husband, David (Gordon Currie), she wants to go to their cabin out in the woods, have a nice little quiet weekend and work things out with him in private. David has decided to invite her sister, Melody (Iris Graham), because she has been helping him out with his book and doing a lot of the housework for them. He sees it as a time for all three of them to get some rest.
But Harlan Pyne (Aidan Devine) has other plans for the happy little family. He is one of Samantha’s criminally insane patients. And he knows things about her. Things that she would rather no one else knew.
This is the kind of film that can really get under your skin if you let it. It’s a complex psychological thriller that never lets up. The intensity of the story and the performances is sometimes too much and the audience is visibly squirming. Director Paul Fox, who has mainly done Canadian television (including “Degrassi: The Next Generation”), has made a film that I will be thinking about for a long time. Although the end isn’t as “out of nowhere” as some would have you believe (I figured it out pretty early on), the journey is so good that you forget about any predictability.
There isn’t an American release date on IMDb, but I’m sure it will get released in some way. It’s playing at the New York City Horror Film Festival soon. That will help it get a few more fans, so maybe it will build its way up to a full-on release. I can’t wait. This could be the next Silence Of The Lambs.
POPEE THE MAGIC PERFORMER: GREAT MAGIC
What a strange little short. It’s all very amateurish looking CGI, but it’s also very Looney Tunes-ish. (So that made it good, actually.)
Popee is trying to learn magic. He and his sidekick, a wolf with a human mask, find Papi, a crazed magician who seems to only want to kill his students. And he does so in what would be a series of very bloody ways if there was any blood to be seen in the animation.
The Japanese are weird. They’re very interesting, though.
This was called “one of the scariest films ever made” by the festival program. Released in 2001 in Japan, it pre-dates a lot of the more popular J-Horror that is being re-made these days. Of course, this one is being re-made with the least popular future stars of America and directed by a nearly completely untried director.
Good luck, kids.
Pulse is the story of four friends who work together and…um…I’m not really sure where they work. It has something to do with computers and flowers. There’s no real explanation as to why they’re writing programs next to a greenhouse, but we’ll just go with it. When one of them kills mysteriously kills himself, the other three are left to figure out why. And it doesn’t help that he keeps popping up on web-cam messages all over the place.
They’re not the only ones who are plagued by these strange, creepy messages. Another kid is trying to get on the internet, but his computer seems to be possessed. He knows nothing about computers, so the fact that a website keeps popping up with these creepy images of lonely people with bags on their heads is a complete mystery to him. (By the way, when I say that he knows nothing about computers, I mean this kid is one of the most computer ignorant people I’ve ever seen in a movie made after 1955. I think one of his lines is, “What does ‘print screen’ mean?” Wow.) He asks a beautiful young student to help him and together they get wrapped in the mystery that also involves rooms sealed by red tape and people disappearing into rotted looking spots on walls and floors.
Like Creep, there’s one creepy scene in this movie that involves a woman running very slowly towards one of our heroes. Unfortunately, the rest of it is pretty much just your typical, “I’m oblivious to the danger behind me and so are you because I’m hiding it from the camera” school of Japanese horror. And not even all of that pays off.
Now, I know that the Japanese are frightened by different things than we are. They’re frightened by thoughts more than deeds. Jump scares aren’t really their thing. They tend to slowly build towards the big scare at the end. A movie like Ringu is a perfect example. Their version is slow and deliberate. It has its creepy points, but it doles them out slowly and we get the big pay off at the end.
The re-make kind of kept to that formula, but it’s much faster to get to the creepiness. For American audiences, it’s a much better movie. (Hell, I think it’s a better movie, too, and I like Japanese horror.)
Pulse is all about death and loneliness. Apparently, death is loneliness. When people die, they become incredibly lonely. They want more people to join them, but it doesn’t help. No they just want the living to feel the way they do, so people are dying of loneliness.
I could have gotten to that point in about an hour. Instead, Pulse drags it out for ten hours. (Wait. It was only two?! No way!) And the big pay-off is an empty city. Wow. Scary.
Actually, no. Just confusing.
And why are the ghosts in the computers? Is writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa trying to say that technology is killing us? Who knows? A lot of the message of the film was pretty muddled by the end and I didn’t care enough to really think too much about it.
I’ll look elsewhere for my idea of “the scariest movie ever made.” This certainly wasn’t it, though.
Watch for Takashi Miike stalwart Sho Aikawa in a very small role.
In Thai, P means “ghost.” In English, though, it means, “incomplete title.” And that’s about what this movie amounted to.
Dau (Suangporn Jaturaphut) is a country girl whose grandmother is a witch. She knows almost all of the magic that her grandmother knows, but she doesn’t yet know exactly how to control it. Because of her family, all of the other kids have always stayed away from her. As far as they know, she could turn them into newts!
Eventually, she has to leave home to buy medicine for her ailing grandmother. She goes into the big city (in this case, Bangkok) to find work. Her grandmother gives her some rules to follow for her magic. (I think one of them is “Never eat after midnight” or something like that.)
Dau gets a job as a go-go dancer, makes some enemies with her magic and slowly (very slowly) learns how to dance.
Soon enough, she’s breaking all of the rules that her grandmother told her and an evil spirit takes over her body every night, forcing her to kill.
Enter a magical Witch Doctor who may be able to help Dau. He…well, he doesn’t do much at all except promise a big finale that never really comes.
P is the first Thai film made by a Westerner (British director Paul Spurrier). He moved to Thailand, lived there for five years, learned the ins and outs of the culture and language and wrote this film as his homage to the culture that he had grown to love. All of the magic is based in folklore and cultural beliefs of Thailand and the seedy under-belly is, of course, as realistic as possible without making a porn film. He really wanted to catch the subtleties of both sides of the culture. I guess he did, but it would have been awesome if he had made a movie that was a little more interesting with that knowledge and love.
Jaturaphut is very good as the innocent naïf who becomes a worldly dancer/hooker and, eventually, a possessed little girl. This is pretty much The Thai Exorcist. There’s even a “Take me! Leave her!” scene. Unfortunately, it never really lives up to the promise that it showed early on. It always looks as if there’s going to be a big, explosive confrontation, but it never comes. And then we’re left wishing that Bangkok had just exploded right when she walked into town so that we could have had the last hour and a half back.
All in all, it wasn’t a terrible movie. It was even kind of fun occasionally! There were some really cool deaths complete with some weird-ass inner body effects. Possessed kids are always creepy. It’s even better when they’re prostitutes! And any movie that features so many hot Asian dancers goes up a grade with me.
But it just didn’t add up to much in the end. I really wish it had, though. Even so, it was a damn sight better than Pulse.
Yeah, it wasn’t part of the festival, but there are perks to working a festival in one venue with multiple theatres.
A few years ago, I had the idea to make a zombie movie for kids, but I never quite got a handle on what the story would be. Zombies are always overly gross and definitely an adult form of horror. But I think kids would love a good zombie flick.
Well, Tim Burton beat me to it. Dammit. But I’m sure he’s done a much better job than I would have done.
I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t see this earlier, but it doesn’t help that I just don’t have time to go to movies all the time. Damn work and money and stuff. But I finally got to it and even got to see a trailer for the new Harry Potter flick. Looks good and really dark. I guess that’s why they rated it PG-13. Good for them.
But anyway, back to the movie.
This is the second Burton movie in about six months, so we Burton fans are movie rich this year! Of course, I think that means that we won’t see another one from him for about five years. We’ll see.
In his first feature-length stop-motion film that he’s actually directed, he tells the story of Victor van Dort (Johnny Depp), a young man who is betrothed to a beautiful girl, Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson). (Hey! Victor/Victoria!) Unfortunately, he’s a clumsy oaf who can’t remember his lines at the rehearsal. So he goes out to the dark forest to practice, puts the ring on what he thinks is a branch, says his vows perfectly and ends up married to a beautiful corpse (Helena Bonham Carter) who was jilted on her own wedding day.
Oops.
The rest of the story involves the two lost souls trying to figure out how to either stay married or get Victor married off to Victoria. And, of course, there’s a bad guy, Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant), who seems to be a wedding guest, but he has his own motives.
So, what we’re looking at here is a weird cross between Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice with a small helping of A Nightmare Before Christmas to tie it all together. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t quite as good as any of those. Which, of course, is not to say that it’s bad. It’s just not always as involving as we all would hope for it to be. There’s a certain dryness to it that shouldn’t be there.
And, as much as I love Danny Elfman (who has only ONE singing part—he plays Bonejangles, who sings the story of the Corpse Bride in the cleverly titled “Remains Of The Day”), his songs this time out aren’t as good as they usually are. The first song, “According To Plan,” is just kind of clumsy. He’s done better.
It’s still a lot of fun, though. There are some great characters (I especially liked the bride’s Peter Lorre-ish pet maggot that keeps popping her eye out of her head and the body-less head waiter) and a lot of great gross-out jokes. It’s just not as good as the movie that it will forever be compared to. If you’re a fan of the form or of Tim Burton (or of co-director Mike Johnson, who is responsible for that awesome “Devil Went Down To Georgia” video for Les Claypool), then you have to see this movie. If you’ve got kids who have been hankerin’ for a zombie flick, you have to see it.
And, really, the animation is pretty amazing. Although, at times it looks a lot like the old Rankin Bass Rudolph movie. Not necessarily a bad thing. Just interesting.
This was Eli Roth’s Student Academy Award winning short. I think it’s from 1994, but I’m not completely sure since it’s nowhere to be seen on IMDb and it was a last minute addition to the festival. We were supposed to see a Rotten Fruits short before Hostel, but Eli decided that he wanted to show this instead. Cool!
It’s the story of a young man who just wants a shake. But what he gets is the chance to whoop Ronald McDonald’s ass to save the Burger King’s daughter (a cow named Dairy Queen, of course).
It’s a little long, but it’s pretty damn funny and, if you’re a fan of Eli’s at all, worth searching for. I’m not even sure where you could find such a thing. But in a world with the internet, I’m sure it can’t be too hard to find.
Three years ago, Eli Roth brought his first movie, Cabin Fever, to the first From Dusk Till Dawn horror movie marathon that the Alamo put on. It was one of the first Rolling Roadshows and helped to set the bar for what was to come.
Now he brings us his latest opus, Hostel. Where Cabin Fever recast the slasher flick into a fun, sick flesh-eating disease gore-a-thon, Hostel has taken a completely different route.
The movie opens with a couple of friends, Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) backpacking across Europe. Along the way they’ve picked up Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), and Icelandic man who seems to have no filter on what he says or does.
Basically, we’re looking at three guys looking for pussy in Europe. Nothing wrong with that. And the first half hour or so of the movie has plenty of naked chicks for your viewing pleasure. And there’s plenty of funny lines, too. “Faggoty-ass elf” is a new addition to my tough-guy vocabulary.
Soon enough, they find out about a hostel in Slovakia where the women “hear your accent and fuck you.” They love foreigners, especially Americans. And what draws guys to a hostel halfway across a continent like the promise of free and flowing pussy?
The guys have no idea what awaits them. There’s hell underneath this seemingly perfect hostel. (Of course, that’s after the pretty constant fucking.) The rest of the movie is filled with some of the most disturbing gore and violence since maybe Irreversible. (This one actually deserves a comparison.)
Eli paid homage to slasher flicks of his childhood with Cabin Fever. Now it’s time to do the same for European gore films. And he does it with abandon. Hell, I’m writing this a few days after seeing the movie and I can’t stop thinking about some of the scenes.
And THAT’S the sign of a good horror movie. All of Eli’s detractors who hated Cabin Fever can suck my balls. This is the movie that’s going to put him on the map. It’s awesome. The characters are a little bit rote, but you do start to feel for them after a while. And their dissension into hell is pretty painful to watch.
If you see this movie, make sure to have a strong stomach. It’s NOT for the weak. The cut we saw was not quite finished (the music was a temp track and some of the digital effects weren’t done), but it looked pretty finished to me. I don’t know that I could take too much more. I’m sure that there will be cuts made to appease the MPAA. But fuck ‘em. The DVD will be uncut and then we can “enjoy” this one over and over again…if we can take it.
This Finnish short is actually the longest short of the festival. At 23 minutes, it’s WAY over the long side of “short.” And, in fact, I started to get bored with it about 10 minutes in. Fortunately, it made up for it by the end.
Domoi is the story of a warrior in the middle ages who just wants to get home after a hard battle. He hits a storm on the way and hides out in an abandoned castle not knowing that there is a secret buried there that involves ghosts and grieving husbands.
Director Toni Pykalaniem had some pretty amazing production values on this one. It looks medieval from start to finish. We’re not talking some people who decided to dress up for the Renaissance Fest. No, these folks look like they’ve been living there for years.
But that was where my intrigue fled…until the ghost of a dead mother popped up from a story that was told at the beginning of the film. She died in child birth and her loving husband put her in a tomb to keep her memory alive. But the tomb did not hold everything that it should have.
This story definitely could have been told in about 10 minutes, but Toni dragged it out for 23. Perhaps it was to give us a sense of place and time, but I could have gotten that in about two minutes.
Either way, it’s actually a beautiful short that deserves to be seen. I just needs a new editor.
Carrere (Gerald Laroche) is thrown in prison for embezzlement. His cellmates are a disparate band of criminals who seemingly have nothing in common with him or each other except a desire to leave. Lassalle (Philippe Laudenbach) is the old man of the bunch and seems to know more than he lets on. Marcus (Clovis Cornillac) is a tough transsexual whose hatred for every one else is bottled up inside of him. And Paquerette (Dimitri Rataud) is a slightly retarded little DJ Qualls looking elf who eats everything. He’s the only thing that Marcus really cares about.
The four men band together when they find the journal of a former inmate who dabbled in black magic. Ok, he didn’t just dabble. He pretty nearly perfected it. But he didn’t realize that, when you ask for something from the black arts, you often get exactly what you asked for. Just not the way you wanted it.
A few people complained about this movie, but I actually really liked it. It was, as a fellow viewer put it, like an extended (and gory) “Twilight Zone” episode. But it was a pretty damn good one, too. I thought that I would be bored by four guys in a cell, but I really liked the characters and wanted at least Carrere to escape.
Malefique has already been slated by Paramount for a remake in 2007. I’m sure they’ll suck all of the darkness out of the film and it’s ending, which is a shame. The French seem to be on a roll with horror movies lately. With Haute Tension, Brotherhood Of The Wolf and The Nest (or Wasp’s Nest) I think we should be seeing even more from France that’ll be pretty kick-ass.
So that was my Fantastic Fest. Hopefully we’ll get to see another one next year. As much fun as everybody had with this one, I’m sure that it will be an annual thing for years to come.
Maybe I’ll even get to get another 50 hours of overtime next year!
