Fantastic Fest 2007–The Rug Cop/The Backwoods/Mirageman/Weirdsville/Wrong Turn 2
“I don’t care if your mom wants you to plow the drive. This is the will of Lucifer!”
Got lots of movies in today. Hopefully I can fit them all in here.
The Rug Cop was one of those movies that I was semi-interested in, but I was really into the short. So I’ll start there.
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK (2007)
Directed by: Don Hertzfeldt
Written by: Don Hertzfeldt
Don Hertzfeldt is a genius. I love that guy. Everything he does is golden. (Although, I wasn’t so into his last one, The Meaning Of Life…which apparently was his magnum opus or something. Oh well.)
This time out, he tells the story of a young man with a brain tumor. The guy goes about his normal life and does things his own way. Then he starts to question life. Then he comes close to dying.
And, there you go. That’s the plot. But Don turns it into a crazy quilt of ruminations on life and the thought that you should always choose fruit from the back of the stand because the front of the stand is at crotch level with people.
And awesomeness ensues. I loved all 17 minutes of it. Run out and see it…I don’t care how. And, as usual, I don’t know how. Don travels a lot, so hopefully it’ll be in The Animation Show the next time it hits your hometown.
Directed by: Minoru Kawasaki
Written by: Minoru Kawasaki/Takao Nakano
Zura Deka (Fuyuki Moto) is a cop with a difference. In fact, all of the cops on his team have a difference. One is devilishly handsome and makes female criminals fall to their knees. One has a huge dick that he wields like a lightsaber. One makes great tea.
Zura, though, has a toupee. It’s a killer toupee, actually. He throws it at people and knocks guns out of their hands.
It’s a pretty thin plot, but there it is. It’s a Japanese action comedy by Minoru Kawasaki (The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala…which are exactly what they sound like), so you get what you pay for. In my case, I got a fairly funny 70s cop movie spoof with strange fantastical elements thrown in for good measure. Don’t expect anything more and you won’t get anything less.
Directed by: Koldo Serra
Written by: Koldo Serra/Jon Sagalá
The Spanish woods can be a scary place, apparently. About as scary as, say, West Virginia. (More on that later.) They can be especially scary if you’re an Englishman who found a deformed little girl chained up in a basement.
And that’s exactly what happens to Paul (Gary Oldman) and Norman (Paddy Considine). The two men and their wives (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon and (sigh) Virginie Ledoyen) are vacationing in Spain, but they don’t count on strange, incestuous families who don’t want them there. When they find the girl and try to hide her from the family, things get really Straw Dogs.
Actually, this movie reminded me a LOT of the Peckinpah movie. Norman is even kind of Dustin Hoffman-ish…although he’s a lot dumber than Hoffman’s character. And Oldman is just cool…as always. He’s kind of scary hunter dude, but in a really cool way. (Even if he apparently can’t speak a word of real Spanish. He only knew a few things that his Mexican housekeeper taught him…which isn’t the Spanish they needed. He learned all of his lines phonetically.)
Director/co-writer Koldo Serra knows how to build a suspenseful survivor movie. I liked it a lot. It just had a bit too much of the “been there, done that” feel to it. Even so, it was really cool. I’m actually becoming a big fan of Spanish directors lately. It helps that they’re all really funny in person.
Directed by: Ernesto Díaz Espinoza
Written by: Ernesto Díaz Espinoza
South America may have a pretty long history of martial arts, but they’ve never made a martial arts film…ever.
Until now. Star Marko Zaror (who was The Rock’s stunt double in The Rundown), director/writer Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and producer Derek Rundell (who is actually from Detroit) are out to change everything you think about South American martial arts films.
Of course, this isn’t actually their first movie. That would be Kiltro, which is also playing the festival. This is the movie they made after that kind of as a bit of fun.
And it’s actually a LOT of fun.
Maco (Zaror) has a horrible past. His parents were killed and his little brother raped by a gang a few years ago. His brother is basically catatonic in an asylum. And Maco just kind of goes through life without really seeming to feel anything. One day, though, he saves a woman from being raped. It makes him feel good for the first time in a long time.
The woman turns out to be Carol Valdivieso (Maria Elena Swett), a local newscaster. She turns this new “superhero” into a celebrity. Maco creates Mirageman and goes about his crimefighting ways…no matter what the locals say. (They think, for the most part, that he’s not really helping anything.)
The fun part of this movie is all of the little hardships that Maco goes through. He comes up with a costume, but the bad guys laugh at him. It takes him FAR too long to put the costume on. He has to defog the goggles. And that’s what makes this movie fucking awesome. I loved it.
Marko Zaror has the potential to be a huge star. He’s an amazing martial artist (especially considering the fact that he’s so freakin’ huge), has lots of charisma and the ladies will love him. I’m not sure if he’s a great actor because he didn’t really have to do a whole lot here. He has almost no dialogue and, if I remember right, there aren’t a whole lot of close-ups of him. But what he does, he’s very good with.
I can’t wait to see Kiltro.
One big warning…this movie starts off really funny (with the dramatic parts with the kid) and gets REALLY dark at the end. Like, TERRIBLY dark. Still really good, but darker than you think it will get.
Directed by: Geoffrey Uloth
Written by: Geoffrey Uloth
The short before the next film was barely a short. 24 minutes long. And usually I rail against shorts that are that fucking long, but this one was really funny.
A man’s wife stabs his hand with a fork. When she goes to stab him with a knife, she hits the fork…and immediately orgasms from the sound. This starts a chain reaction that ends with the entire town wanting constant orgasms.
Strangeness ensues. So does comedy. Very funny long short. I was worried at first, but it maintained with only a couple of small lulls here and there. Not enough to make it bad, though.
Directed by: Allan Moyle
Written by: Willem Wennekers
I have NO clue why this movie is in the Festival, really. It’s not horror. It’s not sci-fi. It’s not fantasy. It’s not Asian. But it’s really fucking funny.
Royce and Dexter (Wes Bentley and Scott Speedman) are losers. Not only are they losers, but they are junky losers. And they need money badly…if they don’t get money, they will get killed by the local Russian gangster. Luckily, they know that the millionaire down the street (Matt Frewer) has money in a safe…and they have the combo because of Matty (Taryn Manning), their hooker friend.
Insert gnomes, mice, little people who love medieval reenactments and Satanists and you have the funniest movie of the Festival. I can’t even explain everything in the movie without giving things away, so I won’t even try. All I’m saying is that I’ve never seen Wes or Scott be funny, and they succeed very well.
I loved this movie. I can’t wait to tell everybody to go see it.
GI JOE: BATTLE FOR THE SERPENT STONE (2007)
Directed by: Sean Olson
Written by: Sean Olson/Mike Miller/Sean Olson
based on characters created by: Larry Hama
I really know nothing about GI Joe. I never liked it and never followed it. So I didn’t get this at all. It was a decent short film and (I guess) had all of the elements of GI Joe…but it was just kind of lost on me. There was a character who showed up at the end that everybody cheered. No idea who he was. People would laugh at things that didn’t seem to be happening. No clue. This movie was NOT made for people who didn’t care about Joe as a kid.
But, as I said, it was a decent short. Worth checking out if you were into GI Joe. We can only hope that the live action feature that Hollywood is working on right now is as good.
Directed by: Joe Lynch
Written by: Turi Meyer/Al Septien
Based on characters created by: Alan B McElroy
If you all will remember, I really didn’t dig on Wrong Turn at all. It was a nearly decent movie about a bunch of West Virginia deformed hicks who liked to eat human flesh. I thought that House Of 1000 Corpses did it better. But Wrong Turn had Eliza Dushku…so it had that going for it.
Well, I figured that I would see the sequel at the Festival because I wouldn’t pay to see it. Might as well see it for “free.”
I’m kind of glad I did. Director Joe Lynch loves horror movies. And he loves, loves, loves gore. More than anything, he loves to bathe his actors in blood and entrails.
The premise for this movie is beyond lame. A bunch of kids are headed to West Virginia to be in a reality show based on nuclear holocaust. It’s called “Ultimate Survival” and it’s hosted by Colonel Dale Murphy (Henry Rollins, this movie’s R. Lee Ermy).
I won’t even bother introducing characters because I didn’t give a damn about any of them. They just get slaughtered in (sometimes) new and interesting ways. The girls are hot. The guys are stupid. The deformed hillbillies are creepy and violent. And that’s all that really matters.
The movie is actually better than the first one, but really only because of the death scenes. They are so over the top that they stick in your mind LONG after the characters have disappeared. Lynch said that he tried to make you care about them…but he really didn’t.
I did, however, care about Henry Rollins…only because he was Henry Rollins and he’s awesome. His is the best character.
The main girl (Erica Leerhsen) is pretty hot, too. So, that helps.
Lynch throws a few wrenches in our works. The people we expect to live don’t and vice versa. But there are really no surprises after the initial shock of the first death…which is so gory and violent that there’s almost nothing that he can do to shock us after it.
It’ll be interesting to see what Lynch does next. He seems to really care about horror films (to the point that he made the studio re-write the script to this one because it seemed like they hadn’t seen the first movie), so maybe he’ll do something really good next. We can only hope.
This is a straight to video release, and there will be no rated version. So, that’s good. Check it out if you’re a gore fan. If not, avoid at all cost.
