Fantastic Fest 2007–Devil’s Chair/The Beautiful Beast/The Orphanage/Death Note/Death Note: The Last Name
“You want me to play?”
Didn’t I say that I was done with births? I guess I was wrong.
RAYMOND (2007)
Directed by: Jules Janaud/Fabrice Le Nezet/François Roisin
Written by: Jules Janaud/Fabrice Le Nezet/François Roisin
A pretty short short about a guy who really wants to go deep-sea-diving. A group of scientists have to find out if he has enough stamina for it, though. They put him through a LOT of tests, sometimes along with other people.
Very funny stuff and pretty hard to tell that it’s mostly CGI. The tests they put him through would be enough to kill a crash test dummy. I especially love the foozeball bit.
DEVIL’S CHAIR
Directed by: Adam Mason
Written by: Adam Mason/Simon Boyes
Nick (Jason Statham lookalike Andrew Howard) is accused of killing his girlfriend after she winds up dead at an abandoned asylum. He told everyone that it was a horrible looking chair in one of the rooms. She sat in it (while he was giving her a pretty damn good time) and it suddenly came to life, clamping her in and shooting spikes into her arms, legs and neck. She died not long after that.
Of course, no one believed him, so off he goes to another asylum.
Fast forward a couple of years. He is now being let out because he’s never shown any violent tendencies since the day of the fateful event. But a psychologist (David Gant) wants to write a book about the events. He and some of his students take a trip with Nick back to the asylum. When they find the chair, they also find out a little bit about its secret.
Blood is lost and now Nick may be their only hope for survival.
Pretty good movie that kind of plays with and makes fun of a lot of conventions of this sort of movie. The good doctor goes WAY over the top at some point becoming a very stereotypical “DON’T DO IT, NICK! YOU DON’T KNOW THE POWER OF THAT CHAIR!!” type character. Nick even makes fun of the audience calling us all “torture porn loving fuck-faces,” or something along those lines.
It may not have been great, but it was definitely entertaining and kept me guessing for a little while. And it had some pretty awesome creature effects.
Lots and lots of blood, too. So, if you’re not into that, stay the fuck away. Not as bad as Inside…but close.
Directed by: Nikolas List
Written by: Nikolas List
A short film from Belgium (directed by Nikolas List) about a doll-maker who meets a girl who was born without a spine. Love–and a big surprise–ensues.
This goes in a completely different direction than you originally think that it will. The doll-maker seems so sweet!
Liked it a lot. Pretty creepy stuff. It has just about everything that really creeps people out: doll eyes, carnies, circular saws…no clowns, though. Oh well.
Directed by: Karim Hussain
Written by: Karim Hussain
Based on book by: Marie-Claire Blais
I’m still not really sure how I feel about this movie. It’s about a really fucked up family that seems to get off on being awful to each other.
The mother (Carole Laura) is a rich and vain bitch whose only really good attribute is her hotness. (Towards the middle even that gets screwed up when she starts to look like an Alan Parsons album cover.) And she seems to have a pretty unnatural relationship with her son (Marc-Andre Grondin). He is a good-looking social outcast. He acts like a six year old. He has a pretty pure heart, but only loves his family and his horse. The daughter (Caroline Dhavernas from “Wonderfalls”) really only wants attention from her mother. Unfortunately, she’s constantly being told, “You really look ugly when you smile like that.” (She’s not, by the way. I’ve always thought Caroline was pretty cute.)
Things eventually come to a head and the family explodes.
Not even thinking about all of the missed opportunities for boob shots (all we get is a lot of man ass) and the crazy-ass birth scene, this movie was just kind of…meh. I really wanted to like it a lot. But it was so slowly paced and these people were so horrible to each other that it was very hard to like.
There’s style to spare here and a lot of really interesting ideas. And it’s even worth seeing for those reasons. But don’t expect anything earth shattering.
And, despite the picture of the dude with a horse’s head all over the program and poster, don’t expect this movie to be THAT weird. Really, it’s only the characters that are weird. The horse-head dude is a vision that Caroline sees occasionally. No Lynch-ian fantasies going on here.
Directed by: Juan Antonio Bayona
Written by: Sergio G. Sánchez
Today’s secret screening was of a movie that I had never heard of. Everybody was talking about it before hand saying that this HAD to be the movie we were seeing. All I could say was, “Ok. Whatever. What the fuck is it?”
This is (as far as I know) the first movie that Guillermo Del Toro has “presented.” With that stamp of approval on a Spanish ghost story, how could I go wrong?
Well, this was certainly not the best movie I saw at the Festival.
It’s about a family who move into the orphanage where the mother grew up. The little boy, Simon (Roger Princep), starts seeing ghosts, saying that they’re his new friends.
When he goes missing, things get very strange and frightening.
Like Guillermo’s ghost stories, this isn’t just a horror movie. Yes, there are ghostly aspects, but really it’s a movie about a mother’s love for her son. Laura will go to pretty amazing lengths to find Simon. Even when her husband gives up, she keeps going. She hires a medium (in the creepiest scene in the movie), gives up on the cops and…well, you’ll see.
Unfortunately, I was smarter than every single character in the film. This isn’t always a problem in horror movies. I mean, if every character in a horror movie knew that you should run outside instead of up the stairs, there would be no horror movies.
But, in this case, the characters are supposed to be pretty smart people.
Example: Simon shows his mom a game that he plays with the ghosts. It involves them taking your “treasure” away from you. Then you have to go find it with treasure hunt type clues. When he goes missing and she suspects a ghost of kidnapping him, my first thought was, “Play the game.”
It takes her nearly a year to come to this conclusion. By that time, I knew exactly how the movie was going to end. There were no more surprises.
Yes, the ghosts were kind of creepy. Yes, the movie was a pretty effective ghost story. Yes, it conveyed the aspect of a mother’s love very well.
No, I didn’t really care about any of the characters because they were all just a bit too stupid.
I was very impressed with the writer and director (Sergio G. Sanchez and Juan Antonio Bayona). For a first film, they really seemed to have a pretty good grasp on the genre and love the hell out of it.
Too bad their characters weren’t smarter. It could have been a lot more interesting if they had been.
(To be fair, this script is about 10 years old. Sergio kept seeing movies come out that were pretty close to it and had to re-write it many times.)
THE FAERIES OF BLACKHEATH WOODS (2006)
Directed by: Ciaran Foy
Written by: Ciaran Foy
Are faeries always good? Well, not exactly. A little girl finds out the true nature of faeries in this short.
I pretty much called the ending about half way through, but it was still a fun short.
DEATH NOTE/DEATH NOTE: THE LAST NAME (2006)
Directed by: Shusuke Kaneko
Written by: Tetsuya Oishi
Based on manga by: Tsugumi Ohba/Takeshi Obata
I’m just going to treat this like it’s one four and a half hour movie. The second one picks up right where the first one leaves off.
When I heard that this movie was the biggest hit Japan had seen in years, I suddenly became very wary of it. After all, Pulse was huge over there…and it sucked. A lot. The Grudge was also pretty huge. And it sucked. A lot.
Luckily, they get things right every once in a while.
Light (Tatsuya Fujiwara from Battle Royale) is just a normal college student trying to become a lawyer. One night, he starts to realize just how much the legal system DOESN’T do. They let far too many criminals slip through their fingers.
Enter the Death Note. Light soon finds out that if you write a name in the book, that person dies within a minute. Finally, he has a way to punish the wicked.
He meets the previous owner of the book, a god of death named Ryuck. Only he can see him because he touched the book.
There are a lot of rules that go with the book (and sometimes the movies make the rules up as they go along), but basically it all boils down to killing people without actually being there.
Soon, so many people are dying that the cops get involved. Light’s dad is put on the case and he goes to a mysterious character named L for help. (And, no, L is not Light. There’s no mystery there.)
These were definitely my favorite movies of the day. They weren’t horror at all. More like a really cool fantasy (sort of) cat and mouse game where the cat and mouse aren’t always on opposite sides.
I can totally see why these movies took Japan by storm. They’re fun, very intelligent and have all kinds of twists and turns that don’t betray the rest of the movie. (No Haute Tension here.) They also are a pretty good anti-death penalty statement.
I really loved these movies. I hear that they’re already available on DVD over here. At some point (if I ever get my hands on a dollar again), I might have to pick them up.
They’re planning more sequels, but these are pretty self-contained. There’s definitely an ending. There’s a little bit of a hook that leaves it open (and gods of death exist all over, so there could be no end to the books), but they don’t need to do a sequel.
I guess, though, if director Shusuke Kaneko is involved, I’m all for it.
Now I kind of want to read the manga.
