Fantastic Fest 2010 – Animated Shorts/X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes/We Are What We Are/I Spit On Your Grave

DRAWN AND QUARTERED: ANIMATED SHORTS

12 YEARS (2010)

Directed by: Daniel Nocke

A couple is breaking up at dinner. He’s moving on. She’s heartbroken because of 12 wasted years. And if you think 12 yeas is a long time for a human, imagine how long that is for a dog.

Pretty funny stuff and decent CGI animation. Nothing too groundbreaking, but the dogs look pretty realistic and the ending makes the whole thing.

THE ASTRONOMER’S SUN (2010)

Directed by: David Bunting

A sad short about an astronomer and his teddy bear. The astronomer is trying to replicate an experiment that turned his father into a comet. His teddy bear is just trying to help. The sense of fear and loss is great and the animation is very good. Definitely worth checking out.

ATOMIC HUBBUB (2009)

Directed by: Stephen Irwin

Atomic dread is hilarious! This one is very short and didn’t have a lot to do. Just some crazy drawings to some old atomic age warnings about nuclear bombs. Strangely, nudity abounds. Pretty funny.

CAGES (2009)

Directed by: Juan Jose Medina

Absolutely the creepiest short of the festival…and I haven’t even seen the live action shorts, but I’m pretty assured of my statement.

An old man carries his luggage on his back during a windstorm. The top box falls off the stack and out pops a child’s head with a spine and wings! ACK!!!

This was the most disturbing thing in the program and maybe the most disturbing thing of the festival so far. Very well made and pretty, but the creature was just crazy. See it.

FARD (2009)

Directed by: David Alapont/Luis Briceño

A man in a dystopian future gets a package with a flashlight. When he turns it on, it makes whatever its light shines on turn real. to the government, of course, that’s treason.

One of the best shorts in the program if only because of the concept of a flashlight showing the truth. Maybe it seems obvious, but it was well done.

GIANT (2010)

Directed by: Yann Benedi

A short one with no social agenda. Just a giant who catches balloons for a child. Then the kid’s parents get involved. Then the military. Then the military get uninvolved…very quickly and suddenly.

Funny and quick…just like I like ‘em.

PIXELS (2010)

Directed by: Patrick Jean

Atari is taking over! Pixels shoot out of a television and space invaders start shooting up New York, turning the whole city into a video game. (My favorite were the Tetris blocks falling on the building.) Pure awesomeness for a world that is slowly being re-taken over by old Atari games and 8-bit stuff like that.

RISE OF THE LIVING CORPSE (2010)

Directed by: Chris Walsh

The shortest short, apparently, in Fantastic Fest history. It was probably about 30 seconds long. It was a really cool looking zombie climbing out of his grave and his gravestone falling on him and killing him again. Not long enough to make much of an impression, but it looked really cool.

SEED (2009)

Directed by: Ben Richardson/Daniel Bird

This was another creepy one. A creepy bird head hatches with twigs growing out of its neck. On another mountain, a bird leg comes out of an apple looking very much the same as the head. They each build radio stations. Meanwhile, a sentient radio tries to pick up both stations at once, driving itself crazy.

It’s a very strange short, but I liked it. And the stop-motion was cool as hell. Not a clue what it was all about, but there it is.

TECLOPOLIS (2009)

Directed by: Javier Mrad

A beautiful beach is overtaken by a big city and technology. It’s all done with stop-motion and household objects. A strangely pretty film that kind of leaves a sad feeling with us as the buildings of computer keyboards go up and destroy the beach.

VOLTAGE (2008)

Directed by: Filippe Lyra/William Paiva

This was almost a Daft Punk video. A bunch of robots plug into an amp and each other making oonce-oonce-oonce music. Not bad, but I barely remember it. I remember it had some pretty good animation, though, and in the “thank you” section, they thanked Moog, Eno, Hancock and a bunch of other keyboard players. Cool

WISDOM TEETH (2010)

Directed by: Don Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfedlt always excites me. This time he brought a short that was being made for a different, longer project that got scrapped. It involves a guy who just had his wisdom teeth taken out and his friend who wants to pull out his stitches. “Ok, but just one!” That stitch is the longest stitch ever.

Oh, yeah. The whole thing is in some kind of bastardization of German and Swedish.

Wisdom Teeth is going to be on Showtime on a compilation of shorts in the next month or two. See it with all haste.

YURI (2009)

Directed by: Cécile Brun/Katja Schiendorfer/Immanuel Wagner/Nils Hedinger

An astronaut is collecting specimens and he fills up his collection. Time to go home and see his kitty! But is home still there?

This one starts out with its simple claymation making it look light and happy and fun. It ends up being pretty desolate and a little depressing. I liked it.

X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)

Directed by: Roger Corman
Written by: Robert Dillon/Ray Russell

Roger Corman is legend and, actually, one of the most important figures in film history. Sure, he didn’t invent any new processes or necessarily change the form. But he introduced a LOT of new talent to the field who are still major players today. He made films for virtually no money and made millions with them. And I believe that he is still the most successful independent producer of all time.

Fantastic Fest is finally doing a tribute to him and his films. The only one that I really had on my list was X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes. it’s one of the films that Corman is most proud of and one of his most enduring.

It stars Ray Milland (who was on the downtrend of his career in 1963) as a doctor who is trying to revolutionize eye sight. The way he figures it, we only see 10% of the spectrum. Why not all of it? He’s been developing a drug that will allow us to see more.

When he starts using it, he can suddenly see more…in fact, he can see more of women. But that’s about where the truly funny ends. As he sees more and more, he starts to realize that it’s a bit of a curse. He ends up at a traveling fair with Don Rickles as his barker. While he’s telling fortunes, Don is figuring out how to make money off of this guy’s gift.

Ray still wants to make money to fund his studies, but he’s being driven more and more mad by his sight.

It’s a very 60s movie with some pretty bad “special effects,” but that really doesn’t matter. Fortunately, Corman was able to get great actors and a great script to show us a little bit of human nature. That whole “with great power comes great responsibility” thing really shows up. Ray could use his powers for good, and he really does want to. But it seems that the only way he can do so is through using it for evil first.

Corman did a quick Q&A after the film and he’s still a pretty amazing guy. You wouldn’t think that he made all of these weird films 50 years ago. He’s like a grandpa now. Soft spoken, gracious and just over-whelmed that people are still interested in his films. I really need to see more of them. I could probably never see all of them because he directed so many in his days as a director (and produced even more), but I really do want to give it the ol’ college try.

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (2010)

Directed by: Jorge Michel Grau
Written by: Jorge Michel Grau

In a country where the government and police are so corrupt that they will empty a gun into a dead body and steal from the houses of the people they are investigating, you would think that cannibalism would be the last thing they would be worried about.

Strangely, though, it seems to still be on their minds. Jorge Michel Grau went back to his old film school to make a film with the current students. (His school funds one film a year made by an alumnus as long as they use current students on the crew. They also let them do whatever they want in the film. Why can’t we do that here?)

When Dad dies, it’s sometimes hard to carry on they way you once did. But when the family is a bunch of cannibals, it’s REALLY hard. They now have to fend for themselves. The two brothers are always fighting over who should be in control, the sister isn’t allowed to do anything and the mom is totally unstable.

I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. It’s a pretty realistic vision of what it would be like for cannibals in today’s world. (Well, ok. Today’s Mexico, which is kind of like yesterday’s world.) They aren’t just cannibals. They’re part of some tribe or something where they have to follow a ritual every so often. The ritual is never explained. It’s a cannibalistic McGuffin and that’s absolutely fine. They don’t need to explain it. We don’t care.

What we do care about is the interplay between the family members. They are all individual characters who, while not exactly being protagonists, are certainly interesting and make us care one way or the other.

Being a Mexican film, this is a bit political. Not only do we see police stealing things among other illegal activities, but I get the feeling that cannibalism was being used as a metaphor for Mexico in general. Everyone is eating everyone else, no matter their status. The country is falling apart and no one is really there to stop it.

We Are What We Are is one of the better cannibal films I’ve seen in a while. Check it out if you get a chance.

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (2010)

Directed by: Steven R Monroe
Written by: Stuart Morse
Based on 1978 screenplay by: Meir Zarchi

I love exploitation films. I will watch them all day long. Whether it’s sexploitation, blaxploitation, rednecksploitation…if it has “sploitation” in it, I’ll watch it.

One genre that I’ve never really been into is rapesploitation. It’s not something that I enjoy watching. I’ll watch it because it’s genre and I feel like there are some titles that I need to see. Last House On The Left (as far as I know, the first real rapesploitation film) is the best, but the one that seems to stand above them all is 1978′s I Spit On Your Grave, aka Day Of The Woman. Personally, I don’t think it’s a very good film, but that’s apparently just me. Sure, it’s harsh and violent, but “hard to watch” isn’t something that makes a film good. There’s also a few little things I like to call “acting” and “writing.”

When I heard that they were remaking the film, I wondered first off, “What the fuck?! Why?!” Then I thought, “Well, it could be interesting. Let’s see how far a modern film will go with this premise. Probably not very far, but we’ll see.”

So, I saw.

Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) is a writer just looking for a little peace and quiet. She goes to a secluded cabin in the bayous of Louisiana (?!) and figures on writing her next novel there. What she doesn’t figure on is getting raped by five men, including the sheriff. (Although, if you’re in Louisiana and a pretty, young woman with any kind of intellectual pursuits, you should be ready for at least a little harassment, unfortunately.)

The film is pretty faithful to a point…which is really fucking surprising. The rape scene is INCREDIBLY hard to watch. Think Irreversible, but with more blood. It goes on forever and then starts again. They also keep the mentally handicapped character who rapes her against his will (here played by Chad Lindberg), which is a bit surprising, too.

Then things get better. As soon as the bloody rampage of revenge begins, we get to see the guys get exactly what they deserve, which is what we’re really here for.

Now, let me say something about the original really quickly. I didn’t really remember this, but it’s probably because I’ve never seen the film as a woman. I just didn’t think about it, but in the back of my mind I probably thought it was weird, too, just like Lisa Hansen (producer of the remake) always did. In the original, she seduces each guy into a sense of safety, has sex with them and then kills them. That makes no fucking sense at all. This woman was brutally raped by these men and now she’s going to have sex with them? The fuck?!

Here she uses her sexuality exactly once: She wears a short skirt to get the main rapist out to her car. Then she beans him on the head with a tire iron. There is no real sex going on after the rape. She is essentially dead inside and puts them through the ringer before she kills them in nasty, horrible ways. It essentially becomes a torture porn film.

All of this makes it a better film than the original. Does it make it more watchable? Um…VERY hard to say. It’s still the same film, so it’s incredibly hard to watch. But it’s well shot, well directed, well acted and well written. All things that the original was not. So it is actually a good film. It’s just very hard to recommend because of the brutality. I will recommend it to people who are into graphic horror films, absolutely. But I will always put in the caveat of, “It has a 25 minute rape scene that will make you so uncomfortable that you will want to leave. If it doesn’t make you that uncomfortable, I’m not really sure that I want to know you.”

Consider that a warning. Don’t see this film unless you are absolutely ready for it. And also know that you’re not ready for it.

By the way, Anchor Bay is releasing this film in theatres unrated. Good for them. The producers actually made an R-rated version, but it made no sense, so they put everything back in and are no hoping for the best as far as theatres wanting to show it. The closest it’s showing to Austin during it’s initial limited run is Dallas. Now, that’s crazy. I can’t believe the Alamo isn’t picking it up yet. But I’m sure they will.