by Walter Chaw I love Fantasia Festival. More than love it, I think it's an important showcase that has provided at least a couple of titles that end up on my Best of the Year list every time I've covered it. Its programming is consistently on point, its courage to wade into deep and hostile waters laudable. This year, I'm most excited to catch Oh Dae-hwan and Jang Dong-yoon in Kim Jae-hoon's Face/Off-inspired debut, Devils, and Jimmy Laporal-Trésor's rise-of-fascism period piece, Rascals. Quarxx has a new flick inspired by Milton and Dante called Pandemonium, and there's a new '80s Satanic Panic documentary called Satan Wants You that dates me, I'll admit. A small part of me still believes I'll start speaking in Aramaic and crawling up the wall every time I spin an Iron Maiden vinyl. I feel a similar mix of nostalgia and dread about A Disturbance in the Force, which dives deep into what exactly was going through everyone's heads while making the "Star Wars Holiday Special".
With a lineup that further includes a restoration of Korean grandmaster Kim Ki-young's 1977 IO Island and a serial-killer procedural from the emerging Taiwanese market (Tseng Ying-Ting's The Abandoned), I haven't been this excited about a program since…my last Fantasia Festival. Ready to get wrecked? Let's go.
