Fantastic Fest Archives - Page 2 of 2

Fantastic Fest ’14: From the Dark

October 8, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland

***/****
starring Niamh Algar, Stephen Cromwell, Gerry O'Brien, Ged Murray
written and directed by Conor McMahon

by Walter Chaw Conor McMahan's From the Dark is a hell of a film. Sarah (Niamh Algar) and Mark (Stephen Cromwell) are taking a little detour into the moors when they're predictably bogged down as night approaches. What they don't know is that a peat farmer has just been summarily attacked in a stagnant pool after unearthing what appears to be some sort of bog mummy earlier in the day. It's a nifty set-up for a spam-in-a-cabin scenario, and indeed, Mark discovers a ramshackle farmhouse where he and Sarah decide to spend the night–especially once they're attacked by some unseen thing apparently repulsed by light of any kind. It's an amalgam, in other words, of The Descent and Nosferatu: a horror film resting on those genre pillars of transgression, transformation, and contagion that cannily milks every possible light source in its rural environment (cell phones, an old tube television…more would be telling) for surprise and plot points.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Over Your Dead Body

October 5, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan

**½/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Ko Shibasaki, Hideaki Ito, Miho Nakanishi
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike’s dip into formalism and tradition continues with Over Your Dead Body, a play-within-a-play conceit whereby star stage performer Miyuki (Ko Shibasaki) reprises the legendary role of Oiwa in the classic “Yotsuya Kaidan” and finds his off-stage relationship with co-star Kousuke (Ebizo Ichikawa) beginning to resemble the supernatural relational drama in which they’ve been cast. It’s essentially the good version of Birdman, however low a bar that might be, with Miike embracing the new, languid pace of his middle-to-later career before suggesting that maybe he’s ready to let a little of the ol’ Gozu out again. Another Audition tale of a woman wronged, Over Your Dead Body can be read by the Miike scholar as further examination of the filmmaker’s sources and inspirations while providing for the neophyte enough craft and late-in-the-game Guignol to sate most any variety of bloodlust. Yeah, it gets pretty nasty.

Fantastic Fest ’14: ABCs of Death 2

October 1, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw There’s a song by The Nails called “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Here are 52 lines about 26 films. Let’s go:

Amateur (***/***, d. Evan Katz)
A hitman’s plans for carrying out his contract are slick and sexy, while the reality is clumsy and ridiculous. Katz follows up Cheap Thrills with a short that shows the same comfort with gore, physical comedy, and Naked Gun causality.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Dwarves Kingdom

October 1, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals

***/****
directed by Matthew Salton

by Walter Chaw Here’s the thing, and I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful. At least culturally, it should be said, there’s an extreme disconnect in terms of social mores. There’s a certain directness that’s difficult to assimilate as an American, along with a certain disapproval that maybe I’m just more sensitive to because of my privileged status as neither fish nor fowl. I used to say the Chinese perfected racism because they had to learn how to be racist towards people who didn’t look substantially different from themselves. I became a case study in a graduate anthropology course once concerning the evolution of human sexuality. Asked about my object-choice apparatus (was I triggered more by distinct facial features than by hair colour, for instance, or body type?), I wasn’t offended. It’s a good question.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Spring

September 29, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Vanessa Bednar, Shane Brady
screenplay by Justin Benson
directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

by Walter Chaw Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring is sensitive, smart, romantic, and disturbing in the best ways. Flip to call it Cronenberg’s Before Midnight, but how else to describe a warm, resonant relationship drama-cum-travelogue that happens to feature tentacles and extreme body mutations? It’s a compliment. Evan (a tremendous Lou Taylor Pucci) loses his mother to a wasting illness in the same week he loses his job, so he packs it up and goes to Italy, where he encounters a beautiful, mysterious woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker) who happens to have an accent he can’t place. No one could.

Fantastic Fest ’14: The Incident

September 28, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sci-Fi

El Incidente
½*/****
written and directed by Isaac Ezban

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ideas hidden in Isaac Ezban’s The Incident, packed in there amongst an impenetrable payload of dreck. It shows some promise only when it suggests William Sleator’s House of Stairs, the book it most resembles when it works. Unfortunately, the book it wants to resemble is Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, which, you know, it just doesn’t. It’s the tale of two time loops following a mysterious celestial explosion: the first strands a pair of petty robbers and their cop pursuer in an Escher painting, while the second strands a squabbling, awful family on an endless highway TO NOWHERE. Portents and signs everywhere hang low like significantly meaningful storm clouds, leading to a thirty-minute exposition–in what feels like the fourth or fifth hour of a hundred-minute film–that’s delivered with the careful precision of a slow adult explaining something s/he doesn’t entirely understand to a slow child. Painful? It’s at least painful. Ironic, too, that this movie about temporal looping makes you a victim of it.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Everly

September 27, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Revenge, Thriller

½*/****
starring Salma Hayek, Jennifer Blanc, Togo Igawa, Gabriella Wright
screenplay by Yale Hannon
directed by Joe Lynch

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a brutal, just-offscreen gang-rape perpetrated on hooker Everly (Salma Hayek) by a gaggle of Yakuza scumbags. Escaping into the bathroom, Everly retrieves a pistola, secreted away The Godfather-like, tries to call her mother and the daughter she’s never known on her cell, and then goes all spree-killer on her tormentors. But Everly is neither a rape-revenge flick nor a declaration of feminism, really, what with its constantly declaring every single woman character a “whore” in its first half-hour. No, what Joe Lynch’s reductive, big-dumb flick is, is a sub-Robert Rodriguez ripper, marking it as sub-sub-Tarantino. To be fair, it also rips off, shot for shot, moments from Sam Raimi; from Reservoir Dogs in a poor, bleeding-out schlub dubbed “Dead Man” (Akie Kotabe), who fans of “The Simpsons” will recognize as Frank Grimes; and from Luc Besson, in particular (and if you’re a carbon copy of Besson, the image fidelity is a field of giant pixels at this point). There’s so little imagination in the imitation, in fact, that the director himself has described his picture as “Die Hard with boobs.” Classy.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Wyrmwood + Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

September 26, 20142014, Action, Australia, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Norway, Zombie

WYRMWOOD
**/****
directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Død Snø 2
***/****
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Walter Chaw Zombie movies are pretty played-out by now, strung out to the point of zombie romances, but I feel like there’s room, yet, for innovation. Alas, neither Kiah Roache-Turner’s Wyrmwood nor Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead does much to reinvent the wheel, although both seem to know and appreciate their sources. Start with Wyrmwood‘s faithfulness to the frenetic vibe of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, stirred in with some of the costuming and road-play of the “Mad Max” series, in its tale of a zombie invasion that leads to the partnering-up of Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Benny (Leon Burchill). When Barry’s sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) gets abducted by an evil Save the Green Planet! extra and sent along an endless highway with newly-developed powers, it’s up to Barry and Benny to splatter a couple hundred zombies to save her bacon.

Fantastic Fest ’14: John Wick

September 25, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Revenge, Thriller

***½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw Essentially a remake of Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life shot through with oodles of late-’80s John Woo gunplay, stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick is, damnit, really just so much fun. Existing in a fascinating universe that marks it as one of the better comic-book adaptations without origins in an actual comic book, it features Keanu Reeves as the titular angry guy, taking on the Russian mob because they killed his dog. That’s it. The way John Wick gets from point A to point B, though, with a reliance on what appear to be practical effects and a strong, smart use of Reeves’s sinewy grace and muscularity, is a thing of action-movie beauty. Ultimately, it’s a showcase for elaborate stunt-work and fight choreography, and, because I’m starting to think of Stahelski’s film like the films directed by Yuen Wo Ping, that’s totally all right.

Fantastic Fest ’14: It Follows

September 24, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

****/****
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Man from Reno

September 23, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
directed by Dave Boyle

by Walter Chaw Dave Boyle’s Man from Reno is agreeably mediocre. It doesn’t do anything particularly badly, doesn’t do anything particularly wonderfully, overstays its welcome a little, and appears to not know whether to be a Father Dowling mystery or a Patricia Highsmith novel before settling on being a bit of both. It starts with the permanent vacation of popular/reclusive Japanese mystery author Aki (Ayako Fujitani), who travels to visit friends in San Francisco, where she finds herself involved with a handsome stranger (Kazuki Kitamura) and shady dealings. Meanwhile, grizzled small-town sheriff Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna) investigates an abandoned car and a hit-and-run, only to cross paths with plucky Aki. An unlikely buddy comedy? You bet, though one that only flowers for a moment when Aki interrogates a woman as erstwhile interpreter but actual prime-investigator while poor Sheriff Del Moral stands by, asking questions never properly translated. It’s charming. All of Man of Reno is charming. So terribly, terribly charming.

Fantastic Fest ’14: The Babadook

September 22, 20142014, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***/****
starring Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall
written and directed by Jennifer Kent

by Walter Chaw Though taut and incredibly well-performed, Jennifer Kent’s assured debut The Babadook has a general lack of faith that subtext is most effective when it remains subtext. There’s irony there, somewhere, in saying this about a horror movie that’s essentially about the concept of a Jungian Shadow. The Babadook concerns a mysterious children’s book featuring the titular bogey, who, after knocking to announce itself, bloody well lets itself in, thank you very much. Discovered one night by troubled little Samuel (Noah Wiseman) and read to him by his mom, long-suffering palliative-care nurse Amelia (Essie Davis–stardom awaits), the book foretells the arrival of a Jack White-looking thing (Tim Purcell) that serves as an unfortunately obvious metaphor for repressed grief. It’s a pity, because for all the wonderful moments of the film, it never feels truly menacing–I never believed that it would be a fable that ended in a moral, hard-won, rather than a fairytale with a happily ever after.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Darkness by Day

September 22, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

El día trajo la oscuridad
****/****
starring Pablo Caramelo, Marta Lubos, Romina Paula, Mora Recalde
screenplay by Josefina Trotta
directed by Martin De Salvo

by Walter Chaw A girl closes a gate, one of those rural gates that spans an entire driveway entrance, and director Martin de Salvo shoots it with a camera mounted on the end of the gate itself. It’s innovative and intimate, and there’s something adoring in it, so we adore her. She’s Virginia (Mora Recalde), a caretaker of her father, a doctor, at a house in the middle of nowhere. One night, he carries in her cousin, Anabel (Romina Paula), mumbles that she’s ill, and takes her up to a bedroom, closing the door. Darkness by Day, de Salvo’s second feature, is beautiful, unfolding in long, contemplative wide shots that, in their composition and subject, remind a great deal of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. It resembles that film, too, in the way it moves like a nightmare–the kind where nothing’s wrong, except everything feels bad. Virginia begins to sleep a lot. Her cousin wakes up, and they spend time together talking, listening to old records, drinking wine. There’s a story between them told only through glances that linger maybe a beat too long and a dance that seems fuelled less by wine than by nostalgia. And nobody seems to be answering the telephone at Anabel’s family home anymore.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Closer to God

September 21, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/****
written and directed by Billy Senese

by Walter Chaw What Billy Senese’s small, reasonably smart, moderately ambitious Closer to God really has going for it is that it doesn’t make many mistakes along the way to becoming a pleasantly tame Larry Cohen knock-off. The problem is that it muddies its own waters by engaging in the human-cloning debate, only to fall back on the hoary “clones are monsters” trope and concur that science is bad. Its constantly-mentioned Frankenstein’s monster allegory is defeated, too, when our good Dr. Victor(-not-Frankenstein) (Jeremy Childs) turns out to have a couple of adorable moppets of his own, thus negating, generally, the read of the Shelley source material that masculine procreation is spawned by “natural” childlessness. What’s faithful is the uncompromising nature of the picture’s solution; a pity that its hopelessness is more a product of its missed opportunities than of any pathos generated by its execution.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Tusk

September 20, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

*/****
starring Michael Parks, Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw Apparently based on an obnoxious shit-shooting session from one of Kevin Smith’s outrageously-popular podcasts, Tusk is Smith’s The Human Centipede, sort of, in which a crazed mariner (Michael Parks), mourning a long-lost, large-land-mammal buddy, abducts outrageously-popular podcaster Wallace-sounds-like-“walrus” Bryton (Justin Long) and proceeds to surgically turn him into a walrus. Here’s the thing: I always seem to like parts of Kevin Smith movies. I think he’s a smart guy; I like what he likes. He’s wordy and mannered but, shit, so are Whit Stillman and David Mamet. And yet, somewhere along the way, without fail, no matter how smart something of his is in the beginning (Dogma), Smith tosses in a literal shit-monster. He’s puerile. He can’t help it. Tusk has Michael Parks going for it–the rest of it is shit-monster. If I dislike Smith more than I dislike other people who aren’t as clever as he can be, it’s because every single one of his films is a missed opportunity.