>> Fantastic Fest 3: Best of Bloodshots 2007

One of the events I attended at Fantastic Fest was the Best of Bloodshots short film competition. Each competitor is given one prop, in this case corn, and one line of dialogue (“Is that thing real?”). The participating filmmakers are then randomly assigned a weapon and a horror sub-genre and given 48 hours [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: Flight of the Living Dead (John’s Review, 6.5/10)

There are a dozen or more good reasons for me to not like this film, but I suggest you write them all down on a piece of spiral notepaper and stick them someplace dark and hairy. Flight of the Living Dead rocks. Zombies on a plane are automatically a more interesting threat than [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: Finishing the Game (Brandon’s Review, 8/10)

Justin Lin’s Finishing the Game chronicles the search for a stand in to finish the masterwork left behind in the wake of Bruce Lee’s death, Game of Death.  Much like a Christopher Guest documentary this film has it’s share of jokes that don’t stick and I briefly wondered if the players were under the delusion [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: Blood, Boobs, & Beast (John’s Review, 7/10)

Don Dohler is extraordinarily ordinary. It’s this quality that makes it interesting that this is the man behind a dozen z-grade sci-fi/horror flicks, but it is also his ordinariness that keeps this documentary on his career as a filmmaker somewhat mundane. The film makes no real points about what kind of a man [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: Southland Tales (John’s Review, 4.5/10)

An unfunny, incomprehensible mess.
That’s the long and short of it concerning Richard Kelly’s sci-fi comedy satire follow-up to Donnie Darko. I’ll get into the details, and, lordy, are there details, but, first, it’s important to know that it sucks. It might not sound like it truly sucks, but, trust me, it sucks.
Leading this [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: End of the Line (John’s Review, 6.5/10)

End of the Line is possibly the best Stephen King movie ever made that has absolutely nothing to do with Stephen King.  Writer/director Maurice Devereaux has created a zippy, indy horror flick that reminds me of that author’s specific fear of crazy Christians and end-time prophecy.  It’s a small movie that thinks big, making the [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: Aachi & Ssipak (John’s Review, 7.5/10)

Here’s a story we haven’t seen before–a future world where human poo is the most precious commodity, so much so that the government installs a ring-shaped chip into every citizen’s anus, rewarding heavy poopers with “juicybars”, an addictive chemical popsicle that turns you into a blue-skinned mutant if you consume too many of them. [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: The Last Winter (John’s Review, 7.5/10)

I never expected to see a film that I would describe as John Carpenter’s The Thing meets Princess Mononoke, but here it is in The Last Winter. Writer/director Larry Fessenden has created a top-shelf indy horror film, a disquieting “man vs. nature” story that would give Al Gore nightmares.
A tight group of Alaskan [...]

>> Fantastic Fest 3: Diary of the Dead (John’s Review, 5.5/10)

Instead of drawing inspiration from some well of imagination, George Romero returns to square one of the zombie genesis, drawing influence from 28 Days Later and The Blair Witch Project. This non-sequel to his Dead films (companion piece?) attempts to create horror through a psuedo-documentary in which a handful of horribly annoying film students [...]

>> The Assasination of Jesse James… (Brandon’s Review, 5.5/10)

Andrew Dominik’s long shelved/awaited Western is a little on the overcooked side, it wants to be a thoughtful story about the weight of consequence and the bitter twang we get in our mouths when our heroes are not the people that we always wished them to be, it‘s only slightly successful in any case. The [...]