>> 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 to create a completed horror short.

In all honesty, it was the most entertaining block of short films I’ve seen at a festival. Some were amusing, some more amateurish than others, but most all of them displaying a good amount of imagination. The winner of the contest, “LARP”, was a tight, funny, gory little backwoods tale of live-action role-players who get lost in the woods. The second place winner was “Mobius”, from my boys and frequent collaborators at Bleutuna, one of the few films whose intention was solely to scare the audience. They made use of the corn and the line, and were saddled with “fire/explosives” as their weapon and “mutation” as the sub-genre. Without a doubt, they delivered some of the best horror visuals in the selected block of fifteen finalists. Congratulations to Bleutuna for taking second place in such a wonderful festival!

Here’s the “48-Hour Bloodshots Edit” of their short “Mobius”.

>> 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 snakes on a plane. Why? Because I’m pretty damn sure that snakes have actually been on a plane before and have never taken out the entire passenger list while in transit. Thus, snakes automatically require more suspension of disbelief than zombies. We’ve never in the history of manned flight seen a zombie on a plane, so who can predict how they will actually react? Director Scott Thomas and screenwriters Sidney Iwanter and Mark Onspaugh provide one nightmare zombies-on-a-plane scenario in their bloody, low-budget mile-hile romp.

Seems a genetically modified virus developed by the government (echoing, no, completely aping Return of the Living Dead) has snuck its way onto a commercial flight by a morally questionable scientist (character actor Erick Avari). He’s transporting a fellow doctor dead in a box and can’t wait to get to the ground to show everyone the miracle of undead reesurrection. Nothing ever goes as planned in any zombie film. Of course that doctor breaks free, and of course she starts eating people and spreading zombie-ism all over the plane with gut-munching, splattery fervor. It’s pretty great. Along for the ride are a handful of familiar faces and character actors including David Chisum (Pet Semetary), Kevin J. O’Connor (The Mummy), and Richard Tyson (Three O’Clock High).

This isn’t going to revolutionize horror filmmaking. Heck, it’s probably going to be considered unwatchable by the movie’s title alone, and left to rot on video store shelves across America. That’s too bad. This is the dumb fun that Snakes on a Plane should’ve been. It doesn’t matter that it was made solely to cash in on a mis-predicted “Blanks on a Blank” craze; it’s fast, raucous, and goofy. It ain’t art, but I likes it.

6.5 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 that the premise was more clever than it seemed. That notion was dispelled from the first time I laughed until the end.

Justin Lin assembles some of his regular players and  it’s refreshing to see Sung Kang break free from the aggressively generic supporting roles he’s received of late to play a bright eyed and bushy tailed aspiring actor named Kim, who has trouble summoning up anger. Roger Fan plays Bruce Lee-lite Breeze Loo, an egomaniac who openly admits to having no physicality but very intense eyes.  Fan and Kang are undeniably incredible and it leaves one to wonder how Lin and his two cohorts are unable to get more projects together off the ground.

As with Better Luck Tomorrow, Finishing the Game struggles with questions of identity that may not be entirely specific to that particular culture but in the case of the film there’s no denying where the scope is being aimed. In Better Luck Tomorrow the kids were regarded as nerds but they did some decidedly dangerous things in their off time. In Finishing the Game it has more to do with not being regarded as an interchangeable Asian. On that note, we discover that Breeze Loo was bought for $500 as a replacement for his adopted mother’s dead cocker spaniel and due to his fame Breeze has furnished his parents with a brand new home that has paintings of him hanging on the wall, to which Breeze’s father says, “well we’ll never forget what he looks like.” I don’t know how deep the film aims to cut, but it does and often enough, I understand though because Lin is  a talented man but you wouldn’t know him from anyone else based on Tokyo Drift or Annapolis.  Finishing the Game isn’t entirely obsessed with questions of Chinese identity, but in the pursuit of laughs.  I think greater questions about who we are are inevitably answered.

8 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 it takes to create video store schlock, instead offering a passive view of his friendship with collaborator Joe Ripple and the minor horror convention success Dohler has achieved.

A native of Baltimore, Dohler worked a nine-to-five publishing job during the day, and used his nights and weekends to create his chintzy alien movies, filling the cast with family and neighbors. He’s smarter than Ed Wood and more in-touch than Uwe Boll, but his movies are still inept little treasures, usually featuring a rubber-suited monster to fulfill at least one of the three requirements one of his distributors asked for years before: blood, boobs, and beast. It’s the adherence to that formula that provides the film’s tiniest bit of conflict. Dohler is never 100% comfortable with nudity and gore; Ripple finds it necessary to a fault.

There is probably an exceptional documentary somewhere in the two years worth of footage that filmmaker John Paul Kinhart shot–something close to the genius of Chris Smith’s superb American Movie. Dohler is exceptionally likeable, shrugging off his cult status with truthful modesty, and his collaborators are an interesting bunch, but Kinhart’s film lacks an emotional through-line. Kinhart keeps the audience at arm’s length from getting into Dohler, opting instead to focus on Joe Ripple’s scheduling conflicts and interviews with fans that feel, at times, remarkably staged.

I remember seeing the video for Galaxy Invader decades ago, but never rented it. The only time I even saw footage from it was plastered over the end credits of an entirely different movie on an episode of MST3K. Not once did I ever consider the proud Baltimorians that made the film. Blood, Boobs, & Beast did succeed in getting me interested enough to want to check out one of Dohler’s films, specifically Blood Massacre, a “cannibals vs. criminals” movie, with what appears to be a decent amount of sicko gore. The doc made me nostalgic for mom and pop video stores and lousy monster movies on UHF stations, things that are starting to feel like a lifetime ago. Basically, Don Dohler is a regular guy making awful movies, as a way to turn a buck and hang out with loved ones. That’s not so bad.

7 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 rambling, incoherent nonsense is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, wrestler turned actor, playing against type as a boxer turned actor, “Boxer” Santaros. He’s married to a high profile political candidate’s daughter (Mandy Moore), but disappears and washes up on the California shore with amnesia, where he is promptly taken under the wing of a talk show host/porn star/terrorist played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. The two collaborate on a screenplay about the apocalypse, as the events within the script begin happening in real life. None of this is shown in the movie.

Did you get that last part? None of that information is acted out in this film.

Instead, it is all told to us by Justin Timberlake’s character, an actor/singer/drug dealer/war vet, who sits in a turret all day guarding the West Coast when he’s not breaking out into Killers’ songs and narrating this baloney. After the world’s longest expositional voiceover, we pick up with Boxer as he’s being used as a pawn by underground Marxists (Nora Dunn, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler), who are also in bed with a nutty energy guru (played by Wallace Shawn) and his cult-like followers, who are also in bed with Frost, the political candidate who is also Boxer’s father-in-law. Somewhere in all this is Sean William Scott as twins, one posing as a cop, one an actual cop, as part of a staged race crime involving Jon Lovitz’s cop character and the Marxists.

Sound confusing? Try watching it. It’s a grand failure, the type that rarely get made anymore, a throwback to the days of all-time overblown turkeys like Ishtar. It’s like the studio cut of Brazil for the Playstation Generation. By the time Kevin Smith inexplicably shows up in the film, sporting old age prosthetic make-up, you’ll have had enough (possibly even before that).

Someday, dictionaries will feature a picture of the Southland Tales movie poster beside the words “sophomore slump”. There’s ambition a’plenty–a sprawling two and a half hour satire based loosely on a mash-up of current events and the Book of Revelation–but, man, was this a misguided move. There’s a nugget of a decent film underneath the layers of headache-inducing backstory and the calvalcade of SNL alumni, and that’s a shame. If this was irredeemable, it would be forgotten in time. As it is, Southland Tales will join the annals of the great misfires of all time.

4.5 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 most of its cast and budget to create an efficient, effective creep-out.

A train full of strangers are interrupted from their travel by their subway’s sudden stop mid-route.  Suddenly, strangely uniformed men on the train reach for their buzzing pagers, read their synchronized message, and brandish bladed crucifixes.  Their mission?  To save the souls of the unbelievers in the world by murdering them.  What happens next is a grisly chase through darkened subway tunnels as a small group of survivors flee from the apocalyptic cult members while the outside world experiences the same mass killing spree, all in the name of God.

It’s a more-than-worthy addition to the “religious nightmare” subgenre of horror, and hardcore horror fans should eat this up with a spoon.  There’s plenty of blood splatter and mayhem, and it’s slightly smarter than other b-movie survival horror films.  The movie feels a little bit “been there, done that”, although I’m hard pressed to think of another movie like it.  I think the run-from-the-threat plot is where the film feels as if it’s going through the motions, and the peeks at the outside Biblical doom and gloom taking place while the ensemble stomp around in subway tunnels raise more interesting questions than the film answers.  The ending, however, is nearly pitch perfect–the visuals of the last 60 seconds being some of the most geniunely scary I’ve seen in a long, long time.

The simple pleasures of a well-made horror b-movie can beat any watered down big-budget “A-List” horror movie for me.  There’s usually some level of imagination at work that sets it apart from the rest, no matter how mediocre the actors are, or how easily the film might teeter into genre cliches.  End of the Line feels both familiar and different–a solid first feature film from Canadian Maurice Devereaux.

6.5 on a 1 to 10 scale 

>> 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. This may be the most original idea for a film in human history. Did I mention it was animated?

Basically, the movie follows juicybar black market hustlers Aachi and Ssipak, as they protect a girl who’s been given a reprogrammed anal ring by a struggling movie director, one that dispenses hundreds of juicybars with just one poo. She’s being pursued by juicybar addicts The Diaper Gang, a grinning group of smurf-like bandits, who routinely raid government supplies of the dangerous popsicle. It all sounds like a fever dream doesn’t it? Put Beavis and Butthead, John Woo, comic artist Dave Cooper, Akira, and Klasky-Csupo in a blender and you might come up with the closest equivalent to the truly bizarre action orgy that transpires in this film.

Wholly original, even when paying homage to a vast array of movies including Misery and Terminator, Aachi & Ssipak has to be seen to be believed. The opening sequence of the film may be one of the greatest action sequences ever. Not just in animated film history, I mean EVER. That’s not to say the film is perfect–ultimately, the characters are too annoying, the situations too audacious to sustain itself for two hours. Still, ya gotta see this one to believe it.

7.5 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 pipeline workers led by roughneck Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) are inconvenienced by ecologist James Hoffman (James LeGros), sent by their parent company for good PR. The crew are ready to complete their job post-haste, but Hoffman is startled by the sudden temperature decreases–decreases that are not only melting the permafrost, but seem to be causing some really out-there phenomena. Pollack’s green nephew is the first to see the eerie stampede of ghostly horses that circle their work camp, and his psychological unraveling from that point forward, brings everyone involved with the project that much closer to their doom. These spirits are not happy that their land is being mucked with.

Fessenden lets his landscape work for him with lots of great shots of the harsh tundra, creating a foreign environment that feels like part of the threat when things start going south. Perlman and LeGros are pretty terrific cast opposite of one another. Their realistic performances help ground the film; it’s especially important because none of the supernatural aspects are clearly spelled out. I kind of like it that way. This isn’t a film where a character attempts to explain everything 30 minutes before the credits roll. We only know what they know, and they want to survive first, figure stuff out second.

The Last Winter takes the thrills of a haunted house film and creates the first haunted Alaskan pipeline film. Put simply, it works. Effective and original, The Last Winter is the kind of movie that deserves to be sought out by horror fans, especially amongst a tidal wave of studio-released remakes.

7.5 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 capture their road trip through a strangely empty, newly zombified America. The film within a film is called “The Death of Death”, the first of many things Romero finds clever, that I found kind of stupid. (Amongst other things, heavy-handed tip-offs in the production design–A twisted U.S. flag, an upside-down globe. The world is upside-down! Get it??? Ugh.)

There is no thinly veiled social statement at work in this film. It’s all right there on the surface, and if you didn’t catch it the first time, wait five minutes and a character will say it again. “If it didn’t happen on camera, it didn’t happen” is probably repeated three or four times in the film, along with any dialogue that Romero happens to find especially insightful or cutesy. It’s annoying, especially as spouted by the ensemble of TV-ready twentysomethings, with TV-ready acting chops.

Romero is obviously NOT an actor’s director. I don’t think that’s really a problem with him until this film. You are asked to buy into the realism of the situation by people that sound like all the acting they learned was by watching other young TV actors. There isn’t a trace of realism in any performance, and if Romero hadn’t been in love with his own script, I think a little improvisation might’ve gone a long way towards creating the “YOU ARE HERE” effect that the film so desperately aims for.

And, oh yeah, there are zombies in this. They keep things from getting boring, for the most part, and there are some clever zombie deaths, probably a couple of the coolest put on film. The truth is there’s something vaguely sad about seeing the originator of the walking dead on film create a zombie movie that is merely “all right”, and he’s done it twice in a row now.

What’s the deal with Romero? Is he making what he truly wants to make, or is he making what he thinks people expect from him? I don’t know that he enjoys his zombie legacy. I get the impression that he thinks it’s the only thing people want to see with George A. Romero above the title, but, honestly, one more like this and it’s simply not going to matter anymore.

5.5 on a 1 to 10 scale

>> 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 degree to which it works is because of Casey Affleck, a personal hero of mine who makes the allegedly cowardly Robert Ford into someone sympathetic and lovable. He’s bullied often in the film by his brothers, their friends and most unkindly of all his hero Jesse James. Ford tries to blow it off, but underneath it we see a man at a breaking point (we all have one, but how you grapple with disappointment is the difference between you and a man vilified by history, the decision does not rest easy with Ford who lived in the shadow of his reputation for the next ten years and knew that the few smiles he ever received were not earned or lasting). Eventually Robert and one of his brothers (Sam Rockwell) will betray Jesse and soon be asked to kill him. After a scene late in the film where Pitt’s Jesse James pulls back Robert’s head and holds a knife to his throat I was glad that he was willing to oblige.

Calling Robert Ford a coward is a contradiction of sorts, presumably he is a coward for shooting Jesse James with his back turned but Jesse James does the same to a former partner at one point in the movie. I would call this self preservation not cowardice. I would also call it the smart thing, Billy the Kid shot more than one man in the back. As portrayed by Brad Pitt Jesse James despite having a family is a real bad news type (beating a young man for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of his father while holding his mouth shut). I’ve seen a lot of Westerns where heroes do bad things and bad men do bad things but asking us to believe the man who shot Jesse James, played by Brad Pitt as a cowboy descendant of his psychotic Early Grace from “Kalifornia,” is a weasel doesn’t sit well with me. It’s not as if though the film makes Ford a despicable person (it doesn’t), but by calling him a coward in the title Jesse James by omission of any descriptors is elevated to something decidedly more heroic. He’s not. I really, really hate him.

“The Assassination of Jesse James” is by no means a stinking awful film but at two hours and forty minutes it’s not without long stretches of tedium. Hugh Ross, the film’s narrator, is often doing the dramatic heavy lifting that the capable cast is rarely given the opportunity to do outside of Affleck. If the characters had been given the opportunity to vocalize what they were thinking a little more often we wouldn’t need to rely on the narrator to so often drive home the point of a scene that meandered on a little too long and forgot where it was going. Andrew Dominik’s film is amongst the least of a number of films in this genre, hamstrung as it is by narration and in a genre full of conflicted rogues it boasts what could easily be the most unlikable in the whole lot. Nobody’s saying that Westerns aren’t often cynical films marked by the passing of icons and eras, but they aren’t usually this boring either.

5.5 on a 1 to 10 scale