>> 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