Movies
Fantastic Fest ’11 Announces Second Wave Of Films
Fantastic Fast, Austin’s annual celebration of genre greatness, just added seventeen new films to its slate, along with a New York Asian Film Festival that will be comprised of four surprise 35mm screenings of Hong Kong exploitation flicks from the late 80’s and early 90’s!
Melancholia is probably the most high profile addition, but there’s a lot of very impressive films making their way into the line-up, including Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial, Jaume Balaguero’s Sleep Tight, and Pastorela: A Christmas Play, which sounds like it could be this year’s feel good holiday event. I’m sure they’ll be at least one or two more waves announced before the fest starts, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for The Thing, The Skin I Live In, The Wicker Tree and The Theatre Bizarre.
Check out the full list beyond the break.
MOVIES ON FIRE: HONG KONG ACTION CLASSICS- presented by AGFA
The amazing Grady Hendrix of the famous New York Asian Film Festival will join us and introduce four surprise 35mm screenings of classic Hong Kong grindhouse gems (most not available on DVD) from Hong Kong’s exploitation heyday of the late 80’s and early 90’s, these movies are cinematic crystal meth: cheap n’crazy, they’ll spoil you for everything else. Designed to play to rowdy audiences who threatened mayhem if they weren’t delivered a dose of gonzo delirium every five minutes, they have a total disregard for three-act structure, Hollywood plotting and the lives of their stuntmen. Get ready to burn!
AARDVARK (2010)
Texas Premiere
Director Kitao Sakurai live in person
Director: Kitao Sakurai, Japan, 80 minutes
Larry (AARDVARK’s blind-since-birth protagonist) has an innate curiosity that lands him smack in the middle of a bizarre criminal underworld replete with mixed martial arts, intrigue, murder and pillow humping.
BLIND (2011)
US Premiere
Director – AHN Sang-hoon, Korea, 111minutes
A blind woman narrowly escapes from the clutches of a serial killer. When he circles back to get rid of any witnesses, the woman must rely on her other acute senses to identify and outwit the killer.
CALIBRE 9 (2011)
World Premiere
Director Jean-Christian Tassy & Producer Axel Guyot live in person
Director: Jean-ChristianTassy, France, 84 minutes
A city planner becomes strangely linked to a gun possessed by the soul of a dead hooker.
THE CORRIDOR (2010)
US Premiere
Director Evan Kelly live in person!
Director: Evan Kelly, Canada, 100 minutes
Five friends stay in a remote cabin for the weekend and uncover a supernatural anomaly in the woods.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2011)
US Premiere
Director Nacho Vigalondo and Producer Nahikari Ipiña live in person
Director: Nacho Vigalando, Spain, 90 minutes
A man wakes in a strange apartment after a long night of drinking. When his unfamiliar bedmate tries to usher him out, they both discover that spaceships are hovering over Madrid.
HEADHUNTERS (2011)
US Premiere
Director: Morten Tyldum, Norway, 100 Minutes
Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is good at two things: hiring people and stealing from them. He’ll risk it all when he meets a former mercenary who owns a painting worth millions.
THE INNKEEPERS (2010)
Director Ti West live in person
Director: Ti West, USA, 101 Minutes
Luke and Claire work the desk at a quaint, failing hotel. On their last night, these two amateur ghost-hunters try to capture definitive proof that their workplace is haunted. THE INNKEEPERS kicks off a Ti West retrospective at the Alamo Drafthouse sponsored by the Austin Film Society.
LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010)
Regional Premiere
Director: Jiang Wen, Hong Kong, 132 minutes
The highest grossing domestic Chinese release ever, LET THE BULLETS FLY features the hilarious and bloody antics of a band of thieves traveling by train in this 1920s-set western satire. Writer/Director Jiang Wen stars opposite screen legend Chow Yun-Fat.
MELANCHOLIA (2011)
Regional Premiere
Director: Lars von Trier, Denmark, 130 minutes
The man who brought us Fantastic Fest hit ANTICHRIST creates a very different type of genre film – an incredibly personal science fiction story about the end of the world.
MICHAEL (2011)
US Premiere
Director: Markus Schleinzer, 96 minutes
Setting the record for the darkest of character studies, Markus Schleinzer’s compelling and surprisingly humorous directorial debut follows five months in the lives of a pedophile and the ten-year-old boy he keeps in the basement.
PASTORELA: A CHRISTMAS PLAY (2011)
World Premiere
Director: Emilio Portes Castro, Mexico, 90 minutes
Fantastic Fest again hosts another untraditional Christmas movie; this time Santa Claus is out and Satan is in. When Chucho (Joaquín Cosio) loses the beloved role of Satan in the town’s Christmas play and tries to reclaim the part, all hell breaks loose and an epic battle between good and evil begins.
PENUMBRA (2011)
World Premiere
Director Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Producer Andrea Quiroz live in person
Director: Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Ramiro Garcia Bogliano Argentina, 85 minutes
A beautiful young woman is trapped in her apartment with a nervous realtor and an expanding cast of unsettling characters in the latest from the director of COLD SWEAT.
SLEEP TIGHT (2011)
US Premiere
Director Jaume Balagueró live in person
Director: Jaume Balagueró, Spain, 102 minutes
The location is familiar (a vertical shaft Barcelona apartment building) but the story is markedly different in Jaume Balagueros (REC; REC 2) solo feature debut. Lonely doorman Cesar must do whatever is necessary to keep the neighbors from uncovering his dark, disturbing obsession for his favorite resident Clara.
SNOWMAN’S LAND (2011)
US Premiere
Director: Tomasz Thomson, Germany, 95 minutes
Tomasz Thomson’s SNOWMAN’S LAND is a bleak comedic thriller from Germany about an over-the-hill hit man who gets sent to the remote snow-covered wilderness to handle a job that may be his last.
THE SQUAD (2011)
World Premiere
Director: Jaime Osorio, Columbia, 107 minutes
Haunted by memories of their last mission, a feuding special ops unit is tasked to uncover the mystery of what happened at a desolate military base in this tense and claustrophobic South American thriller.
SUMMERLAND (2010)
North American Premiere
Director: Grímur Hákonarson, Iceland, 85 minutes
Oscar and Lara have an entirely normal family other than the fact that Oscar runs a haunted house in their basement and Lara speaks with elves.
YOU’RE NEXT (2011)
US Premiere
Director Adam Wingard live in person
Director: Adam Wingard, USA, 95 minutes
From the team behind the Fantastic Fest award-winning film A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE, YOU’RE NEXT traps a family inside secluded mansion in the middle of nowhere. Outside the home is a group of animal-masked killers who take a stab at making sure none of them leave alive.
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At the Abigail premiere, Dan Stevens listed Norway among his four favorite vampire movies. “I just saw a great movie recently that I’d never heard of,” he told Letterboxd. “A Greek film called Norway, about a vampire who basically exists in the underground disco scene in ’80s Athens, and he can’t stop dancing ’cause he’s worried his heart will stop. And it’s lovely. It’s great.”
You won’t find a better endorsement than that, but allow me to elaborate. Imagine Only Lovers Left Alive meets What We Do in the Shadows by way of Yorgos Lanthimos. The quirky 2014 effort follows a vampire vagabond (Vangelis Mourikis) navigating Greek’s sordid nightlife circa 1984 as he dances to stay alive. Not as campy as it sounds, its idiosyncrasies land more in the art-house realm. Stylized visuals, colorful bloodshed, pulsating dance music, and an absurd third-act reveal help the existentialism go down in a mere 74 minutes.
With the recent solar eclipse renewing public interest in the astrological event, Bloody Birthday is ripe for rediscovery. Three children born during an eclipse – Curtis Taylor (Billy Jayne, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose), Debbie Brody (Elizabeth Hoy), and Steven Seton (Andrew Freeman) – begin committing murders on their 10th birthday. Brother and sister duo Joyce (Lori Lethin, Return to Horror High) and Timmy Russell (K.C. Martel, The Amityville Horror) are the only ones privy to their heinous acts.
Bloody Birthday opened in 1981 mere weeks before the release of another attempt to claim the birthday slot on the slasher calendar, Happy Birthday to Me. Director Ed Hunt (The Brain) combines creepy kid tropes that date back to The Bad Seed with slasher conventions recently established by Halloween and Friday the 13th – with a little bit of the former’s suspense and plenty of the latter’s gratuity. The unconventional set up helps it to stand out among a subgenre plagued by banality.
Starting in the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, Italy built an enterprise out of shameless rip-offs of hit American movies. While not a blatant mockbuster like Cruel Jaws or Beyond the Door, 1989’s Alien from the Abyss (also known as Alien from the Deep) was inspired by – as you may have guessed from its title – Alien, Aliens, and The Abyss.
After a pair of Greenpeace activists attempt to expose an evil corporation that’s dumping contaminated waste into an active volcano, the environment takes a backseat to survival when an extraterrestrial monster attacks. Character actor Charles Napier (The Silence of the Lambs) co-stars as a callous colonel overseeing the illicit activities.
Director Antonio Margheriti (Yor: The Hunter from the Future, Cannibal Apocalypse) and writer Tito Carpi (Tentacles, Last Cannibal World) take far too long to get to the alien, but once it shows up, it’s non-stop excitement. The creature is largely represented by a Gigeresque pincer claw that reaches into the frame, giving the picture a ’50s creature feature charm, but nothing can prepare you for its full reveal in the finale.
Set against the backdrop of displaced Syrian and Palestinian refugees, What Is Buried Must Remain is a timely found footage hybrid from Lebanon. It centers on a trio of young filmmakers as they make a documentary in a decrepit mansion alleged to be haunted on the outskirts of a refugee camp. Inside, they find the spirits of those who died there, both benevolent and malicious.
It plays like Blair Witch meets The Shining through a cultural lens not often seen in the genre. The first half is presented as found footage (with above-average cinematography) before abruptly weaving in more traditional film coverage. While the tropes are familiar, the film possesses a unique ethos by addressing the Middle East’s plights of the past and the present alike.
Cathy’s Curse is, to borrow a phrase from its titular creepy kid, an “extra rare piece of shit.” The Exorcist, The Omen, and Carrie spawned countless low-budget knock-offs, but none are as uniquely inept as this 1977 Canuxploitation outing. Falling squarely in the so-bad-it’s-good camp, it’s far more entertaining than The Exorcist: Believer.
To try to make sense of the plot would be futile, but in a nutshell, a young girl named Candy (Randi Allen, in her only acting role) becomes possessed by the vengeful, foul-mouthed spirit of her aunt, destroying the lives of anyone who crosses her path. What ensues is a madcap mélange of possession, telekinesis, teleportation, animal attacks, abandoned plot points, and unhinged filmmaking that must be seen to be believed.
Visit the SCREAMBOX Hidden Gems archives for more recommendations.
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