I have enjoyed going to Fantastic Fest, the genre film festival started by the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse, Tim League, since… 2009!?! Holy shit I’m old. Anyway, I go, not every year, and I write up film reviews here, though not every year. It’s a week of black shirted men and tattooed women at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin watching 5 movies a day! They specialize in “genre” movies – SF, horror, action, weird, foreign… Some are “secret screenings” where you don’t know what you’re going to see until you’re seated. Anyway, I just got back from FF 2024 and realized I never posted my 2023 reviews so time to get caught up!
My rating scale (in my opinion of course, YMMV, but I don’t bother beating around the bush if I don’t like something):
- 5/5 – Great movie, I plan on actively promoting it to anyone who will listen, will happily rewatch it
- 4/5 – Good movie, seek it out
- 3/5 – OK, worth watching
- 2/5 – Fair – don’t regret watching it per se but wouldn’t recommend it without some caveats
- 1/5 – Bad – regret spending hours of my time on this trash (none of these this time, and usually there are!)
Let’s see… I’ll start out with the best ones, and do separate posts for the good, mid, and bad ones. There were four films I really loved this year and gave 5/5 to. Definitely check them out, they’re all on Amazon Prime and Apple TV as well as a long tail of other outlets, except sadly for Triggered.
Action!
Triggered, a Filipino action movie with loads of great and bloody action. A commando vet with PTSD is hired to guard a warehouse and two teens seeking refuge bring a waves of corrupt drug cops in to get killed with guns, knives, flashlights, hands, debris, table saws, explosions…. But with a remarkably deft hand with humanizing all out participants via their families and lives. First Blood meets Hard Target meets The Raid. Put it in theaters already! 5/5
Kill – an Indian (Sikh) movie that is a “Die Hard on a train” scenario (I refuse to mention Under Siege 2) where our commando hero and his clandestine fiancée gets caught up in a train robbery by a big extended family bandit gang like they have over there. He is all about “no just beat them up don’t kill them” for the first act, I was starting to roll my eyes and think poorly of our hero, and then one baddie just up and knifes his would-be fiancée to death and then it is MURDER TIME. Brutal kills that had even a hardened Fantastic Fest crowd hooting and hollering. Death by knife, cleaver, hammer, fire extinguisher (both ends), lighter fluid, toilet, and more. He scares the piss out of the bad guys to where some just bail. They all go forward to “get him” and find a dozen of their dead are hanging by sheets in the intervening train car and they have to take a good cry break. Hard core! [Editor’s note from a year later – I mentioned this to an Indian coworker and they were impressed, this had just come out in theaters and made a splash there.] 5/5
Cinema!
Animalia – Whoa that was deep. You follow a pregnant Moroccan woman who was a poor Berber but married into a rich family. The rest of the family goes away on a trip and then weird stuff starts happening. As she travels trying to get to her husband, there is constant tension and increasing weirdness. Beautifully shot. “Confidently ambiguous” in the wording of this Variety review. If something makes you think, is it “arthouse“ nowadays? It blended social roles, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and science fiction slash the supernatural in a realistically complex melange. Reminded me a little of 2001: A Space Odyssey without taking as much of a sudden turn into weird. I find it hard to believe this was Sofia Alaoui’s first film, it was casually masterful. It had no clear firm resolution or statement, but frankly I like that. This film makes me want to think about it and discuss it with others. 5/5
Family Fun!
Riddle of Fire – Wowza! Shot in 16mm and evoking the 1970s live action Disney movies, we get three roguish youngsters who run around loose like I did as a kid in the 70s and then go through some good old fashioned child endangerment, but with a faerie mythology layer slathered on top. The mix of contemporary and literary language in the dialogue reminded me of O Brother, Where Art Thou, mixed with the original Bad News Bears and Pete’s Dragon. And it was HILARIOUS. The kid actors and their dialogue and mannerisms were so winning. They meet a member of the gang they’ll come to loggerheads with, the Circle of the Enchanted Sword (a kinda Manson Family lite) who’s a big cowboy shit-kicker type and they say “he looks like he plays the jug in a hillbilly band” and then refer to him consistently as “that woodsy bastard” thereafter, which made me belly-laugh every time. Cute, foul, resourceful, and touching in turns. This film is why I go to Fantastic Fest, to be completely surprised and delighted by something I didn’t know I was looking for but enjoyed immensely. 5/5 must see when it hits theaters next year and I’ll be telling everyone I know to go. [Editor’s note from a year later – I bought the Blu-Ray of this from Vinegar Syndrome so I can show it to anyone who will sit still.]
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