Plenty of perfectly good movies of various types at this FF! Keep an eye out for a cluster of older movies that are still perfectly good in the middle.
Baby Assassins 3 aka Baby Assassins: Nice Days (8/10) is the latest in Yugo Sakmoto’s Japanese series of “two GenZ shrieky Japanese girls are John Wicks.” Literally; this is a series made by and with stunt people to show off action choreography and one of the lead girls, Saori Izawa, just got done doing stunts on John Wick 4. The action was top notch including some real knock down drag out hand-to-hand fights. And while the acting in between was still melodramatic to the max, it had some decent character moments, especially between our dynamic duo at the end. Make out already! I liked it better than the previous entry in the series (Baby Assasins: 2 Babies) – its action was better and character stuff not as silly.
Bookworm (8/10) – This year’s family movie! Last year Riddle of Fire surprised and delighted me. This year, we have a solid entry with Elijah Wood and a Kiwi girl cracking us up in between bouts of child endangerment. New Zealand precocious kid Mildred (Nell Fisher)’s mom gets landed in a coma from a faulty toaster and her baby daddy comes from the US to help care for her – Elijah Woods, playing a failed David Blaine style magician (“Illusionist!”) who knew mom for a couple hours in a convenience store parking lot in Vegas but hasn’t been in the picture since then. Then they go camping to try to get footage of the mythical Canterbury Panther (NZ’s Bigfoot of a big cat). Besides the predictable prickly daughter-father bonding is surprisingly dark and hilarious writing – no-filter dialogue and some real danger with brutally real consequences. But, you know, for kids! I hollered out loud at least five times during this film, sometimes in humor, sometimes in shock.
MadS (8/10) is a lively French movie about rave kids in the beginning of a zombie-type outbreak. A rich kid rave is not where you want your original superspreader event to be. And of course this in turn unleashes the paramilitary death squads. The gimmick here is that it is shot in one long 90 minute take, which really keeps up the momentum! Ok so I get that they’re all stoned and some have “the virus” but boy French people are excitable! The amount of squalling and hollering and thrashing and running around bashing into things is impressive and along with the one-shot format is one big thrill ride (the sound design is impressive too). I can’t imagine those actresses screaming like that for all that time straight, that’s some sore throats for sure. Anyway, a worthy take on day 0 zombie outbreak especially if you like things like 28 Days Later.
House of Spoils (8/10) sports a chef who has just gotten her big break opens a cauldron-to-table restaurant when the spirit of the witch that used to live in their rustic location starts whispering to her. A good horror movie leveraging our cultural love of hollering “Yes, Chef!” It has super solid production values, this should be a wide-release movie. An interesting roller coaster of twists about what’s going on in the plot and an atypical but welcome – if just a shred preachy – resolution. And despite some gross food scenes it had good ones as well; once it was over I popped down to the nearby Soto for a chili hamachi and lychee martini.
Saturday Night (8/10) was the first secret screening of Fantastic Fest; it’s about Lorne Michaels and the cast and crew getting ready for their first ever Saturday Night Live broadcast in 1975, in real-time for the 90 minutes leading up to its start. Jason Reitman directed and did extensive research and interviews to piece together the intense blend of humor, greed, pride, lust, and cocaine that was that time. Great performances emulating the comedy greats of the day especially of Chevy Chase and John Belushi. Frantic pace and lots of humor, some from the comedians but more from the ridiculous lengths Lorne has to go to in order to hit air (Belushi going missing! Drug induced lockjaw! The Standards & Practices lady! A llama! Studio suits! Milton Berle’s huge penis! Johnny Carson being a huge penis!). Mainstream (out of the ordinary for Fantastic Fest) but definitely worth seeing.
Mac and Me (8/10) is what a lot of these “zany” movies aspire to be. Sure it’s an ET ripoff from 1988, sure it’s full of Coke, McDonalds, and Sears product placement, but it is bananas in a great way. From the weird too-human naked aliens (like… sea-monkeys that have the face of Arseface from The Preacher) that do not even start to obey the laws of physics, to the absolutely wild child-in-wheelchair endangerment, to the full on spontaneous breakdance party at McDonalds (in the credits: “And starring Ronald McDonald as himself”), you absolutely do not expect what is about to happen in the next scene at any point. The audience shrieked in shock and hilarity many times. As a bonus they played the original alternate ending ripped from a Japanese laserdisc where a cop trips and DEAD CENTER SHOOTS WHEELCHAIR KID WHOSE BODY THEN WHEELS INTO A GASOLINE FIRE!?! “He’s going to be OK!” “He’s gone.” At any moment you don’t know if someone’s going to die in an abandoned cobalt mine or tear up a mall or OD on soda. They said “let’s take ET and turn it up to 11” and I’m here for it. I know this is a high rating for a movie that ended up on How Did This Get Made, but I enjoyed this screening more than the vast majority so I gotta be honest!
The Guest (7/10) was a 4K remaster of a 2014 thriller that goes from being a Hallmark movie about a guy who just got out of the military coming to visit the small town family of a dead brother in arms to help them and romance the sister, to Jason Bourne, to Friday the 13th in short order! Starring Dan Stevens aka Legion from the FX series (best Marvel TV series to date and I’ll fight anyone who says different) as the boy-next-door-psychopath, . All the family characters were great (except the dad; I was kinda rooting for soldier boy to seduce the wife tbh). Not perfect; the plot doesn’t entirely make sense and tries to be a little much in one sausage casing, but it’s gripping and a solid watch!
Raze (7/10) is another ten year old movie where a bunch of sick one percenter fucks kidnap women and keep them in an underground prison and make them fight to the death in a bare-knuckle arena or else they’ll kill ther loved ones (you know, standard one percenter shit). But not normal women, Aussie Zoe Bell (stuntwoman and actor, you may know her from Tarantino’s Death Proof) is our main character (and producer) and all the women are selected for being formidable – not (all) professional fighters but mostly with some history of violence. So it’s Hunger Games/Battle Royale-y; the women are trying to find a way out of the prison but are also having to just brutally bludgeon their fellow captives to death, friend and foe alike, if their number comes up. All the women actors were hell on wheels and making the most of the opportunity to be a badass. I don’t know why I had never heard of this movie before!
Bone Lake (7/10) sees a couple AirBnBing a nice lake house in the middle of nowhere and it turns out it’s “double booked” with another young hot couple and then the mind, sex, and murder games begin. Gripping and keeps you guessing! Not enough nudity for an erotic thriller though, and the gore level went from 0 to 60 pretty surprisingly at the end. The whole movie is just 4 actors, and their performances successfully drive the whole film! And the lovely house is effectively the fifth actor; it’s a great space for the setting (apparently the homeowner really hovered over them while filming) and since it’s the only location you get a really good feeling of the space. Shot in 18 days on a shoestring budget and is really, really good for that!
The Creep Tapes (7/10) was a secret screening – apparently there are a pair of movies I haven’t seen (Creep and Creep 2) and these are the first three episodes of a TV series following on that’ll be on AMC/Shudder. The crowd reacted favorably upon hearing this; I don’t like it when I hear “TV series” but it got me in a receptive mood. It’s basically a humorous spoof of a serial killer (Mark Duplass) filming his own exploits done super low budget (cast and crew: 5-6 people) and it’s really good! Funny but also startling and… well, creepy. Just goes to show a good story and talented people makes for good entertainment even if you don’t have any budget and a single shitty digital camera. I’ll go watch Creep and Creep 2 now! This may not be for everyone, it’s definitely a mood, but I liked it. At least one fellow fest-goer did not, for what that’s worth.
Geek Related 