Not everything’s a winner. But it’s a range, the 4’s you might like if they’re your thing… The ones I rated 1-2 I have trouble understanding how anyone would like, but someone made them!
I, The Executioner (4/10) was a perfectly serviceable Korean cop thriller movie, a sequel to 2014’s “Veteran,” apparently with the same Major Crimes squad from the first. A serial killer is killing people who got off easy from the justice system and they must catch him. Like a PG rated Se7en. It was OK. Some action but not “whoa check out that martial arts or gun fu” level. A lot of modern Korean film including this seems like watered down versions of what already exists. Not much more to say, watch it if you are bored and are really into Korean shows.
Frankie Freako (4/10) is a silly retro puppet movie starring Fake Young Dana Carvey and Fake Chrissy Tiegen where the hopelessly square husband calls the “Frankie Freako” 1-900 line to try to get less bland and suddenly little Garbage Pail Kids type puppets are tearing up his house. It is a reference to “Freddie Freaker” from the late ’80’s. It’s lightly entertaining but not great – who is this for? It’d be PG if not for an explicit neck wound and bear-trapped leg – content wise otherwise it’s solidly there’s at 11-12 year olds. Like, Gremlins is spicier. They could have gone hard R with it and had Frankie showing Fake Dana Carvey how to Eiffel Tower Fake Chrissy Tiegen and play up the gore, but no, “freaky partying” is drinking Fart Cola and spray painting the living room. The puppets didn’t have much funny dialogue either, just “let’s get freaky!” I didn’t hate it, it kept me engaged, but I don’t know who it’s for that would pay to see it.
Disembodied aka Aberration (4/10) is a 4k remaster of a 1998 film that you would swear was a surrealist horror movie from the ’60’s. A lady takes a room (technically, the boiler room) in the worst hotel ever and then decorates her room with her jarred brain and bathtub full of, uh, vaginal nodules and then starts growing oozing lumps. And is being tracked by an Evil Colonel Sanders looking guy from the Plasmaster Corporation. Luckily her next door hooker friend is on her side. Very gooey and trippy. The dialogue is hilarious but there’s not enough of it, with large parts having the put-me-to-sleep effect of slow moving old time horror. There is *lots* of vaginal imagery but no actual vaginas. Unclear resolution on the ending. This movie does not look great, I shudder to imagine it prior to this uplift work. I mean, I get the guy made it in his spare time with his spare money but 1998 horror movies were like “The Faculty” and “Ringu” and this looks like one of the “we just got out of the black & white era” films on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Universal Language (4/10) is an absurdist – comedy? – that merges a fantasy post-Quebec independence Canada with Iran and is in half French and half Farsi, with Tim Hortons becoming a samovar-bearing tea house. Which is cool but… I struggled to find a point and even to stay awake (and this was a 2:30 PM showing). There was some fun to be had seeing some Persian kids from the French immersion school wandering around on their youthful shenanigans in a snow-covered beige-building-filled Alberta that kinds looks like a sand-covered beige-building-filled Iran but other than that it was a bunch of visually interesting scenes where you felt like “this must MEAN something” but it’s totally opaque what besides the single obvious family regret angle. It has mood and technique but plot and acting not so much. I loved last year’s Moroccan art house film by Sofia Alaoui, Animalia, and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home At Night; it’s not like I can’t get behind weird slow Middle Eastern stuff, I just didn’t get this one. I was briefly excited by the appearance of an “eclairagiste” in the credits and I thought they might have an eclair expert on staff but it just means lighting tech. Fucking Quebec.
Baby Invasion (3/10) defies easy explanation. It doesn’t have plot – at best you could say it has a loose conceit of people streaming themselves performing home invasions using baby face filters with comments streaming over the screen with a deafening techno as the entire soundtrack, but interspersed with trippy random Unreal Engine computer graphic kaleidoscopic… scenes? Segments? Anyway, even writing this down makes it seem more coherent than it is. Though strangely it’s not terrible; I could sit through it without intense regret. Not that I would recommend it; it’s the kind of thing that should just play on a big screen during a rave or something. Oddly non-graphic content wise though, possibly because the budget was “a dozen yo-yos and their airsoft gun collection and one guy who can use Unreal Engine.” And it is impressive the sheer volume of twitch stream comments they generated, thousands and thousands.
Ick (2/10) is a high school horror movie like The Faculty, but less subtle and played constantly at x2 speed. I am not exaggerating; I thought maybe we were just starting with a double-speed flashback or title scene but no it just kept going like that. No time for emotional beats or memorable sights, just ultrafast self-aware basic GenZ quips and CGI death. And 30-ish 2000s pop-punk needle drops. Not only did I not like it, now I am nursing a headache. The filmmaker wanted to make “a PG-13 starter horror movie for his 13 year old.” Maybe just put them on ADHD meds instead.
Zenithal (1/10, no link I can find which is probably for the best) is a wild mistake of a French movie about, I guess, penis oriented martial arts? Which could be goofy fun in concept, but then there were zero martial arts – or penises, except for the blurred/clothed three foot penis of the victim who was found “dick-capitated.” The height of humor here is practicing “Sexkido” and “being less genital and more zen-ithal.” If you are not guffawing by now then this movie has nothing for ya. Production value hovers around “don’t spend more than $20 on set dressing” level. And there’s a weird choice to make it very much like it’s a sequel to a previous movie (it’s not) and relying on alluded to prior events to make you give a crap about any of these characters. I made it 3/4 of the way through and finally the 20 minute long speech from the incel villain kept putting me to sleep and I just left. Come on, French people can do martial arts movies! District B-13! This made me sad and angry and sleepy. But I guess I’m happy the French are swinging for the fences, we get Planet B out of them in the same year, so if this is the price we have to pay, OK.
And that’s the Fantastic Fest 2024 roundup! Only two real stinkers and a lot of good stuff, I really enjoyed the programming this year.
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