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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 8

Posted on September 29, 2026 | Leave a comment

Last day of the fest! 8 days of movies is hard work. That’s 33 movies at the fest and 1 nearby! It was good and I went into the end with energy. The ubiquitous Hellraiser game trailer started to get semi-ironic cheers when it played today.

I love Fantastic Fest. I do tech for my job and this is a great vacation. You really don’t have time to do work, you can’t stay at home much, you don’t have to plan complicated outings – just movie after movie of wildly different creative visions. My brain feels carbonated and I am refreshed when it’s done (after catching up on sleep of course). Now, our final day slate!

The Cycle – Deborah Ann Woll stars as an elite forensic anthropologist who works out at one of those body farm facilities with dozens of controlled decomposition scenarios, 3D skull printers, the height of forensic technology! And she’s asked to consult on a case when it turns out her father, who “went to the store for milk and never came back” when she was four, is found at a particularly confusing murder scene in a costal Oregon town, so the local cops (one of whom is Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donavan) call her in. It goes slowly from a crime procedural to something more! If you like Dark Winds and True Detective but think they should do more than tease you with the supernatural element, where here you go! The plot goes a little soft once we go full creature feature but overall really fun and well done and Woll does a great job carrying it. 4/5

I tried to standby into River, the third Jessica Rothe movie of the fest, as everyone was raving about it. And sure enough, the theater was packed and no standbys were activated. Sad.

No Way Down – aka “Kraken” in France (a better title!). A French guy who just got out of prison returns to the hood and tries to go straight, but is pulled back into an abandoned high-rise project building that he has a history with, but the building has started to rack up a disappearance headcount lately. Eventually he and a batch of friends are trying to escape intact from a – maniac? Interesting brutal “slasher” movie with solid emotional core and interesting complications. Ooh la la decapitations! 3/5

Donkey Princess – Was… Baffling. A princess in the Kingdom of Chile (does Chile decorate stuff with skulls like it’s Warhammer 40k usually?) wants to defy her father the king and find love, but then… Time and dimension travels? To become a pest control worker? And a television mascot? And other stuff? I think the major theme is taking care of an ailing father. Or boyfriend? Or both? Or the tension between those? I was kept interested the whole way through but have no idea what I just saw or what it was about. Mostly live action with weird little bits of animation and claymation and puppets mixed in. Apparently inspired by a fairy tale called “Donkeyskin” – I just read a synopsis of that and it didn’t help. Like, I can catch a whiff of themes but like someone just drove by in a van smoking them. I am not totally clear why I enjoyed it enough to give it a 3/5 but I did!

The Swallow – The closing movie of the fest! Aka Night of the Living Quicksand. Goth Pinkie Pie and her four twentybopper friends go out camping and fall victim to particularly aggressive quicksand. No, really. “You know, like those old time monster movies!” You mean the ones they do on MST3K? Ok. Good mud based special effects, it out-acted the humans. Inspired by “The Raft” from Creepshow 2. 2/5

And that’s the fest! There were interesting themes that emerged that happened across multiple films.

  • Mostly immigrant casts in European movies
  • Tampons placed in bloody noses
  • Supernatural VHS tapes, which is a weird pull for the year of our Lord 2026, who even has VHS players any more. “Videos of me as a kid!” Only if you’re 40.
  • Jessica Rothe
  • Dealing with loss/grief/death
  • Going full Hellraiser creature at the end of supernatural movies
  • AirBnBs (kinda standard)

At previous Fests there were movies I regretted seeing. Really there was only one I rated one star this time, better than the previous 2 years. And plenty of top notch ones – my 5/5 list is:

  • A Prayer For The Dying – absolute must see for the general population
  • Pathetic Fallacy – absolute must see for horror fans
  • Welcome to Dolly’s House – absolute must see for anime fans
  • Girl In The Night – for deadpan fans
  • The Squirrel – for sci-fi fans
  • The Spiral – for terrifying family drama

Interestingly, I don’t mind gore and stuff but Pathetic Fallacy is the only one I’d think of as a explicit content warning in the bunch. In the rest, maybe someone dies but they’re not slashers… In The Squirrel no one does (oh… there is a brief sex scene, I guess in the US that causes panic attacks nowadays).

Back to work, I’ll be back at the fest next year!

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 7

Posted on September 28, 2026 | Leave a comment

Next to last day of the fest! A week in but I’m still going strong. Unfortunately we weren’t off to a strong start today… But we ended strong!

Death Has No Master – A woman (Asia Argento) returns to her childhood cacao plantation in Venezuela to sell it but must contend with squatters and PTSD. You wouldn’t think that’s enough plot to sustain a movie and you would be right. Billed as “slow burn,” it teases flashbacks that never go anywhere, and deliberately or accidentally refuses to let you make an emotional connection with anyone or anything. It wants to talk should colonialism and whatnot but doesn’t seem to have any real point. By the time the violence starts, it’s not just ambiguous who deserves it but also why we should care. 1/5

Corpus – A movie that dares to ask the question “can the power of cocaine enable a twink to overcome witchcraft?” Stay tuned for the answer. A New York photographer slash drug dealer, his model ex-boyfriend, and their younger version of Jason Manzoukas bro go out to a mansion in the middle of nowhere to party with a photographer who looks like Charlize Theron, her elderly Asian girlfriend, and a feral model girl. Hijinks and eventually stabbings ensue. Way too slow and no discernible point. 2/5

5 More Minutes – There’s a 5 minute “Groundhog Day” style time loop in this Spanish film but it is happening to everyone everywhere – but things or people damaged stay damaged. A couple whose marriage is on the rocks heads out to a tech-disconnected Airbnb in the country when it hits. You don’t heal and people freak out and mistrust each other so the stakes and consequences get higher each time. Enjoyable and funny but as the start and end are completely unexplained it seemed a little hollow. 3/5

Each movie today has beem getting a little better, but I was not prepared for the next…

A Prayer For The Dying – Based on the Stewart O’Nan book of the same name, this is a Western, set in Friendship, Wisconsin in 1870. It stars British folk singer Johnny Flynn as the Jacob, a combination sheriff, pastor, and undertaker, and John C. Reilly as the town doctor. A diphtheria outbreak and wildfires threaten the town as Jacob has to make increasingly hard decisions about how to keep the townsfolk safe in a world that provides no way out sometimes. It’s a heavy psychological drama about the burden of responsibility and is in a class above the other films I saw here. It’s sometimes dislocating, sometimes impressionist or surreal, sometimes painfully realistic. I haven’t read the novel but I get the sense it’s one part Cormac McCarthy and one part Daniel Kraus’ “Angel Down.” Why is a Western with A list stars at Fantastic Fest? Apparently no one in Hollywood was willing to take a high concept risk and let director Dara Van Dusen make it in the U.S. so she went to Finland to get a producer and shot it in Slovakia. Instead we get the trash we deserve I guess. 5/5

I discovered with a start that I already have the novel on my Kindle so I plan on reading it and apparently it is visually inspired by a book called Wisconsin Death Trip which in turn has a documentary which I also intend to dig into.

There was still a midnight showing to go but I was so affected by this film I needed to go home and lie down, so that’s what I did instead.

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 6

Posted on September 28, 2026 | Leave a comment

OK, 22 movies in and energy is starting to flag. I’m punishing the Alamo for their QR code ordering and ridiculous prices by not eating anything in the theater and have scavenged the nearby areas for placees I can get food in the ~1 hour between screenings. So I wasn’t *totally* crushed when I didn’t get into a film in 2 slots today (I tried for Playhouse, yet another superrnatural VHA movie, and the Spanish vampire tale Upiro), though it’s still not ideal. I did get into the morning showing though…

The Spiral – What could be more terrifying to an Italian than a fat son and a lesbian daughter? Only a mother’s smothering, smothering love! The Spiral is a really interesting and psychological Italian movie, with the bargains-with-Satan(?) aspect really almost a side note in a tale that illustrates the decisions parents make within families and how they play out, along with the related guilt, shame, control, and so on. The mother makes ever-escalating deals to get her family back to its desired idyllic Italian state of garden parties, winning at football, and slapping women when they’re lippy. A slow but hard burn, a thinking movie! I loved it, 5/5.

I tried waiting in the standby line for Playhouse as I heard great buzz for it from the first half, but was unable to get in and had 2 consecutive slots free. So I went and got an Italian at Home Slice (inspired by The Spiral of course) and… Went to see a movie!!! You heard me. The 4k re-release of the original Ghost In The Shell was in theaters one week only, the exact same week as Fantastic Fest, so I zapped over to a nearby AMC and saw it. So, I may as well review it here too!

Ghost in the Shell – The cyberpunk Japanese animated classic has some fun action, with Major Motoko Kusanagi leading a futuristic cyborg special ops squad that’s part of the Byzantine Japanese government, but it takes its time to lavish you with visuals and soundtrack and philosophical meditation on – what is a soul? (A “ghost” is a soul.) If we get more and more of our bodies replaced with tech, what are we? If an AI claims to be alive, what is it? If minds and memory can be hacked and manipulated, what is self? I’ve seen it many times and the image that has started to stick with me the most each time is a hapless garbage man, whose brain got hacked so he’d make proxy hacking calls from his trash route believing he was trying to get to see his daughter via his ex-wife, but that was all implanted memories. When they catch him and he sees that the “picture of his daughter” he’s been showing is just him with a basset hound, he is crushed and ask how they can remove the false memories – but they can’t, and his dejection is profound. It’s slow and thoughtful and in my top 3 GOAT anime (Akira and Princess Mononoke being the other two). 5/5

Back to the fest! In the feature slot was a movie I had not selected in the first half but people said it was good. I learned to avoid “puppet movies” in previous fests but this one paid off.

Kylgor In the Grisly Abyss – An all-latex puppet production of a fun 1980s type barbarian fantasy movie!  Kylgor and his four comrades go to slay the evil king and take his head – they do that as the setup, but then they and some of the pursuing evil-kingdom soldiers fall into an underground cavern full of demented monsters and slime and blood and monsters and blood and slime! Really good pacing and variety, this is the kind of thing that could get old at feature length but it doesn’t! Every character has an arc, and you can follow the sword and axe and dagger and punching and biting puppet fights… The final boss has an electrified flying guillotine as a weapon which is metal as hell. Made by a Canadian family in their garage for like $17k? Hell I’ll pitch in for a sequel!

I play a tabletop role-playing game called Dungeon Crawl Classics that has an aesthetic identical to this film, they totally should do a collab! 4/5

And finally, the midnight showing!

The Heretiks – A cult of witches that lives in the woods near the ‘burbs decide it’s time to sacrifice a random girl who is having drama with her older sister and little friend on Halloween. They have to fend them off with the help of one of the witches that disagrees with them on various theological points like “don’t bring on the end times” and “don’t giggle maniacally at all opportunities.” OK sure, it has a cast of 9 and props clearly liberated from a Spirit Halloween and is set in “a suburban house” and “a park”, but unlike the vast majority in this genre it has good pacing and remarkably coherent magic that obeys clear rules, which is refreshing. The mixed magic and melee fights are fun!  (MMA should have spells that can throw people across the room, or set them on fire, or immediately remove all their skin; I’d watch it if it did!) I mean, it’s not Halloween, but it does have a lot going for it. 3.5/5

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 5

Posted on September 27, 2026 | Leave a comment

Day 5, entering the second half of Fantastic Fest. 17 movies watched so far, and the same to go. My initial luck of getting 5/5 of my film picks during the 10 AM ticketing frenzy has faded and I’m getting maybe 3/5 now.

Before getting to the films, some other fest tidbits.

  • The marketplace they did one day with book, comic, art, and movie vendors was cool, I always find something I can’t live without (got a piece of art for my son I know he’ll like)
  • Plenty of fun swag, this Fangoria fan was very apropos since it was pushing 100 degrees F and there’s a lot of waiting outside involved
  • The new Hellraiser:Revival game must have paid them a huge suitcase of money because they played this trailer for it before every single showing (nothing else got that treatment). And dang it’s gruesome beyond anything I’ve seen in a game.
  • There were only two Secret Screenings this year which is the lowest I think it’s ever been. Weird, I don’t know why.

Anyway, on to another day of movies!

Victorian Psycho – A little tale of a delightfully deranged governess played by Malika Murphy who comes to a rural family mansion and wastes no time going completely nuts. Like an Edward Gorey tale in movie form. It asks the question, “is a psycho killer any more insane and harmful than the British aristocracy?” As always the answer is “No.” Not deep but an easy watch and Malika’s demented expressions never fail to entertain. Also has Agnes from Wednesday in a supporting role. 4/5

Janur Ireng: Sewa Dino The Prequel – An Indonesian horror film apparently based off some Twitter creepypasta thread called “Simpleman”, a newly orphaned brother and sister go live with their creepy aunt and uncle and then there’s rituals and penanggalans and possession and curses and banging of goat demons. Decent production values, not much else. Watchable…but not by a wide margin. 2.5/5

Flapjax – A camp gross-out comedy about a fast food restaurant named “Pigudders” and the hapless go-getter (think a human SpongeBob with mother issues) working there. Corporate is reviving a product, Flapjax, taken off the market a decade ago due to it causing “implosive diarrhea” in many consumers. This time the side effects are worse. Goofy and goopy. I’m not into gross-out for its own sake and this was that. But not terribly made, and had a bit of heart. 2/5

The second and final Secret Screening was Alpha Gang (big budget sci-fi comedy) but I couldn’t get in. I hear I got the better end of that deal from others later.

Into The Sky – An alien abduction rom-com where a guy keeps getting abducted for a month and dumped naked in a field in a random state, which is mildly distressing in and of itself but really screws with your ability to keep a job or wife or stuff. But then he meets a hot little event planner and things look up, but then he meets David Cross as a fellow abductee and things go wrong. Kinda like a Hallmark movie with more self-mutilation than usual. But the mom’s verbal assaults on her daughter-in-law to be were the most shocking violence in the film, it got gasps and exclamations from the audience. Was entertaining enough and went down smooth, though nothing to write home about. But if I were those darn chipmunks I’d stop f***ing with David Cross because he holds a grudge. 3/5

Ghost In The Cell – An Indonesian prison ghost movie.  It started out promising – a ghost gruesomely murders a reporters boss so he gets sent to prison where the vicious gangs are somewhat held at bay by a good guy they respect. The promise of Indonesian jail martial arts fights and horrific ghost murders just kinda peters out as slapstick and the power of friendship take over and it gets really boring in the third act. 1.5/5

Well. Not the best slate of films today, but two decent ones and only one I regret seeing. I don’t pre-research the movies besides looking at the super minimal description in the fest program, I just choose on vibes, so sometimes you roll high sometimes you roll low.

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 4

Posted on September 27, 2026 | Leave a comment

Day 4, Sunday at Fantastic Fest, the last day of the “first half”, and it was a banger! It starts with a Finnish double shot.

The Squirrel – In a controlled, hygienic future like the one in Demolition Man, where there are no more animals or sex or dirt or strong emotions allowed for your health and safety, a robot-dog designer who comes across like a Finnish Ryan Gosling (in hapless everyman Lars and the Real Girl mode) discovers a real squirrel, which rocks his world. Can he discoveee a non-hermetically sealed life without getting dragged off to reeducation by the environment suit guys from Monsters Inc.? A great meditation on where modern culture is going. The production design was a future IKEA fever dream and the acting was great. Apparently all the animal wranglers told them it was impossible to do this with real squirrels and it took them years to find some Czech squirrel whisperer to pull it off. It just got tapped to be Finland’s entry for the international film Academy Award which would be well deserved in my opinion, 5/5 best of the fest so far.

The Finns keep putting up wins! First sc-fi, now holiday horror.

Red Snow – It’s Christmastime in Finland and a vampire is replacing house call Santas (a thing there I guess) and eating families instead of milk and cookies. Except this time, the family is feckless Finnish Robert Patterson, his Twilight-worshipping daughter, Finnish Jennifer Lawrence, his mail-order Vietnamese bride, and his equally feckless son, and an aging suicidal vampire hunter, Finnish Willem Dafoe and his goth home nurse, collide into a bloodbath. Funny, gory, schlocky, a good add to your Christmas horror lineup. 4/5

The day is going strong and getting stronger.

Girl in the Night – A Slovenian deadpan absurdist indie comedy about a convenience store worker who meets a girl who is a… well, nighttime vigilante is a strong word but she graduates from finding lost ferrets to beating up bike thieves pretty quickly. He steals her bike so she’ll come around more. It’s like if A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Kick-ass had a Slovenian baby. I really enjoyed it, it was very well filmed despite being shot virtually entirely at night outside in the Slovenian town of Škofja Loka and the humor translated really well. Right up my alley! 5/5

Well! Two 5/5s and a 4/5 today, I am content. I was not expecting what was about to happen to me…

Pathetic Fallacy – I am not entirely sure how to describe this – it was something new. Which is a rare thing.

Apparently the writers of Ant-Man had a nervous breakdown and wrote this and the director (Adam Egypt Mortimer) secretly turned it into a musical. But it’s not a musical.  It’s psychedelic, but it’s not a psychedelic film. It has a slasher, but it’s not a slasher film. It defies categorization and at no time did I know where it was headed, at the beginning it seemed like 2 entirely unrelated movies, but it was confident in getting there and bringing it all together.

This movie made me go look stuff up! The pathetic fallacy, coined by Victorian critic John Ruskin, is the practice of attributing human emotions or responses to nature, animals, or inanimate objects (derived from pathos, meaning emotion, and fallacy, meaning falseness). He originally used it to criticize poetry that let false emotions distort reality.

I am not sure how to describe the film. It has:

  • Scott Mescudi, aka rapper Kid Cudi, in his first lead role as a man whose lover, Jessica Rothe, passes away from cancer in a gripping sequence that is, I am sad to report from personal experience, highly accurate
  • Axe murders, some butt naked
  • Talking animals, mostly groundhogs
  • Musical sequences, some fully diegetic with an in-movie band
  • Fully psychedelic sequences (think Pink Floyd – The Wall)
  • Soundtrack by Johnny Jewel, which is as much a part of the film as Angelo Badalamenti’s score is in Twin Peaks
  • Natasha Lyonne in a toothsome supporting role as a spider. Imagine an evil Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web encouraging Wilbur to kill. “Be a bad pig!”
  • Lush full 35mm cinematography filmed at night by a commercial/video cinematographer that didn’t know you couldn’t do that on an indie budget
  • Plenty of mind-bending effects done with no AI
  • Rage about the death of those in your life

But that’s just a reductive list that doesn’t in any way explain what this amazing movie is. In the Q&A afterwards the director said that “In genre film, the emotional violence should equal the physical violence.” It came over me in a rush that is what I find missing in a lot of the genre films I’ve been seeing lately, which hinge brutality on the most absolutely tenuous emotional stakes. And he did it, you fully understand and feel the pain and trapped feeling and thwarted love of Kid Cudi, who acts his absolute ass off in the film.

This movie has turned genre film into art without making it pretentious. I was amazed and delighted, it’s one of my two favorite films I saw at Fantastic Fest this year. And amazing work and acting from everyone involved. Disney should replace Jonathan Majors with Kid Cudi for the Kang the Conqueror role, and Jessica Rothe showed she has serious chops that will go well past horror and rom-coms. I feel like this movie can maybe be described as “David Lynch for the newer generation” – the same thoughtful, holistic combination of the grotesque and sublime. Go see it! 5/5

I was going to see “No Way Down” in the midnight slot but I had to go hit the Pathetic Fallacy after-party instead, where Johnny Jewel and the band from the movie performed. The director, Natasha Lyonne, Kid Cudi, and Jessica Rothe were in attendance. No Kid Cudi on stage though, alas (I guess, I still am not sure… Oh… OK, I’ve heard “Day ‘N’ Nite” on TikTok a bunch, now that I go looking for his music.)

Since then I’ve been continuing to think about the movie. Were the animals and mountain evil, or not? Usually when demonic animals tell you to “kill”, that’s what we usually say is a “bad thing” but in this case… Did he really? If he did was it actually OK given the ending? Was this all a Jacob’s Ladder scenario because he really did take a handful of pills 15 minutes in? I don’t know! One reading is just that it’s a meditation on grief at a last-episode-of-Evangelion level.

I do know that it just makes sense to get butt naked if you’re about to axe murder people so you have clean clothes to put on though. So there’s one solid takeaway.

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 3

Posted on September 26, 2026 | Leave a comment

Saturday at Fantastic Fest! And it was a really solid lineup I saw today.

Welcome to Dolly’s House – A Taiwanese rotoscoped animated movie about a “eerie sites” type influencer, her flower arranging boyfriend, and a famous and mysterious dollmaking lady. And then it goes bananas. It’s super stylish and beautiful, and is one of the few treatments of influencer characters that wasn’t trite or annoying. In the end it had a very effective message of a girl being an influencer trying to fill the gap inside her left by her craving love and only getting a bunch of poor substitutes.

Visually it sometimes reminded me of Paprika, but with modern techniques like you see in Blue Eyed Samurai. 5/5

And then – another VHS based horror movie, like Death of a Yellow Bird from yesterday. There was another VHS horror movie, Playhouse, that got really good buzz and I wasn’t able to get into all fest 😦

Posthumous – A VHS tape haunting slash familial trauma movie! Zoe, a thirty year old woman “with a shitty aura” goes back home to hang out with her burnout dad and rummage through historical knickknacks for her birthday, which is always marred by her mom dying of cancer when she was born. But mom made some proactive video birthday wishes for her first 21 years (over the course of time, and I was initially very concerned that her mom was pregnant every year like clockwork when she filmed these till it became more clear). Turns out her parents hung out with the new agers next door back in the day but Zoe’s dad warns her to stay away from the “pot selling witch” next door. Then it ramps up from your normal VHS tape supernatural horror to Hellraiser level. It’s really well done, though I kept getting turned off by the missteps – like there’s diegetic video viewing which was good but then also there were just gratuitously inserted video shots and/or filters direct to audience which were obviously manipulative and not necessary because there were good bones there already. Also in the end there was just a bit too much explaining and a bit too much denouement – 4/5, if it had been tauter it’d hit 5/5.

This next one was for sure on my must watch list if only because last year’s Indian vampire movie Sister Midnight was one of my favorites and this looked stylish as heck.

Half – A movie in Malayam, which as a dumb American I’ve never heard of but it’s the language of a southern Indian state. It’s their first international release and first time at a film festival! And it’s a banger.
We have a pair of smoldering twins (the girl is mute, the boy a hunk) who get run off the road and murdered by some road bandits in the Rajistan desert. However, it turns out they are half vampires! So when night comes they heal up and go on a revenge spree.
Apparently Indians also like them some torture porn as the pair meted out gruesome justice while the bad guys also get their dhampir torturing in. It has a bopping music soundtrack and intense action and Silat-infused fight choreography from Very Tri Yulisman who worked on The Raid and The Raid 2 among other high velocity actioners. Kinda reminded me of The Crow. Except Indian. And twins. And in the desert. Anyway, a wild ride! 4/5

Ever seen Role Models? Knights of Badassdom? I guess “norms go into a LARP” is a whole genre now. To explain this, LARP, or “live-action roleplay”, is where a whole bunch of people get together in the woods to pretend to be elves and stuff and have a big organized event where they do quests. Like Dungeons & Dragons but outside.

Game Master – A French movie about a single corporate salesman dad who pursues his daughter, who is skipping her business school interview, into a massive LARP. Hijinks ensue. The director, who does a TV series that is like a French Curb Your Enthusiasm, describes it as “the wedding of Lord of the Rings and cringe comedy” which is pretty accurate. Goofy fun, family values, solidly in the “good hearted LARP subgenre.” Suitable for the family, which is unusual for Fantastic fest movies. Sentimental but watchable. 3/5

And to round out the night, the midnight showing was a bood old fashioned brutal slum apartment murder fest, like they do.

Kick On – An Australian movie about four friends out partying all night. They need some more coke and so they go to a guy… a crack fueled son of a Russian mobster who has a Roman fixation. Well it all goes bad and gruesome bludgeoning, wounding, and killing go on and on since the crooks are only barely competent. Mean and brutal but pretty straightforward and solidly done. The Brisbane Bandits are in the credits for some reason. 3/5

Whew, day 3 of movies going well past 1 AM, I’m starting to feel it. Will Sunday be a day of rest?

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 2

Posted on September 26, 2026 | Leave a comment

Here’s the full film guide for the fest. How this works is that there’s usually 5 showings a day (11, 2, 5, 8, 11) and you have to select your movies (if you’re a peasant with a Fan level badge like me) at 10 AM sharp every day, when a solid thousand fest-goers all click reload in a frenzy trying to be the first ones in and you have about 60 seconds to get tickets before they’re all gone. Then you leap in your car to get to the theater in time for the first showing at 11 and ride it hard till you go home at like 1:30 AM. Today I got 4 out of 5 of my first picks, but in the first slot I couldn’t get into “Ghost In The Cell” and went with my backup, Roma Elastica.

Roma Elastica – A 1980s glam Italy fever dream. The most European movie it is possible to make. Well, southern Europe, so it makes moping and death look good. (Eastern Europe makes moping and death look brutal and Northern Europe makes moping and death look philosophical. That’s your 101 guide to European cinema.) Anyway, Marion Cotillard is a (slightly) aging French actress with a newly discovered brain tumor who goes to 1980s Italy to film a movie. The movie is ridiculous, the people are ridiculous, her pain not so much. It’s like if you took a very vague idea about what The Substance is about and made it sooooo European. Fair warning, I laughed out loud a good number of times but I think I was the only one who did. It’s satire but a weird kind of satire. Often I find films about filmmaking/actors to be dreadful and narcissistic but so far she’s 2 for 2 on making it work (last year’s The Ice Tower was also really good). Anyway, you have to go into this one with the right mindset and have fun with it. 3/5

Then the high point of the day was another film whose lead was dying of cancer! Talk about a theme.

Death of a Yellow Bird – A guy with a terminal cancer diagnosis goes to his old family home to hang out alone and come to grips with it. But is he alone? What’s the deal with his father and his brother? This one is really good, a VHS-tape supernatural slow burn tension builder about family trauma and healing.
I did see the “twist” coming a mile away but it kept me on the edge of my seat till the end. Well acted (basically one actor, not counting videos, memories, and voices on the phone), directed, shot, sound design, really good. And not gruesome at all, it’s family safe (though scary). 4.5/5.

Then, a very promising premise that didn’t deliver.

Kung Fu Deadly – An Irish movie set in modern Dublin where jiangshi (Chinese hopping vampires) led by an undead Chinese pirate lady are revived by a feckless vaping… mobster (?) and attack! Or at least disrupt the rat population and take over a karaoke lounge. A Chinese-Irish version of Simon Pegg and an African-Irish version of Nick Frost who are brothers (?) who work as exterminators fight them off with the powers of… Ancient Chinese magic? Family? Chinese dance? Spice bags and Guinness? Not a bad premise but the humor and action were lacking and the melodrama gave me diabetes. It’s a shame. There’s a cool coin sword and everything. But not enough kung fu, not enough hopping vampires. 2.5/5

Godmother – Hmm, it’s tough to review this one without giving the big twist away… OK light spoiler warning, because this starts out like your usual Airbnb slasher (a young couple goes to a desert house rental for a romantic weekend, her wild sister tags along, and the old folks of the area are weird…) and ends up like Rosemary’s Baby meets Hellraiser. Quite a ride! And the production of this indie film sounds equally grueling. Filmed in 16 days, co-written by Alanah Pearce from the game Dispatch and eventually given money by streamer Jacksepticeye to get it over the finish line. The result is a really good horror movie! Great performances by both female leads. 4/5

And Alanah Pearce was in attendance! She’s built like Malevola in real life. The next movie was a “secret screening”, which means you don’t know what it is until you’re in the theater! Speculation was rampant about what it’d be, the majority seemed to think a new V/H/S movie, but not so…

In a Violent Nature: Part 2 – Basically an updated Friday the 13th where an implacable undead killer with an old timey fireman mask instead of a hockey mask and the most tenuous of backstories rips his way through a summer camp. You get about 5-10 minutes of setup and then it’s full tilt kill. This is one of those movies that has no point except to innovate around the gruesomeness of the murders, stretching the limits of special effects and taste. Getting hacked in two with a hatchet is the most mundane way to go in this one; camp counselors get various objects pushed through them and are dismembered and decapitated and blood eagled for a couple hours. It doesn’t have the touch of whimsy of a Terrifier movie (winking hell clown murders!), it’s just murder porn. Not my cup of tea, but well done for what it is. At least the main kid has a character arc (debatably). I’ll give it a point for good cinematography even at night. 2/5

And that’s 5 films down! More to come on Day 3.

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Fantastic Fest 2026 – Day 1

Posted on September 25, 2026 | Leave a comment

I went to Fantastic Fest for the first time in 2009, and have been off and on since – 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2023, 2024, 2025, and now 2026! Eight solid days of film-watching with 5 showings most days. It is “genre” film, which is a weird term that means horror, scifi, “foreign”… Basically anything non-mainstream. It’s here in Austin, TX and is held by the Alamo Drafthouse.

The fest kicked off with a big feature…

Resident Evil! An organ delivery driver is given a special package to go to Raccoon City General Hospital and – if you know anything about Resident Evil that’s ’nuff said. A completely different take on Resident Evil than all the previous incoherent actioners, by the director of Weapons and Barbarian. It was humorous and scary in turns, going for an Evil Dead 2 sort of vibe. Many of the shots were video gamey but not, you know, bad, as you might be led to expect by that statement. The action is nonstop and gruesome, these aren’t just zombies, it’s tentacle mutating body horror from the jump and escalated over the course of our hapless everyman’s journey. A fun watch. 3.5/5

Then it was snakey time, hence all the snake decor.

Beware Boiúna – A medical volunteer mission on the Amazon runs afoul of both colonizers and jumbo sized wildlife. Can be summed up as “a better Anaconda” in terms of effects and most technical measures. Is nature or man more ruthless? Well, one has a giant ass snake in play. But team human has a scrappy indigenous girl! Filmed on location along the Amazon. Not Werner Herzog by any means but a solid giant creature feature. Well made by Michael P. Nelson, director of last year’s “Silent Night, Deadly Night” reboot and solid if B-movie acting from the leads. And I got to hold a big snake they had as a promo. 3/5

One of the two female leads was Jessica Rothe, who was starring in three movies at the fest! Scream Queen of 2026 for sure.

The Glorious Dead – By the Adams family, a local fest favorite family/group that generates a movie a year plus or minus. A small town sheriff, Deb, has weird things start to happen in town. Sounds like half the streaming series out now right? Well this is a really small rural town and the sheriff is used to everyone being crackpots or helpless and wanting random handyman help from her so it takes a good number of weird reports to get her attention but then it gets really weird and gruesome fast. A horror comedy about the dead coming back to life, but a much different take on it than you’d expect. I liked the premise – but it was the late movie and they needed to edit it, they went through the same core loop of being confronted by the problem/doing the same thing about the problem/seeing that doesn’t work 3 full times and I was falling asleep by the third. It’s only 81 minutes long though. 2.5/5, 3/5 after an edit.

The first night of the fest was a success – kind of a downward trend over the evening, but whatver! I was up fresh and early for day 2…

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Eight

Posted on October 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

The last day of the fest. Fatigue has set in. You’ve seen most of the films so you start picking random stuff out of the schedule.

Angel’s Egg – A restored 1984 anime by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano (Vampire Hunter D). Cryptic, weird, haunting. A little girl (?) tends a large egg in an abandoned world and meets a mysterious soldier (?). Very little dialogue, mostly the sounds of wind and rain and water and footsteps. Cool and surreal. It’s on HBO MAX now but I figured I should see it on the big screen, and that was the right call. Slow and moody alert, but I like that. 4/5 stars.

Lunatic: The Luna Vachon Story – A documentary about female wrestler Luna Vachon and her struggle to get both herself and women’s wrestling taken seriously, with bipolar disorder, lots of drugs, a culture of abuse, and sex trafficking getting in the way (not to mention Vince McMahon). Lots of segments from her adoptive father Paul “The Butcher” Vachon, several wrestlers she had been friends with, and her son, who is all blonde, square-jawed, and smiling as he relates heartwarming tales of not seeing his mom for years, getting involved in gangs, being beaten, not seeing her for a year at a time, and doing lines of coke with her. (He went on to first prison and then a couple seasons of Hell’s Kitchen). A pretty depressing expose (Rowdy Roddy Piper likes to rape 13-year-olds apparently) alongside a tale of someone who spent every bit of her energy trying to achieve her dream and got 98% of the way there despite it all. 3.5/5 stars.

Camp (or, CAMP) – A young woman is upset because she ran over a kid when she was 16 and her best friend OD’ed recently. So she goes to become a camp counselor and makes friends with the other counselors who like to party, take drugs, and engage in light witchcraft. It is… puzzling and unsatisfying and gets real surreal toward the end. But maybe their witchcraft works because I want to hate it, but there were enough flashes of good moviemaking to keep me engaged… It seems like any random cult dreck movie but was slightly better, though for no reason I am able to identify. It was not comedy, or horror, or drama really, just… dreamy? 2/5 stars.

I talked with others after the showing to try to make sense of it. “I’m not sure who that’s for or what it’s trying to say or why” was a common sentiment. But, opinions vary, it won one of the fest awards. I’m trying not to be judgemental about that, though this seems more like a film you’re “supposed” to like (ha ha! down with Christians and up with lesbianism!) than you actually *do* like.

Then the final slot of the fest! They saved a new horror movie for it to go out with a bang.

Whistle – Hot goth lesbian moves to a new high school and she and her friends, a jock, a princess, a The Crow cosplayer, and a hot preppie lesbian, run afoul of an Aztec Death Whistle that kills all who hear it!  About what you’d expect, the cool twist is that you die in the way you eventually would if you lived till whenever you were gonna kick the bucket, from “old age” to “fell into a wood chipper.” Oddly none are peaceful, even if it’s old age you get chased around by an old ghoulish monster version of yourself first. The kills are not as epic as you’d hope for though, from a Final Destination kind of thing. 3/5 stars, maybe generous but heck I’m in a generous mood!

And now, the closing night party! I don’t always go to these but this one sounded boss. It was out at Robert Rodriguez’ Troublemaker Studios in a cool outside city set!

Besides music and drinking there was a big ol fantasy LARP type of scavenger hunt where you had to protect a minotaur by defeating a minotaur hunter, which involved a lot of fetch quests from random NPCs – find runes, deliver a message, find an herb, draw some sketches, you know, adult Dora the Explorer episodes.

In the end it’s rolling dice at a table getting benefits from each thing you gathered. I hooked up with a band of merry folks and we murderized the bad guy!

And that was Fantastic Fest 2025, the 20th anniversary edition! I’m sure to go back next year, I just need to make sure I get a Superfan badge so I don’t have to queue for tickets. I hope some of these movie reviews help and encourage you to check out some unusual films you might otherwise not notice!

My three best of the fest were Sirat, A Woman Called Mother, and Ikatan Darah – a drama, a horror movie, and an action movie, all foreign. Keep an eye out for them.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Seven

Posted on October 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

A week in but we’re still not done! It starts hurting a bit at this point. But, you know, a good hurt.

Let’s dispense with the first two quickly, as they were both forgettable.

V/H/S Halloween – A collection of “found footage” ultra low budget shorts. They can all be summed up as “something to do with a shakycam and all your haunted house props in the off season.” Vaguely amusing, mostly snoozing. 2/5 stars.

Deathstalker – A remake of the 1984 fantasy film. Daniel Bernhardt is our sword-swinging antihero cursed by an amulet he looted off a dying prince.  He will have to defeat way too many glistening latex monsters and stop-motion critters to defeat a prophecy or something.  What will carry the day?  The poorly aimed magic missiles of the lizard-midget Doodad?  The cute scrappy but utterly ineffective thief girl? A magical four-bladed sword made by a bored kid in shop class?  Lead guitar by Slash on the song “Deathstalker?” Fight choreography straight out of the worst Hercules: The Legend Continues episodes? We’ll see.  A fun throwback to bad 1980s fantasy movies, but not, you know… Good. The pacing was leaden. 2/5 stars.

There was a “20 years of the Masters of Horror” panel with Don Coscarelli, Joe Dante, and Ernest Dickerson; I could only catch a couple minutes of it though before running to one of the best movies of the fest.

A Woman Called Mother (Dia Bukan Ibu) – Genuinely terrifying. I watch a lot of horror and can’t remember the last time I got actually scared by a movie but woo doggie this one did it.

An Indonesian movie (the writer/director has been at Fantastic Fest before, in 2021 with martial arts actioner Preman), it’s about a single mom and her two teenage kids, a boy and a girl (the eldest and primary lead) moving out into the sticks where their uncle lives to start a hair salon a couple years after the father left. It has deep and complex character interaction very realistic to a partially-broken family. Does the mom regret being a mother? How does she reclaim her womanhood while also a single mom to two kids? How does the bond between the siblings weather their new life circumstances? How do you balance living a family member with the consequences of their mental health issues? Hey why does mom slaughter chickens every day? Are the kids just being really suggestible because they spend their spare time filming “ghosts are here” content for social media, or did they really see something weird in the mirror? The girl’s subjective observation vs reality can be hazy… Oh but don’t worry it ramps up hard as the movie barrels toward its climax! It almost lags a couple times- there’s twice you think “oh the movie might be over” but that’s just it starting another level up of crazy.

Expertly done, every bit as good as a Hereditary or other modern horror touchstone. This isn’t “good for an Indonesian movie” it’s top tier. It’s the director’s first horror movie and he’s got the touch for sure. 5/5 stars.

Between this and Ikatan Darah the Indonesians are on fire this year! Afterwards I made sure to find the director and actor of the older sister, who had both come to Austin for the premiere, and told them how good it was.

Then there was another secret screening. I waited in the standby line but couldn’t get in, and by that time it was too late to see something else. It was the new Gore Verbinski movie “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” starting Sam Rockwell, apparently. I’d never heard of it but later I heard that folks tended to like it. My late showing of horror comedy Coyotes was like three hours away – I went and got some dinner and killed an hour, and then I just couldn’t take it and went home.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Six

Posted on October 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

This morning in the first slot they were also running some D&D! How could I resist.

Courtesy of the nice folks at Tiny Minotaur, they ran a Dungeon in a Box adventure where we all ended up taking over mecha to fight a giant bug. I played Scylla the bronze dragonborn Circle of the Sea druid. I had a fun group, the other players were a guy and his dad both of who come to the fest, and two lovely ladies on their honeymoon. We rocked through the adventure with nary a hit point lost.

Theater is Dead – A really fun movie about a college engineering major lured into acting in a local theater production! I won’t give away the twist but it’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Glee. A lot of the cast and crew had worked together on Juniper and self funded this, did like 3 jobs each, and filmed it in in 14 days.  Most “we did this on a shoestring” movies are “good, you know, considering that” but this looked perfectly big budget and well done! High energy, funny, tightly edited, and very engaging, the audience was really into it. This is the kind of “theater people making stuff for themselves” premise that has fueled many indifferent kinda-cringe horror movies but this was really skillfully executed and was a joy to watch. Sure, it had goofy bits but that was part of the point, they never let it lag. 4/5 stars.

Then the big evening showing was a secret screening. What could it be, everyone buzzed? And we were psyched to find out we were going to see One Battle After Another!

One Battle After Another: Theatrical ...
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER" - Review

One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. Leonardo DiCaprio and Regina Hall are revolutionaries, part of the French 75, who rob banks and free detainees from immigrant concentration camps. As so often happens, the feds get people to rat and it all falls apart and people go into hiding, and Leo and his daughter go to ground for decades while he bakes his brain on drugs and she grows up and hangs out with her high school friends. But the forces of law, mostly driven by racism and sex perversion, never let it go and then they’re on the run again – and that’s when they run across Benicio Del Toro, the daughter’s karate teacher, who is involved in a big immigrant underground railroad. It’s an interesting and lively take on resisting injustice, and the different approaches to that and the terrible cost of it. See it before Trump bans it! 5/5 stars.

After, they gave out fake beard-thingys, which was fun. VIVA LA REVOLUCION!!!

Her Will Be Done – a teenage girl lives on a mud-covered (modern day) cow farm in the hillbilly region of France.  Is she a lesbian, a witch, or just Polish? The locals don’t really like any of those options. Then slime molds start growing everywhere and cows start dying as the girl who offed her abusive boyfriend tries to sell her house, also garnering the ire of the locals. Very slow burn and suspenseful. It’s one of those “so was that supernatural horror – or not?” movies. There’s nudity and cows dying, so it would never play here in the US where we tolerate those things worse than mass murder in film.  Very well done! 3.5/5 stars.

Beast of War – Remember the story Quint tells in Jaws about his naval vessel in WWII sinking and nearly everyone getting eaten by sharks?  This is that but Australian. Totally serviceable survivor horror shark movie. But is the real enemy the shark – or racism? Find out here. 3/5 stars.

Not much more to say. Shark! More tomorrow.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Five

Posted on October 9, 2025 | Leave a comment

The second half of the festival arrives! Some of the glitterati bail after the weekend, they even sell a “second half” badge, and many of the movies get shown in the first and second halves.

Before the first film of the day, I quickly went to the spooky book sale or whatever they called it, focusing on Texas horror authors, where I picked up three – “The Legend of Charlie Fish” by Josh Rountree (Tachyon Publishing), a horror novel set in Galveston during the hurricane, “Whispers of the Dead Saint” by John Bathlisberger (Madness Heart Press), fiction for Mork Borg the new style RPG, and “Mother-Eating” by Jess Hagemann (Ghoulish Books), a retelling of Marie Antoinette’s reign set in Austin. And I got all three signed by the author!

I also picked up “Corpses, Fools, and Monsters” a book about transness in cinema. If you like horror and barbeque, check out Haunt Happy Books in Lockhart and if you like gaiety check out The Little Gay Shop in Austin.

For the first movie slot, I planned to see “whatever I missed out of Sirat, Luger, Vicious, and Folies Merutreries.” I saw all the other three already, which is good because Sirat was a winner.

Sirat – This film hit me like a ton of bricks. Here’s my raw notes I took as I sat outside the theater afterward still having to will myself not to cry a half hour later.

“I don’t know what I’m feeling. Loss? Grief? Existential dread? My heart feels hollow. People say it’s bleak. Is it really? Or is it just unflinching?”

I don’t really know how to explain the movie, the plot is really just a reason the characters are there – a man and his young son are living in their van driving around looking for their teenage daughter, and they go to an underground rave in the desert near Morocco to hand out flyers and look for her. The federales break that one up but they hear from some of the ravers there’s another one so they caravan across the desert with some interesting characters that definitely seem like career race-goers – sun-baked, drug-baked, tattooed, one missing an arm, another a leg, speaking a mix of Spanish, French, English, and Arabic, weird but but good-natured, in a converted bus and Mercedes 911 transport truck. Some things go wrong while driving for days and days across the desert. Maybe World War III is happening in the background, hard to tell when you’re in the middle of a Moroccan desert.

There’s a pretty sparse amount of dialogue – most of the time it’s just sensory storytelling – thumping bass, roaring engine, and the moan of dust-laden desert wind. Definitely needs to be seen on the big screen, or at least the big speakers! But what’s it about? I don’t know, man. Human connection but isolation. Hope and desperation and despair. Everyday toil and the suddenness of tragedy. All of that. In my opinion it shows how you cross the thin line to being a refugee. Sirat means “the narrow bridge from hell to paradise” so that tracks I guess.

I have to stop writing about it now because I’m getting upset again. But best of the fest by a wide margin. Won the Jury Prize at Cannes too and is getting submitted by Spain for the international Academy Award. NEON will be releasing it here in January. 5/5 stars.

I just sat outside in silence until the next showing. Here’s another review of Sirat for you. It’s best seen on the big screen, or at least the big speaker, as so much of it is the immersive sound design and cinematography. Here’s a Spotify playlist of the soundtrack if you want to desert-rave.

Penance – a movie made for $7k by a bunch of stunt people!  Good action in the beginning, two brothers attack a whole warehouse+bar installation of goons because… something about their sister? Anyway, they kill infinite goons but the Bad Guy and his three sons jack them up, burning one with acid and such.  Cut to three years later and they are healed up and ready for revenge, they go after it a lttle more serial-killy than you can do and stay the good guys.  Lags hard in the middle but there’s a good twist at the end. The sound wasn’t finished, and the acting levels varied, but for $7k quite an achievement! 3/5 stars.

Dinner to Die For – a hot food photographer and true crime lover needs a piece de resistance for her new cookbook. She teases her pet friendzoned guy with scenarios about participating in a food related thrill kill with a curvy lesbian next door. Is she just teasing him? What will happen?  A good South African thriller made mainly with three people and a cool loft. 3/5 stars.

One fine day, all the movies made during COVID will finally finish being released and we’ll get full casts again. Though maybe peak capitalism will still prevent it. Anyway, this leads us to the second Secret Screening of the fest!

Bugonia – The new Emma Stone acted, Yorgos Lanthimos directed, Ari Aster produced A-tier feature about two losers who abduct hyper-CEO Emma Stone because they think she’s an alien plotting against humanity, as proven by the stuff she and her bio-pharma-tech-whatnot company does to people and the world. Which is plausible. It was good, a fun ride! Conspiracies, capitalism, and so on. Possibly more ambitious in touching on “hot button topics” than actually delivering on solid conclusions on them. I will sum it up as “Emma puts the lotion on her skin or she gets the hose again” and “Fuuuuucking Andromedans!” 4/5 stars.

In the final slot I had a ticket to The Curse, but I have a bad attitude about all the ‘social media horror’ movies this year, I feel like they’re all just “let’s remake The Ring or whatever but instead of VHS it’s… Instagram!” That may not be fair in every case but it’s fair enough that I avoided the genre, which means after going outside to watch people take advantage of the free head-shaving after Bugonia I turned in.

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