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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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Four

Posted on October 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

Sunday at the festival starts off slow, as Friday and Satrday nights are full of fun. I considered seeing Holy Boy in the first slot, but decided on a roundup of Indian shorts billed as “Fantastic India!” instead. Really more general SE Asian. I have learned to skip the shorts programming in general after several years of it just being a “how gross can we be” competition but there have been really interesting Indian movies the last two years so I thought I’d hit Indian shorts to get a smorgasboard. The shorts were:

From Me To You
  • Demons – a guy who just wants his heroin delivery man to top him explodes in gore when he takes the drug. And maybe there’s a supernatural creature of some sort? Short and serviceable, 3/5
  • Landfills of Desire – about the Rantas, some kind of Kashmiri witch. Mainly just some chick dressed up all goth walking around slash laying in a dining table while a voiceover alternates between cartoonishly ominous warnings about the rantas interspersed with 30 days of night style vampire shrieks. Marginal even for a film class. 1/5
  • From Me To You – very high budget looking cyberpunk Vietnam where there’s also aliens now living in a underclass similar to District 9. A sex tourist gets more than he bargained for with an alien prostitute. Really outstanding visuals but also themes. Outclassed all the other shorts by a wide margin. 5/5
  • The Last Ride – Mumbai cabbie trying to raise money for his sister’s dowry has misadventures ending with giving a ride to a witch but just like in the real world witches are the good guys compared to the cops! 4/5
  • Moti – COVID fable about a family dog that turns into a boy, or at least a boys body but is still a dog mostly. Well acted and tries to take the premise seriously but it was way too long and I got snoozy. 2.5/5
  • Night of the Bride – forcing a woman into a marriage with your rapey son is just good clean Indian fun, but when he’s also already dead it’s over the line. Good, short and to the point. 3/5
  • Rajas & the Wolf Girl – sweet, funny and strikingly animated short combining rotoscoped 2d for the main characters and 3d including mocap for the environment/secondary characters. Sideshow freaks need love too. No dialogue, just sounds, which was effective. Very cute and enjoyable. 4.5/5
  • Whodunit – a batch of Indian actors wait on roles, and apparently make this sketch while they wait as a demo reel. Fine for what it is but if you’re not casting Indian men in a movie give it a pass. 2/5

It was a solid set of shorts, only one aggravated me and two bored me, but the rest ranged from solid to really good! It’s good to see Indian cinema breaking out of the usual trenches. And a special shout-out, my favorite movie credit up till now has been “Vomit Monster” in Poltergeist 2 but now that’s rivaled by “Tongue Double” from From Me To You. And that tongue double worked overtime let me tell you.

Next slot, I decided on Marama over Crazy Old Lady, and Chocolate, which while it sounded fun (a Thai martial arts movie with an autistic girl that gets Taskmaster-type abilities from it) is from 2008 and available for home streaming so I watched it before the fest. 3/5, a servicable martial arts movie, goofy with good but not great fight sequences.

Marama is the first in a planned trilogy of Māori gothic horror movies! Our heroine Mary (Marama) is a Māori woman who was adopted by a British family as an orphaned baby, and she travels to a country estate in Britain based on a letter promising to reveal information about her birth family. Very well filmed and spooky! The first part evokes Jonathan Harper going to Dracula’s castle, but of course the real enemy is the Hated British. Good plot and supernatural elements, the tension ratchets up throughout even in scenes that could have become comical (the party where all the British are cosplaying as Māori and sailors and queens for example). Marama is freaked out by what’s going on but otherwise is a self-assured, strong woman, no screaming and running aimlessly down hallways in fear for her. Definitely worth a watch, gothic horror is so seldom done well any more and this is a fresh twist. Goes just a touch into cringe with the “Maori power” message, like, we get it. 4/5 stars.

After that I came out to discover a weird bloody mannequin, which bodes well because it was clearly there to advertise the next film on my schedule, Dolly!

Dolly – shot on film in the woods of Chattanooga, this is a Hills Have Eyes type slasher movie with a demented doll-faced woman (played by NWA wrestler Max the Impaler) victimizing some hikers. The main point is showing off gruesome practical special effects. Somewhat predicated on people not looking around at all when being stalked by a Jason type killer that, while way slower than their victims, somehow manages to Pepe Le Pew their way to jumping at them from out of frame a lot. Not really anything special, but at least you get to see Seann William Scott get mutilated. 2.5/5 stars.

I came out of this still going strong because I was committed to the full 5 screenings today! The next one was quite a left turn. It was up against Sisu 2, which is a big crowdpleaser and I liked Sisu, but it’ll be in theaters soon so I see no need to spend a fest slot on it.

Dawning (Demring) – A Norwegian film about three adult sisters who go out to a cabin in the woods to help the younger one recover from her latest suicide attempt. Then they get Ted Bundyed. (I enjoyed that one of the sisters pointed out the stranger with a sling on his arm asking for help with his busted car was a total Ted Bundy move as just two minutes before I had to restrain myself from shouting out “don’t go with that Ted Bundy looking m*********r!!!” in the theater. Of course, they went anyway, but I appreciated it.) Strikingly shot in black and white for the present and color for the voluminous flashbacks. It’s a weird proportion tonally – 2/3 of it is sitting around a cabin engaging in light sister-conflict and investigating their children-of-a-narcissist relationships with confessional scenes, flashbacks to interminable dinner parties, and so on, and then 1/3 is extremely brutal kidnap/murder. I think it’s trying to be about the cycle of life.  Decent but flawed tonally, you’d expect either more of the movie to be brutal or less. Though it does show how self-cutting can be a superpower in the right situation. 3/5 stars.

Finally, the late showing, which was the first Secret Screening of the fest. This is a FF tradition where they don’t release what they’re showing till you’re in the theater. Always big draws as this is where the jumbo premieres happen. I couldn’t get a ticket for it but I waited in the standby line and lucked out! The guy behind me (a soundtrack composer from Hollywood) was last in.

Silent Night, Deadly Night – a remake of the classic holiday horror film, where our protagonist kills one person a day in the lead up to Christmas while dressed as Santa Claus, encouraged by his own version of a dark passenger. But, you know, just bad people. He’s basically Advent Dexter. He stops off in a Hallmark movie type town and starts having a Hallmark movie type romance (though the girl has a real short temper) but the runs across another serial killer while trying to keep up with his own murder spree. It was really good and a fun horror/romance/comedy/thriller mashup, definitely worth a watch come holiday season! 4/5 stars.

And, we got a present with some goodies in it!

It was a long day but a good one, and we’ve just hit the halfway mark of the festival!

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Three

Posted on October 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

It’s a fine Saturday morning and the big weekend of the fest is here. They start a silent auction for parts of the diorama they used to film the “spooky church” trailer for the fest, which is cool – I’d love the big stained glass piece to put in my window but the bids immediately hit $500 and Lord only knows what they got to eventually.

In the 11 AM slot I saw a fun Italian/Chinese mashup action/romance, The Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City – A hidden away “second child” in China, who naturally is highly trained in kung fu (Yaxi Liu from Mulan), comes to Rome to find her sister who got sex trafficked to the one Chinese restaurant there.  She teams up with an Italian chef because it turns out his father ran off with her sister. She beats the absolute bejeezus out of crowds of goons and he provides pasta; they communicate via smartphone translation and the international language of love. The Italians are all very Italian, romantic and dramatic.  It’s like a martial arts Hallmark movie, and I mean that in the best sense.  It does need 30 minutes edited out of its runtime but otherwise it’s hen hao/molto bene. 3.5/5 stars.

I’d pay good money to watch Yaxi Liu from The Forbidden City fight Livia Cianata from Ikatan Darah, that would be quite a battle. $20 US on Livia though. Movies where the stars communicate via smartphone translation have gotten to be pretty common… I get it, but the novelty is starting to wear off.

The next film starred Mario Mayo, a Spanish actor who had wowed us at a previous year’s fest with “I’ll Crush Y’all,” which made up for a lack of polish with raw energy. This outing was… okay.

Luger – A Spanish thriller about two low level thugs who recover a stolen car that ends up having a very historical and valuable Nazi Luger in it that everyone wants and don’t mind beating someone to death over. It’s one of those old style “Judgement Day” type thrillers where they go from chore to chore and threat to threat, get split up, get beat up, and so on. It was good, though the fascist threat angle was actually so subtle you could miss it, there’s not really a big “here are the Nazis” moment. They didn’t need to go over the top with it but I think dialing that up a little would have made it less generic, you could have used the same script with another Macguffin just as well. And it was a little slow. And our big bruiser Mario gets incapacitated early and stays out of the movie for a while, which is a bummer. 2.5/5 stars.

Next, do you like Black horror comedies? Well, then you’ll enjoy 1/3 of this next film.

Haunted Heist – Lil Rel Howery directs a Black horror comedy staffed by standup comedians, most notably Tiffany Haddish.  A guy gets out of prison and has his three old square school friends join him at an AirBnB, really an old house he heard from a guy (“Ratface”) inside he could make a big score at.  But – it’s haunted! By a super racist (they used slurs I’ve never even heard before and I’ve lived in both Texas and Memphis) married (?) couple of cultist ghosts!  This is a tough genre, either not funny (Haunted Mansion) or way over the line to stupid (all the Wayans type stuff).  But for the first third of the movie they hit a solid comedy but not slapstick vibe, like Tag or other modern post-Hangover work. Unfortunately it’s a delicate balance and once the first act pays off with a very funny scene (the protagonists try to summon their own spirit to combat the ghosts and, like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, all that comes to mind is Lil Rel’s mean dead grandmama), it starts to wobble in Act 2 with random info dumps and then crashes to the ground in Act 3 with endless monologuey dialogue as the four friends make up with each other for various beefs, slowly, for like 20 freaking minutes. And then a pointless resolution. So in the end the movie is not good, but the first third was solid and funny. Watch for free when it hits streaming until the grandma scene and then bail with a clear conscience, you will miss nothing. 1.5/5 stars.

A mess of weirdos provided entertainment between films – a crowd of folks paid to dress up for, I think, “The Strangers – Chapter 2“(?)

Luckily the fourth slot had a real banger – an older movie you can see on streaming currently, but they did a restoration of it and showed it at the fest and it beat out a lot of the newer movies in my book!

Before the Fall – a restoration of a 2008 Spanish film by F. Javier Gutierrez where everyone finds out a meteor is going to wipe out the Earth shortly.  Chaos ensues globally, but we spend the time with Ale, a marginal maintenance man in a dust-choked Spanish town. He doesn’t care about anything, but his mother becomes convinced that a child serial killer her other son thwarted back in the day is for sure one of the mass prison escapees and will want to spend his last days getting revenge on their family, so they head out to their house in the sticks where all his kids are staying alone – he and his wife were out of town and global transpo is down so they’re not gonna be back by meteor time, and the kids haven’t even heard about the impeding apocalypse as they are in a remote part of Spain that largely operates on dirt and static. 

Gritty, brutal, and viscerally shot. Taut pacing and ongoing reveals that continually deepen the plot and characters. A very well done film and it really hits you in the existential buttons, what do you do when the end is nigh? It never got wide release but was highly respected among those in the know; Wes Craven was working on an English language version when he died.  One of the best movies of the festival, even if not a new one! 4/5 stars.

We even got a promotional bar of soap for the movie. My next film didn’t start till 11:30 which was rough – and it sucked, which was rougher.

Folies Meurtrieres (aka Killing Spree)- a restoration of a French slasher movie from 1984. A jumpsuit-clad slasher chases a woman. She runs 3x faster than him but he plods after her like a pillowcase-masked Pepe Le Pew for 10 minutes and eventually pops out ahead of her to perform a gruesome murder. Cut, and… he chases another woman for 10 minutes and then cuts her up. Cut, and… he chases a third woman for 10 minutes and then cuts her up. No framing, no plot, just Casio keyboards, overexposed film, and a fetishistic look at murdering young women. After kill 3 I realized no plot was forthcoming and bailed. I’m glad it was “restored” because it looked and sounded super shitty and I can only imagine its original state. Sometimes old things are just bad. 1/5 stars.

Then I dragged myself home to catch a couple hours of sleep before the full slate before me on Day 4!

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Two

Posted on October 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

The first full day of the fest, which means five movies! The first slot is usually around 11 AM, then 2 PM, then 5 PM, then 8 PM, then 11 PM. Then you stagger home at 2 AM, sleep, be in front of the computer to reserve your next day’s tickets at 10 AM sharp, and jump in the car to come back and do it again!

My first film of the day was The Ice Tower, an artsy French film. My backup was Her Will Be Done which I got to see later.

The Ice Tower.  Modern (well, 1970s) tale based on the Snow Queen fable by Hans Christian Andersen. Think Black Swan meets Frozen, but ultra French and impressionist.  A village girl runs away to the big city and becomes part of a film about the Snow Queen, played by superstar Marion Cotillard. Psychodrama ensues as she is lured/injects herself into the production. Do some of the scenes happen in the real world or a dream? What happens at the end? I’m not sure, but it’s stylish! Very slow, spare of dialogue, but it builds dramatic tension across its length.  I enjoyed it a lot but be warned… it’s very French. 4/5 stars.

Here’s a more coherent review of The Ice Tower if you’re intrigued.

The next movie was a Hong Kong action movie, Road to Vendetta.

Road to Vendetta.  Hong Kong cinema wants its John Wick back, so a lad working for an assassin network with a food delivery motif goes to Japan and a hot little Japanese girl leads him to loggerheads with the organization, even though they have to communicate via smartphone translation half the time. He teaches her to murder too!  Decent but not great, weird pacing. And the real rough transitions in HK films between comedy, melodrama, and brutality were ok back in the Hard Boiled days in the 1990s but they’ve had 30 years to sand down the rough edges but don’t seem to have done it. An acceptable weekend afternoon action watch. 2.5/5 stars.

For the third slot I had tickets to Reflections in a Dead Diamond (a Bond-ripoff movie?) which was my second choice after not getting into Shelby Oaks, but I decided to skip and go do D&D Trivia at the Highball! It was run by some friendly folks from Tiny Minotaur, a local fantasy themed tavern/art space.

And as you would expect from us here at Geek Related, I led my team “Bad Haircut” to a sound victory over the other two teams, “Rainbow Sparkles” and “Melf’s Magnificent Cunts.”

Next slot, I was tempted to stay for “Dungeons & Drag,” but skipping two movies in a row was too much for me. Turns out I should have listened to my instincts, because…

Vicious – the most generic modern supernatural horror movie ever made and that’s saying something. Creepy lady brings feckless young lady (Dakota Fanning) a box! The box demands “something you hate, something you love, and something you need!” Spoooooooky things happen with no justification or internal logic!  Random camera shots from film class with no thought to a consistent visual language are performed! “Scream when the phone rings a lot! Now cut one of your fingers off.  Now thrash and scream some more!  PHONE BUZZES!!! Movie done, budget diverted to cocaine!” Afterwards in the bathroom people were saying things like “something you hate, something you love, something that SUUUCKS!!!” True story. 2/5 stars.

The Ghost of Roger Ebert agrees with me on the merits of the film. It was so bad I just went home after instead of waiting nearly 2 hours for the midnight movie. I was supposed to see Silencio but I was demoralized and midnight movies are tough if you’re not in good shape.

But, it let me get off to a rested start for Day 3 and the start of the weekend at the fest!

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day One

Posted on September 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

The first day is a partial one – an opening night party and big premiere on Thursday night. The Highball, the bar connected to the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar that hosts the festival, was all Dungeons & Dragons decorated – they even had a dragon head set up atop the building outside like the Godzilla head in Shinjuku! Cosplayers in Renfaire garb filled the venue (advertising a “Hynafol” LARP event happening soon at a local Renfaire).

Then we had a lively opening band – Castle Rat! If you haven’t heard of them, they are an example of, uh, the “chick with a sword rock” genre? I’ve seen their videos on YouTube and it was cool to see them in person.

Then we had the big premiere of the first night, a movie called Primate, showing on most screens. There were a couple screens of something called Tree of Knowledge that also looked good, but I figured I’d start the fest off with the big crowdpleaser most folks were attending.

Primate – A young version of Florence Pugh (Johnny Sequoyah) comes home to Hawaii for college break with her girlfriends.  The family chimp gets rabies. Hilarity ensues, and by hilarity I mean faces getting ripped off. Nearly zero foreplay, they just get right to it. Interesting quirk in that the professor dad is deaf (the actor too) and so you get some chilling “can’t hear what is happening right around him” moments, though he’s not there for most of the film. Disappointing in that the monkey just goes to 100% murderchimp immediately, no slack for his family (you’d expect just a little bit of “maybe he won’t kill her!”, but the girl is immediately like “nope he’s gone”). Decent, but watch some murder chimp documentaries first to get in the mood. Coming to theaters in January. 3/5 stars, though I am rounding up to get there.

Then in the 11:00 PM slot for the faithful, I chose Ikatan Darah, an Indonesian film (I was tempted by the 4k Bride of Reanimator restoration, but I try to choose films it’ll be hard to see again vs easy to maximize my fest-time). And it was a hoot!

Ikatan Darah – The first film from Uwais Films – yes as in Iko Uwais from The Raid. An Indonesian family runs afoul of the mob and it falls to the daughter, a former national silat (Indonesian martial art) champion, to save them….  by increasingly awesome martial arts kills vs an ever freakier cast of bad guys! It doesn’t disappoint and there was lots of breathless applause after many of the knock-down-drag-out fight scenes.  She starts out normal and not wanting to kill anyone but as the stakes ratchet up she kills her first guy, is sad and pukes, and then as they kill her friends and stuff she goes no holds barred on them. The pacing was really good (sometimes modern foreign martial arts films either choose weird times to lag or cut confusingly from one scene to another). The crowd exclaimed (hollered, we’d say in Texas) at some of the more impressive and/or gruesome moves, which silat is particularly good at. I saw Uwais’ first film Merantau at my first Fantastic Fest back in 2009 and it’s been great to see the growth of his acting, and now production, career! 5/5 stars for sure.

Next, Day 2!

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – 20th Anniversary Edition!

Posted on September 29, 2025 | Leave a comment

I took a week off and went to my favorite Austin film festival, Fantastic Fest! It’s the 20th year of this genre (fantasy, horror, science fiction, action, and cult) film festival started back in 2005. The movies range from the ultra weird obscure foreign films to the breakthrough hits (Zombieland, John Wick, The Babadook, and Smile for example). I started going in 2009 with fellow gamer Chris and have attended on and off since (2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, the online-only 2020, 2023, 2024, and 2025). It’s always a good time – you see some complete trash and you see some movies better than anything that would normally hit the theater in your city that become your favorites of all time.

You can check out my writeups of previous years (of varying length and detail). The TL;DR is my top 10 movies I enjoyed the most from prior years are:

  1. Fish Story, a Japanese movie about a punk song that saves the world.  It is beautiful. 
  2. 13 Assassins, the best modern day samurai movie by a wide margin. TOTAL MASSACRE!!!
  3. Sound of Noise, a Swedish film about guerrilla musicians and the tone deaf cop from a famously musical family who’s after them
  4. Green Room, where a punk band runs afoul of Nazis, as they do (with Patrick Stewart as lead Nazi!)
  5. Kill, an Indian (Sikh) movie that is “Die Hard on a Train” with super impressive action
  6. Animalia, a Moroccan arthouse movie that is beautiful and deep
  7. Riddle of Fire – like a 1970s live action Disney movie, and absolutely hilarious
  8. Planet B – a frighteningly realistic “VR Guantanamo” scenario in a French near future sci-fi thriller
  9. Daniela Forever – Nacho Vigalondo’s take on an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type situation
  10. Sister Midnight – a newly married bride in Mumbai’s life goes from trying to boring to weird

If you watch those you’ll have a good time and also get a taste of the breadth of offerings at the fest.

Here’s a letterboxd list of the 2024 features as a bonus.

I’ll cover the fest day by day! Here’s the cool stained glass “Saint Chingu” theme this year:

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Dungeon Crawl Classics – Twenty-ninth Session

Posted on September 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

Twenty-ninth Session – And now – weird elves out of time!!!

My research indicates that Old Man Fish’s desire for darkvision let us into DCC 88.5, Curse of the Kingspire!

Things get weird quick, both camping near the ruins of the Kingspire and then as we approach it (leaving our 8 companions and horses at camp) ghostly figures surround us. And as we approach the tower we are suddenly part of a ghostly ancient battle between hordes of beast-men and a castle full of Kith! Some of the spectres are more real than others and it’s dangerous.

I think Kith are elves. But “old” elves? Kinda like in the Witcher they’re like “Elder blood!” “Do you mean elves, there’s a bunch of them?” “Yes! No! Kinda!” Fair enough.

Anyway, we fight/sneak our way into the Kith castle with the sometimes phantom, sometimes physical savage subhumans close behind. We find a crapload (27) of cultists doing some ritual, doubtless responsible for the ancient battle starting to phase in on us.

Luckily (?) a bunch of worms start eating cultists as part of the ritual. We have to fight our way through a rearguard of archers but Ned gets a super high magic missile roll and “death blossoms” them (Last Starfighter reference!)

We make our way through the ruins and find the cult leader Arkos and his cult champions and initiates and a free range combat is on! At the climax the cult leader throws done some black orb from the top of the chamber while invoking the “Crow King.” Harp powerslides and catches the orb before it hits but it shatters anyway (fair enough, gotta get to phase 2 of the adventure, but I was proud of doing it) and suddenly we’re in the full on past battle!

After some violence we make contact with the Elder Kith and meet the Crow King himself, who explains we’re not technically in the past but in a spell of time stasis. “A difference without a distinction!” we cry! Anyway, Old Man Fish swears fealty to him and agrees to go whack his brother, and gets his darksight!

Then we meet the old Vizier and a big formorian giant type torturer on the way to the brother. It’s obvious to us they aren’t on Team King and they are torturing some chick, so once the Vizier leaves we dogpile the giant and take him down fairly quickly. Unfortunately the tortured kith-maiden perishes shortly after being rescued.

Trapped catacombs ensue and we find some other kith – forces of the brother (who we’re not sure is really the bad guy in all this?) Find out… Next time!

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Dungeon Crawl Classics – Twenty-eighth Session

Posted on September 18, 2025 | Leave a comment

Twenty-eighth Session – In the aftermath of Glipkerio’s Gambit, as well as the advent of the year of our Lord 2025, we make friends with the new extraplanar people that have joined us and deal with swamp life, swamp witches, swamp gnolls, swamp zombies… Ick.

The introductions between our normal PCs and the other-time zero levels goes as you might expect, with everyone trying to get each other to take various proscribed substances. We spend a good bit of the session role-playing here, which is fun.

Gallfred Weasel makes friends with a swamp witch – something that turns into a real recurring theme in this campaign (She tells us she has two sisters. We suspect Gallfred means to bang all three.). We gather intel to go back to Kingspire, land of mud farmers and murderous barbarians, because Old Man Fish wants to do something with the Elder Kith (elves? Super old elves?) cult there to get the ability to see in the dark.

Then we decide to attack a bunch of swamp gnolls unprovoked, which doesn’t go super well for us and we end up fairly wounded. A zombie scare, and that’s it for the session!

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Dungeon Crawl Classics – Twenty-seventh Session

Posted on September 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

Twenty-seventh Session – Into Mount Tyche where weird stuff continues to happen and we end up fighting a bunch of time-shifted wizards!

Hemp is on a quest to get closer to his new deity Aphiel – he has an artifact, the blazefire bow, but it doesn’t, you know, blaze into fire. There is a temple to Aphiel up on that mountain, but apparently someone’s taken it over and shooed out the priests.

We fight our way there, and the most dreaded of encounters happens – the “monsters that steal your magic items” attack!!! They grab up Gallfred’s sword shadeslayer and Podrick’s magic bow and beat wings. Luckily, missile attacks down them and we recover our goodies.

But then we start to encounter an unfortunate number of wizards, who seem to be all the same wizard and disappear before we can kill them. Then we fight some “Komodo dragon men,” which is a lot more intimidating (and infection-causing) than “lizard men,” we all approved. Hemp has a magic helmet that helps him in this, but once he rolles a “7” on a die it cracks and falls off, alas.

The numerology continues with number puzzles! We have to go up numbered stairs but they’re also too large to comfortably go to the ones we need; an enlarge spell from Ned and thinking from everyone overcomes the puzzle.

The nomal dungeoneering is disrupted by a bunch of weirdos from other dimensions suddenly teleporting in from modern day, the 1970s, science fiction… From our recent one-shot! It’s a lot to deal with and since they are zero/first level they are probably just going to get murdered so we settle them in on the lovely temple grounds and go fight a whole batch of the same wizard and have some fun time loop stuff. And then we’re done and I am fully on board the Aphiel train, and hit fourth level to boot.

We all make Triumph’s Dawn resolutions for the new year! Two of them are “overthrow the wizard king”…

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Dungeon Crawl Classics – Not In Kansas Anymore

Posted on September 13, 2025 | 3 comments

Not In Kansas Anymore – Paul runs a weird one-shot funnel where we each generate characters from a different time!

Paul directs us to go make characters from “anything” in the Purple Sorcerer 0-level party generator! I choose “Trailer Park Shark Attack” and others pick options like “Space Dungeon”, “Dying Earth”, “1920s Earth”, and “Modern Earth.” We get a lovely list of 0-levels, some of the most notable are Stacey Thompson the Professional Screamer, Maynard the Meth Manufacturer, and Shad the Trailer Park Santa. Full list in the summary.

With my four, I was inspired by having recently read Carl Hiassen’s novel Strip Tease, so I modeled my four characters after the four primary movers from the book – A middle-school student (Erin), a guy with a chainsaw (Darryl), a guy who looks like Ving Rhames in a Santa suit (Shad), and a Florida man (Dilbeck).

Anyway, with no other preamble all our various characters suddenly appear and are beset by a handless wizard and some lizard men. (Seems like this could have been a King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard reference in another world… Someone needed to workshop an adventure more!)

Turns out this is “Not In Kansas Anymore”, written for 1970s characters and in the “Gen Con 2016 Program Guide.” Did you know those were actual content products? I didn’t!

Tim gets the award for quickest death – “Three Coins” the majordomo is murdered in the first round. The fight against the lizard men is quick and violent; some PCs die; more die as we flee the rising lava. Meth begins to factor in heavily to the party’s tactics.

Wackiness ensues – a sample:

There is a motionless humanoid shrouded in shadows at the top of the stairs. Shad staggers up, yelling “Ho, ho, ho!” He finds that the stairway is trapped: a pressure plate causes spears to shoot out from the walls. Fortunately, Shad has the luck of the drunk and survives without a scratch. He finds that the “standing” person is someone already impaled and held upright by a spear.

Shad shakes the body, shouting “You’ve been naughty this year!” He takes a swig from his bottle of Ol’ Grandad.

We are then told by a prisoner “you must stop Glipkerio from freeing the ancient dragon Slagothorp.” That sounds like made up nonsense to us but we don’t have anything else to do. We find a dead dragon, which we think is good news, but it turns out there’s a young dragon too, which is bad news. Everyone decides to use the bullets they’ve been hoarding for their boomsticks to little effect. But then Batreau, an AirBnB owner back in the real world, has been exhibiting strange Scanners-like brain-exploding powers and he explodes the dragon’s brain. Yay?

Then it’s time to face off with the wizard and a bunch of lizard men – we get cool powers but die like flies. Erin my middle school student pretty much solos the wizard while everyone else is distracted, but finally gets murdered and the wizard disappears. Darryl manages to kill dragon with his .357 Magnum and then the eight survivors from the original group of 20 cross-time weirdos get swept up by magical birds and end up in… Our normal DCC campaign, next time!

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Dungeon Crawl Classics – Twenty-sixth Session

Posted on September 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

Twenty-sixth Session – Back in Weebrook, some Wormtongue type sorcerer named Sylle Ru is now in charge. We immediately subscribe to his newsletter.

This new wizard comes to visit us in the inn with some undead goons. Half of the party is Chaotic, and most of us hate in movies where some good supporting character sasses the bad guy and gets murdered instead of humoring him until they’re out of 9mm range, so we have a nice chat about his economic revitalization program.

The Duke has investigated thoroughly, there is nothing to fear from these supposed undead armies. In truth, the King is just sending us reinforcements to make our towns more secure. And then we can bring in those wretched villages and hamlets that have not been brought into our protection. And with that protection comes prosperity! There are so many nameless villages and communities of subhumans around.”

Podrick responds, “You’re right! I have been patrolling the area, and the subhumans are crying out for protection and discipline!”

Hemp is also on board, “Absolutely, there’s nothing more important than the economy. And how can you have so little pride in your community as to not even name it.”

Sylle Ru Is pleased that Podrick and Hemp are so enthusiastic.

But this doesn’t last long as Old Man Fish decides to assassinate the wizard. All hell breaks loose but we are nothing if not practical, as soon as the plan switches to “murder” we mob the guy.

And the Duke is freed! Apparently it “wasn’t his fault” he was sacrificing townspeople to placate the Black Dog but this guy’s. He says he’ll totally go back up Fythorp from the undead army that’s coming. His general pussiness and the ineffectiveness and numbers of his thanes make us dubious.

The rest of the time in town can be summed up loosely by Hemp as:

Hemp goes and tells the bartender that Gallfred drank a potion, encountered a demonic accountant who called him a “bummer”, and then he spent the rest of the night having sex with mutated horses.

No sooner do we leave than giant slugs attack. And a mutated cat monster. And a next quest, to go jack up some wizard named Glipkerio who’s messing with time. We like time! It’s… when I keep my stuff!

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