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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