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.
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.
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 Anotherby 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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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:
Fish Story, a Japanese movie about a punk song that saves the world. It is beautiful.
13 Assassins, the best modern day samurai movie by a wide margin. TOTAL MASSACRE!!!
Sound of Noise, a Swedish film about guerrilla musicians and the tone deaf cop from a famously musical family who’s after them
Green Room, where a punk band runs afoul of Nazis, as they do (with Patrick Stewart as lead Nazi!)
Kill, an Indian (Sikh) movie that is “Die Hard on a Train” with super impressive action
Animalia, a Moroccan arthouse movie that is beautiful and deep
Riddle of Fire – like a 1970s live action Disney movie, and absolutely hilarious
Planet B – a frighteningly realistic “VR Guantanamo” scenario in a French near future sci-fi thriller
Daniela Forever – Nacho Vigalondo’s take on an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type situation
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.
Not everything’s a winner. But it’s a range, the 4’s you might like if they’re your thing… The ones I rated 1-2 I have trouble understanding how anyone would like, but someone made them!
I, The Executioner (4/10) was a perfectly serviceable Korean cop thriller movie, a sequel to 2014’s “Veteran,” apparently with the same Major Crimes squad from the first. A serial killer is killing people who got off easy from the justice system and they must catch him. Like a PG rated Se7en. It was OK. Some action but not “whoa check out that martial arts or gun fu” level. A lot of modern Korean film including this seems like watered down versions of what already exists. Not much more to say, watch it if you are bored and are really into Korean shows.
Frankie Freako (4/10) is a silly retro puppet movie starring Fake Young Dana Carvey and Fake Chrissy Tiegen where the hopelessly square husband calls the “Frankie Freako” 1-900 line to try to get less bland and suddenly little Garbage Pail Kids type puppets are tearing up his house. It is a reference to “Freddie Freaker” from the late ’80’s. It’s lightly entertaining but not great – who is this for? It’d be PG if not for an explicit neck wound and bear-trapped leg – content wise otherwise it’s solidly there’s at 11-12 year olds. Like, Gremlins is spicier. They could have gone hard R with it and had Frankie showing Fake Dana Carvey how to Eiffel Tower Fake Chrissy Tiegen and play up the gore, but no, “freaky partying” is drinking Fart Cola and spray painting the living room. The puppets didn’t have much funny dialogue either, just “let’s get freaky!” I didn’t hate it, it kept me engaged, but I don’t know who it’s for that would pay to see it.
Disembodied aka Aberration (4/10) is a 4k remaster of a 1998 film that you would swear was a surrealist horror movie from the ’60’s. A lady takes a room (technically, the boiler room) in the worst hotel ever and then decorates her room with her jarred brain and bathtub full of, uh, vaginal nodules and then starts growing oozing lumps. And is being tracked by an Evil Colonel Sanders looking guy from the Plasmaster Corporation. Luckily her next door hooker friend is on her side. Very gooey and trippy. The dialogue is hilarious but there’s not enough of it, with large parts having the put-me-to-sleep effect of slow moving old time horror. There is *lots* of vaginal imagery but no actual vaginas. Unclear resolution on the ending. This movie does not look great, I shudder to imagine it prior to this uplift work. I mean, I get the guy made it in his spare time with his spare money but 1998 horror movies were like “The Faculty” and “Ringu” and this looks like one of the “we just got out of the black & white era” films on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Universal Language (4/10) is an absurdist – comedy? – that merges a fantasy post-Quebec independence Canada with Iran and is in half French and half Farsi, with Tim Hortons becoming a samovar-bearing tea house. Which is cool but… I struggled to find a point and even to stay awake (and this was a 2:30 PM showing). There was some fun to be had seeing some Persian kids from the French immersion school wandering around on their youthful shenanigans in a snow-covered beige-building-filled Alberta that kinds looks like a sand-covered beige-building-filled Iran but other than that it was a bunch of visually interesting scenes where you felt like “this must MEAN something” but it’s totally opaque what besides the single obvious family regret angle. It has mood and technique but plot and acting not so much. I loved last year’s Moroccan art house film by Sofia Alaoui, Animalia, and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home At Night; it’s not like I can’t get behind weird slow Middle Eastern stuff, I just didn’t get this one. I was briefly excited by the appearance of an “eclairagiste” in the credits and I thought they might have an eclair expert on staff but it just means lighting tech. Fucking Quebec.
Baby Invasion (3/10) defies easy explanation. It doesn’t have plot – at best you could say it has a loose conceit of people streaming themselves performing home invasions using baby face filters with comments streaming over the screen with a deafening techno as the entire soundtrack, but interspersed with trippy random Unreal Engine computer graphic kaleidoscopic… scenes? Segments? Anyway, even writing this down makes it seem more coherent than it is. Though strangely it’s not terrible; I could sit through it without intense regret. Not that I would recommend it; it’s the kind of thing that should just play on a big screen during a rave or something. Oddly non-graphic content wise though, possibly because the budget was “a dozen yo-yos and their airsoft gun collection and one guy who can use Unreal Engine.” And it is impressive the sheer volume of twitch stream comments they generated, thousands and thousands.
Ick (2/10) is a high school horror movie like The Faculty, but less subtle and played constantly at x2 speed. I am not exaggerating; I thought maybe we were just starting with a double-speed flashback or title scene but no it just kept going like that. No time for emotional beats or memorable sights, just ultrafast self-aware basic GenZ quips and CGI death. And 30-ish 2000s pop-punk needle drops. Not only did I not like it, now I am nursing a headache. The filmmaker wanted to make “a PG-13 starter horror movie for his 13 year old.” Maybe just put them on ADHD meds instead.
Zenithal (1/10, no link I can find which is probably for the best) is a wild mistake of a French movie about, I guess, penis oriented martial arts? Which could be goofy fun in concept, but then there were zero martial arts – or penises, except for the blurred/clothed three foot penis of the victim who was found “dick-capitated.” The height of humor here is practicing “Sexkido” and “being less genital and more zen-ithal.” If you are not guffawing by now then this movie has nothing for ya. Production value hovers around “don’t spend more than $20 on set dressing” level. And there’s a weird choice to make it very much like it’s a sequel to a previous movie (it’s not) and relying on alluded to prior events to make you give a crap about any of these characters. I made it 3/4 of the way through and finally the 20 minute long speech from the incel villain kept putting me to sleep and I just left. Come on, French people can do martial arts movies! District B-13! This made me sad and angry and sleepy. But I guess I’m happy the French are swinging for the fences, we get Planet B out of them in the same year, so if this is the price we have to pay, OK.
And that’s the Fantastic Fest 2024 roundup! Only two real stinkers and a lot of good stuff, I really enjoyed the programming this year.
These movies weren’t perfect, but if you are into their genre you may enjoy them, they are certainly… completed films! (Or TV series episodes, in one case.) Keep an eye out for the Sebastian Stan double shot!
Cloud (6/10) Is an interesting Japanese film about a guy making a living reselling on online auction sites who gets a bunch of disgruntled people in his wake that want to torture-murder him for what seems like extremely minor reasons. Very unusual escalation that seems to comment on a common societal fantasy of violence, ambivalence to new economic realities, that small sins are a downward spiral, and that you can trust no one if you are involved in even the lightest of shadiness. High realism in the action and shooting and such – not escalated in either the action or gore dimensions, very naturalistic. No close ups or quick cuts but very matter of fact filming that I felt was effective. Are all Japanese folks on the edge just looking for some excuse to go nuts? Maybe!
Teacup (6/10) – We got to see the first two episodes of an upcoming Peacock series that seems like a modern adaptation of Lovecraft’s Color out of Space. We are told it is based on the Robert McCammon novel “Stinger”, adapted by Ian McCulloch who also served as showrunner. “But without the dome. There’s two dome things already.” Good call, one “city in a dome” thing is more than enough (well, the Simpsons Movie can be the second, but now you’re cut off, horror writers). It’s a family out on a farm – veterinarian mom, cheating dad (Dr. Nick from Grey’s Anatomy), two kids, a grandma who likes to party (“weed helps her MS” but I’m pretty sure she’d party anyway). Animals start acting weird, strange folks roam the woods, and a guy in a gas mask and gun paints a line around the farm and warns them via whiteboard not to cross it. Then electronics cut out and demented shit happens. Good suspenseful horror. The season plays out over 48 hours. We are not supposed to “give out spoilers” but after 2 half hour episodes we don’t know a thing about what’s going on so… It was pretty cool, though with “NBC” level character interaction drama (like, not movie level dialogue and acting but better than CW level). The child actor playing the young son who plays a key role is good, which can make or break this kind of story. Worth watching if you have Peacock; probably not a reason to go subscribe if you don’t.
Escape from the 21st Century (6/10) is a crazy and inventive Chinese movie that is kind of Goonies meets Shaolin Soccer meets Back To The Future 2 meets… Surreal stuff. I don’t even know. Teens in a wacky fight get tossed into a quarry full of chemicals and start time traveling (like, in their personal timeline, so as themselves in their adult future) forward and backward in time when they… Sneeze? Get knocked out? Want to? The rules are unclear but future them is dystopian as heck (organ harvesting… girlfriend banging a dwarf pimp for drugs…); they try to change the past and can’t, then they fight amonsgt each other and try again? Very gonzo, wide swings from goofy to dark, but of course the power of collectivism will prevail. A little too long and too random but net positive. Not all the effects were done yet, either, so it may squeeze out another point in the final analysis.
Don’t Mess With Grandma, aka Sunset Superman (6/10), is a fun light… home invasion movie!?! It’s like if Tyler Perry did one of the Jim Varney Ernest movies but starring Michael Jai White. I’m just sad that three of the home-invader family weren’t played by Paul, Jason, and June from How Did this Get Made because those three actors seemed adjacent to them (though younger, I guess. They can play their parents in the sequel!!!). Jai White is great as the put upon son of the grandma who has to juggle her needs along with not killing any of these fool crackers who are hell bent on robbing the place. It’s all very silly and has plenty of Dio music. The violence is mostly light and humorous, with one exception that was a bit of a jarring tonal shift. This won’t be for everyone, if my setup of “Madea in Ernest Scared Stupid” doesn’t do it for you, I certainly get it.
The Apprentice (6/10) was a secret screening, and was introduced by Sebastian Stan who plays Donald Trump in this biopic about his early years up through the ’80’s. Stan did a great job, he was barely recognizable as himself at times but was a spot on Trump. It shows his rise as a real estate developer and power player, increasingly at the expense of his family, wife, and friends, and his descent into diet pills and serial adultery and spousal abuse. The set design was stunning. In the end though it’s a movie about banal evil that does not get its comeuppance, which while accurate is unsatisfying. It just ends with him getting lipo and Roy Cohn, his lawyer, mentor, and fixer, dying of AIDS. It’s good in that it’s balanced, it’s not trying to apologize for Trump or do a hack job on him, but as a result it left me a little nonplussed. “So you’ve shown us Trump is a bit of a corrupt dick. Cool story, bro. I think everyone knows that just some people like it and some people don’t.” Even biopics need a point, otherwise they’re a documentary with actors. Giving it a bonus point for Sebastian Stan.
A Different Man (6/10) has Sebastian Stan playing a man with extreme facial deformity trying to be an actor in New York. Since it’s New York he gets the occasional weird look but otherwise gets along fine. He has a crush on his playwright neighbor. And then he gets an experimental treatment that completely removes the deformity and now he’s Sebastian Stan. He makes the weird choice to assume a new name and tell everyone he’s a friend of the deformed guy who died by suicide. Things initially go well for him – real estate success! Women who want to bang Sebastian Stan! But then when he hears the playwright ex-neighbor is doing a play about “a woman and her relationship with her deformed neighbor” he starts to get obsessed and things go downhill especially when a new facially deformed guy shows up. High concept and cool, but it really starts to meander and there are four times when you think it’s the end but no, here’s another piece, adding… What? It’s also tough to get insight into the mind of our protagonist, even once the makeup is gone he’s played pretty cryptically between times he trips out. Was there really even a character arc? I’m not sure, which is weird for how much happens to the lead. It was OK but I think the script thinks it’s more clever than it is. Giving it a bonus point for Sebastian Stan.
Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire (5/10) is a faux true crime documentary about a serial killer named “Mr. Shiny” in the San Bernardino area. Starts normal and then ramps up into Lovecraft style weirdness. A little slow and tips its hand into improbability well before the super weird stuff happens (I didn’t know it was a fake documentary when I sat down but the red flags piled up and it became apparent shortly in) but is a good home watch for true crime fans. And it has a post credits scene, which startled the few of us who hung back to plonk away on our phones.
Heavier Trip (5/10) is a sequel to a silly Finnish movie about the hardest of metal bands, Impaled Rektum, and their attempts at gaining metal cred and/or stardom (which are at odds, and one of the themes). Imprisoned for Nordic crimes against the public peace at the end of last movie, they are in Norwegian prison, which means escaping is easy when they find out they need to save the family reindeer slaughterhouse. Metal hijinks ensue, including hitching a ride with an established metal band whose lead singer is one Michael Brucker looking SOB and an ambivalent relationship with Japanese girl-idol metal band Babymetal. Their goal is to play at the German open air heavy metal festival Wacken to get the money, but the quest for fame intervenes. The power of friendship, of course, prevails. Something to watch if you are in a goofy mood and/or like metal.
Mr. Crocket (5/10) is a Black-helmed horror movie set in the VHS days about an evil Mr. Rogers who has died and comes back through the TV Freddy Krueger style to kill “naughty” parents and abduct kids to his hellscape. Some parents survive and want to get their kids back! Solid but doesn’t fully use a lot of its ideas effectively (like the horrific mascots, lots of great design to see very little use). Some funny bits some scary bits some just there bits. No subtlety here, just suddenly shrieking Mr. Crocket on TV screens. If Tales from the Hood had a kids-show segment, this would be it.
Terrifier 3 (5/10) – I’d never seen any of the Terrifier movies, just little clips on TikTok of the clown acting spooky. I was convinced to see it by the evil lobby clowns and crowd hype at the fest. It is basically the most gruesome murder/torture porn ever made. At the start the programmer warned “We don’t do content warnings at Fantastic Fest but if you are going to have problems with basically anything, run.” It’s supernatural in a Chucky sort of way where the rules are super unclear. They bravely tried to catch you up on the plot from Terrifier 1 and 2 with a flashback and A, B, C, and D plots, to middling effect. And then no man, woman, child, or animal is safe from getting their face torn off like an angry chimp on meth is on the loose by the clown and his… zombie girlfriend? At least two major characters get killed unceremoniously offscreen which is weird. The gore effects are the real star here; I have no idea how they so realistically show people e.g. getting full chainsawed from their genitalia on up in full screen with no cuts nothing left to the imagination. I don’t plan on going and watching more of them myself but they’re a thing.
What Happened to Dorothy Bell? (5/10) Is a found footage (though stretching credulity a bit on that point) movie about a female college student whose grandmother went off her rocker back in the day and – burned down a church? Stabbed the seven-year-old girl in the face? Then went back to work at the library and killed herself by throwing herself off a single story landing? Ok so the details don’t really check out but it’s scary and has an evil book. She has video sessions with a therapist who is a good argument for replacing mental health professionals with an AI because she had such weak basic responses. For a book oriented evil spirit it’s pretty good with the Internet too, it’s good to see demonic forces keeping their skill sets updated. Anyway, passable but barely, watch in the dark to get a couple frights.
Dead Talents Society (5/10) is a Taiwanese movie (yes, I said it; fuck you Chinese government) about ghost society where they have ghost-televised scaring contests; it owes a lot to Beetlejuice in terms of the “hapless new dead folks try to learn to be scary” plot. Funny takes on urban legend folklore and pretty typical Asian “the dead are all organized like we are in real life because we love bureaucracy from beyond the grave.” Some fun gags but way too slow and spaced out; I had trouble not snoozing and was really eager for it to be over. And I’m getting pretty sick of all the “ah genZs who can’t be bothered to do anything or care but just roll their eyes and mope around” as a theme; it’s lazy and usually not funny unless you have some new and clever take. YMMV but my patience with Asian media where all the acting is “unrealistic motivation TURNED UP TO ELEVEN” has run out. Full disclosure – many people loved this movie and it got some Fest awards so it may be for you especially if “Japanese Beetlejuice game show” sounds good to you. I’m just in a weird place with Asian movies right now.
Plenty of perfectly good movies of various types at this FF! Keep an eye out for a cluster of older movies that are still perfectly good in the middle.
Baby Assassins 3 aka Baby Assassins: Nice Days (8/10) is the latest in Yugo Sakmoto’s Japanese series of “two GenZ shrieky Japanese girls are John Wicks.” Literally; this is a series made by and with stunt people to show off action choreography and one of the lead girls, Saori Izawa, just got done doing stunts on John Wick 4. The action was top notch including some real knock down drag out hand-to-hand fights. And while the acting in between was still melodramatic to the max, it had some decent character moments, especially between our dynamic duo at the end. Make out already! I liked it better than the previous entry in the series (Baby Assasins: 2 Babies) – its action was better and character stuff not as silly.
Bookworm (8/10) – This year’s family movie! Last year Riddle of Fire surprised and delighted me. This year, we have a solid entry with Elijah Wood and a Kiwi girl cracking us up in between bouts of child endangerment. New Zealand precocious kid Mildred (Nell Fisher)’s mom gets landed in a coma from a faulty toaster and her baby daddy comes from the US to help care for her – Elijah Woods, playing a failed David Blaine style magician (“Illusionist!”) who knew mom for a couple hours in a convenience store parking lot in Vegas but hasn’t been in the picture since then. Then they go camping to try to get footage of the mythical Canterbury Panther (NZ’s Bigfoot of a big cat). Besides the predictable prickly daughter-father bonding is surprisingly dark and hilarious writing – no-filter dialogue and some real danger with brutally real consequences. But, you know, for kids! I hollered out loud at least five times during this film, sometimes in humor, sometimes in shock.
MadS (8/10) is a lively French movie about rave kids in the beginning of a zombie-type outbreak. A rich kid rave is not where you want your original superspreader event to be. And of course this in turn unleashes the paramilitary death squads. The gimmick here is that it is shot in one long 90 minute take, which really keeps up the momentum! Ok so I get that they’re all stoned and some have “the virus” but boy French people are excitable! The amount of squalling and hollering and thrashing and running around bashing into things is impressive and along with the one-shot format is one big thrill ride (the sound design is impressive too). I can’t imagine those actresses screaming like that for all that time straight, that’s some sore throats for sure. Anyway, a worthy take on day 0 zombie outbreak especially if you like things like 28 Days Later.
House of Spoils (8/10) sports a chef who has just gotten her big break opens a cauldron-to-table restaurant when the spirit of the witch that used to live in their rustic location starts whispering to her. A good horror movie leveraging our cultural love of hollering “Yes, Chef!” It has super solid production values, this should be a wide-release movie. An interesting roller coaster of twists about what’s going on in the plot and an atypical but welcome – if just a shred preachy – resolution. And despite some gross food scenes it had good ones as well; once it was over I popped down to the nearby Soto for a chili hamachi and lychee martini.
Saturday Night (8/10) was the first secret screening of Fantastic Fest; it’s about Lorne Michaels and the cast and crew getting ready for their first ever Saturday Night Live broadcast in 1975, in real-time for the 90 minutes leading up to its start. Jason Reitman directed and did extensive research and interviews to piece together the intense blend of humor, greed, pride, lust, and cocaine that was that time. Great performances emulating the comedy greats of the day especially of Chevy Chase and John Belushi. Frantic pace and lots of humor, some from the comedians but more from the ridiculous lengths Lorne has to go to in order to hit air (Belushi going missing! Drug induced lockjaw! The Standards & Practices lady! A llama! Studio suits! Milton Berle’s huge penis! Johnny Carson being a huge penis!). Mainstream (out of the ordinary for Fantastic Fest) but definitely worth seeing.
Mac and Me (8/10) is what a lot of these “zany” movies aspire to be. Sure it’s an ET ripoff from 1988, sure it’s full of Coke, McDonalds, and Sears product placement, but it is bananas in a great way. From the weird too-human naked aliens (like… sea-monkeys that have the face of Arseface from The Preacher) that do not even start to obey the laws of physics, to the absolutely wild child-in-wheelchair endangerment, to the full on spontaneous breakdance party at McDonalds (in the credits: “And starring Ronald McDonald as himself”), you absolutely do not expect what is about to happen in the next scene at any point. The audience shrieked in shock and hilarity many times. As a bonus they played the original alternate ending ripped from a Japanese laserdisc where a cop trips and DEAD CENTER SHOOTS WHEELCHAIR KID WHOSE BODY THEN WHEELS INTO A GASOLINE FIRE!?! “He’s going to be OK!” “He’s gone.” At any moment you don’t know if someone’s going to die in an abandoned cobalt mine or tear up a mall or OD on soda. They said “let’s take ET and turn it up to 11” and I’m here for it. I know this is a high rating for a movie that ended up on How Did This Get Made, but I enjoyed this screening more than the vast majority so I gotta be honest!
The Guest (7/10) was a 4K remaster of a 2014 thriller that goes from being a Hallmark movie about a guy who just got out of the military coming to visit the small town family of a dead brother in arms to help them and romance the sister, to Jason Bourne, to Friday the 13th in short order! Starring Dan Stevens aka Legion from the FX series (best Marvel TV series to date and I’ll fight anyone who says different) as the boy-next-door-psychopath, . All the family characters were great (except the dad; I was kinda rooting for soldier boy to seduce the wife tbh). Not perfect; the plot doesn’t entirely make sense and tries to be a little much in one sausage casing, but it’s gripping and a solid watch!
Raze (7/10) is another ten year old movie where a bunch of sick one percenter fucks kidnap women and keep them in an underground prison and make them fight to the death in a bare-knuckle arena or else they’ll kill ther loved ones (you know, standard one percenter shit). But not normal women, Aussie Zoe Bell (stuntwoman and actor, you may know her from Tarantino’s Death Proof) is our main character (and producer) and all the women are selected for being formidable – not (all) professional fighters but mostly with some history of violence. So it’s Hunger Games/Battle Royale-y; the women are trying to find a way out of the prison but are also having to just brutally bludgeon their fellow captives to death, friend and foe alike, if their number comes up. All the women actors were hell on wheels and making the most of the opportunity to be a badass. I don’t know why I had never heard of this movie before!
Bone Lake (7/10) sees a couple AirBnBing a nice lake house in the middle of nowhere and it turns out it’s “double booked” with another young hot couple and then the mind, sex, and murder games begin. Gripping and keeps you guessing! Not enough nudity for an erotic thriller though, and the gore level went from 0 to 60 pretty surprisingly at the end. The whole movie is just 4 actors, and their performances successfully drive the whole film! And the lovely house is effectively the fifth actor; it’s a great space for the setting (apparently the homeowner really hovered over them while filming) and since it’s the only location you get a really good feeling of the space. Shot in 18 days on a shoestring budget and is really, really good for that!
The Creep Tapes (7/10) was a secret screening – apparently there are a pair of movies I haven’t seen (Creep and Creep 2) and these are the first three episodes of a TV series following on that’ll be on AMC/Shudder. The crowd reacted favorably upon hearing this; I don’t like it when I hear “TV series” but it got me in a receptive mood. It’s basically a humorous spoof of a serial killer (Mark Duplass) filming his own exploits done super low budget (cast and crew: 5-6 people) and it’s really good! Funny but also startling and… well, creepy. Just goes to show a good story and talented people makes for good entertainment even if you don’t have any budget and a single shitty digital camera. I’ll go watch Creep and Creep 2 now! This may not be for everyone, it’s definitely a mood, but I liked it. At least one fellow fest-goer did not, for what that’s worth.
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