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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