This was Sunday, and I took off most of the day to go to an amusement park with my daughter; my company had rented out Six Flags Fiesta Texas for Family Day so it was too good to miss. But it’s Fantastic Fest, so even after a reasonably brutal day in the Texas sun it was back for a couple movies!
First I saw Primal (7/10), an “Ozploitation” movie in the vein of Cabin Fever, The Descent or The Ruin, where some college kids on a camping trip to look at cave paintings way out in the middle of nowhere, Australia run afoul of a… Well, we’ll call it a “disease,” that turns people into feral “fast zombie” style savages. This was decent; a simple premise but well done. There is almost a tentacle rape, and the heroine takes some good punches in the uterus. Good times. It wasn’t an exceptional movie but I thought it was an enjoyable representative of that “camping horror” genre.
Then I saw Gallants (5/10), a Hong Kong martial arts comedy. It was billed as “Cocoon with kung fu” because the protagonists are old, I guess. HK humor is admittedly a bit of a different beast from American humor, but I didn’t enjoy this movie all that much. The comedy was just goofy slapstick, the martial arts sequences weren’t all that good, and the melodrama was eye-rolling. The most memorable part for us was that the villains had an odd penchant for carrying man-purses (much like Elijah Woods, who attended a lot of Fantastic Fest). I suspect you are supposed to like this because the old guys are huge kung fu movie stars from the old days. But, no.
Only two movies on Day Four, but I crank it back up into overdrive in Day Five!
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