Last day of the fest! 8 days of movies is hard work. That’s 33 movies at the fest and 1 nearby! It was good and I went into the end with energy. The ubiquitous Hellraiser game trailer started to get semi-ironic cheers when it played today.
I love Fantastic Fest. I do tech for my job and this is a great vacation. You really don’t have time to do work, you can’t stay at home much, you don’t have to plan complicated outings – just movie after movie of wildly different creative visions. My brain feels carbonated and I am refreshed when it’s done (after catching up on sleep of course). Now, our final day slate!
The Cycle – Deborah Ann Woll stars as an elite forensic anthropologist who works out at one of those body farm facilities with dozens of controlled decomposition scenarios, 3D skull printers, the height of forensic technology! And she’s asked to consult on a case when it turns out her father, who “went to the store for milk and never came back” when she was four, is found at a particularly confusing murder scene in a costal Oregon town, so the local cops (one of whom is Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donavan) call her in. It goes slowly from a crime procedural to something more! If you like Dark Winds and True Detective but think they should do more than tease you with the supernatural element, where here you go! The plot goes a little soft once we go full creature feature but overall really fun and well done and Woll does a great job carrying it. 4/5
I tried to standby into River, the third Jessica Rothe movie of the fest, as everyone was raving about it. And sure enough, the theater was packed and no standbys were activated. Sad.
No Way Down – aka “Kraken” in France (a better title!). A French guy who just got out of prison returns to the hood and tries to go straight, but is pulled back into an abandoned high-rise project building that he has a history with, but the building has started to rack up a disappearance headcount lately. Eventually he and a batch of friends are trying to escape intact from a – maniac? Interesting brutal “slasher” movie with solid emotional core and interesting complications. Ooh la la decapitations! 3/5
Donkey Princess – Was… Baffling. A princess in the Kingdom of Chile (does Chile decorate stuff with skulls like it’s Warhammer 40k usually?) wants to defy her father the king and find love, but then… Time and dimension travels? To become a pest control worker? And a television mascot? And other stuff? I think the major theme is taking care of an ailing father. Or boyfriend? Or both? Or the tension between those? I was kept interested the whole way through but have no idea what I just saw or what it was about. Mostly live action with weird little bits of animation and claymation and puppets mixed in. Apparently inspired by a fairy tale called “Donkeyskin” – I just read a synopsis of that and it didn’t help. Like, I can catch a whiff of themes but like someone just drove by in a van smoking them. I am not totally clear why I enjoyed it enough to give it a 3/5 but I did!
The Swallow – The closing movie of the fest! Aka Night of the Living Quicksand. Goth Pinkie Pie and her four twentybopper friends go out camping and fall victim to particularly aggressive quicksand. No, really. “You know, like those old time monster movies!” You mean the ones they do on MST3K? Ok. Good mud based special effects, it out-acted the humans. Inspired by “The Raft” from Creepshow 2. 2/5
And that’s the fest! There were interesting themes that emerged that happened across multiple films.
- Mostly immigrant casts in European movies
- Tampons placed in bloody noses
- Supernatural VHS tapes, which is a weird pull for the year of our Lord 2026, who even has VHS players any more. “Videos of me as a kid!” Only if you’re 40.
- Jessica Rothe
- Dealing with loss/grief/death
- Going full Hellraiser creature at the end of supernatural movies
- AirBnBs (kinda standard)
At previous Fests there were movies I regretted seeing. Really there was only one I rated one star this time, better than the previous 2 years. And plenty of top notch ones – my 5/5 list is:
- A Prayer For The Dying – absolute must see for the general population
- Pathetic Fallacy – absolute must see for horror fans
- Welcome to Dolly’s House – absolute must see for anime fans
- Girl In The Night – for deadpan fans
- The Squirrel – for sci-fi fans
- The Spiral – for terrifying family drama
Interestingly, I don’t mind gore and stuff but Pathetic Fallacy is the only one I’d think of as a explicit content warning in the bunch. In the rest, maybe someone dies but they’re not slashers… In The Squirrel no one does (oh… there is a brief sex scene, I guess in the US that causes panic attacks nowadays).
Back to work, I’ll be back at the fest next year!
