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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Eight

Posted on October 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

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.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Seven

Posted on October 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

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.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Six

Posted on October 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

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 Another: Theatrical ...
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER" - Review

One Battle After Another by 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.

Not much more to say. Shark! More tomorrow.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Five

Posted on October 9, 2025 | Leave a comment

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.

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Four

Posted on October 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

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!

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Three

Posted on October 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

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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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day Two

Posted on October 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

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.

Here’s a more coherent review of The Ice Tower if you’re intrigued.

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!

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Fantastic Fest 2025 – Day One

Posted on September 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

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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Fantastic Fest 2025 – 20th Anniversary Edition!

Posted on September 29, 2025 | Leave a comment

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:

  1. Fish Story, a Japanese movie about a punk song that saves the world.  It is beautiful. 
  2. 13 Assassins, the best modern day samurai movie by a wide margin. TOTAL MASSACRE!!!
  3. Sound of Noise, a Swedish film about guerrilla musicians and the tone deaf cop from a famously musical family who’s after them
  4. Green Room, where a punk band runs afoul of Nazis, as they do (with Patrick Stewart as lead Nazi!)
  5. Kill, an Indian (Sikh) movie that is “Die Hard on a Train” with super impressive action
  6. Animalia, a Moroccan arthouse movie that is beautiful and deep
  7. Riddle of Fire – like a 1970s live action Disney movie, and absolutely hilarious
  8. Planet B – a frighteningly realistic “VR Guantanamo” scenario in a French near future sci-fi thriller
  9. Daniela Forever – Nacho Vigalondo’s take on an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type situation
  10. 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.

Here’s a letterboxd list of the 2024 features as a bonus.

I’ll cover the fest day by day! Here’s the cool stained glass “Saint Chingu” theme this year:

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Fantastic Fest 2024 – The Best

Posted on October 6, 2024 | Leave a comment

Another year, another Fantastic Fest! I saw 34 films over a one week period and my brain feels like it’s boiling. Some great stuff this year and some films that were very thought-provoking. I don’t follow the “film circuit” other than this so I go in blind on all the movies. “It won at Cannes!” “Oh, really?” FF is my favorite vacation of the year – no planning stuff to placate family members, no travel rigors – just pick 5 movies a day and grind through them and fill your brain with diverse images and ideas.

General thoughts from the fest:

  • I think “child endangerment” is the real theme of this year’s Fantastic Fest, even though it’s allegedly clowns…  Well, maybe they are the same thing? But kids are NOT safe in any of these movies.
  • “We got access to a nice house; let’s film an entire movie in it” (apparently not purely for pandemic reasons) is a pretty common thing this year
  • The surprise “secret screenings” were kinda bougie this year, possibly due to Sony buying the Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest. They are fine movies but Saturday Night and The Apprentice are not aligned with the usual FF content.
  • The weird “violence is more tolerated, sex is less tolerated” Hollywood vibe continues; some pretty gruesome bits in otherwise more sedate fare was confusing – at least two movies could have been PG barring a couple random gore incidents that seemed out of character for the film. I guess everything goes to screening so MPAA ratings are irrelevant? Or is the MPAA so far gone that brutal violence is fine now but breasts cause you to burst into flames? Dunno.

I’ve rated the films I saw 1-10 based on my subjective opinion.

  • 9-10: Must watch for anyone, seek it out!
  • 7-8: Good stuff
  • 5-6: Mid but watchable if you like the genre
  • 3-4: Maybe if you’re really into its thing
  • 1-2: So angry that I saw this

I’ll start out with the best ones, and do separate posts for the good, mid, and fair to bad ones. There were five films I really loved this year. And interestingly, they each in a completely different genre from the rest, so there should be something for everyone!

Planet B (10/10) is an excellent French political sci-fi thriller about a near future filled with drone surveillance and citizen suppression (a very near future, in other words) where captured dissidents get disappeared and put in total VR immersion to try to get more info out of them. Super realistic and plausible. The two female leads, one who is a captured dissident and one who is an immigrant ex-journalist cleaning lady who happens upon the plot, do a super job. The theme of trust was razor edged – you can’t trust anyone in a secret police state (especially inside VR) where the main thing is them trying to get names of others out of you – but you have to trust others to survive and fight back. This is director Aude Lea Rapin’s second feature (and the first was filmed guerilla), she was a documentarian previously. It’s set in 2039 but this may be a reality sooner; I guarantee there’s some twisted f**k at the Pentagon working on this concept right now.  “Now hear me out… Mind Guantanamo!” Very clever veneer of democracy on top of it – well we can’t torture them in VR, that would look bad if we got discovered, but how about sleep deprivation via nightmares of their crimes? We can’t monitor them but we can play mind games to get them to narc on each other…  The tension was high throughout and you were never sure if a given gambit would work or backfire terribly. The tech was pretty much modern day plus a little, it goes past plausible to inevitable. I strongly recommend this movie, it is what science fiction is meant to do. “The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future, but to prevent it.” – Ray Bradbury

Daniela Forever (10/10) is Fest favorite Nacho Vigalondo’s (Colossal, Timecrimes) newest feature. And he’s back baby!!! Amazingly fun and thoughtful, a musician Nicolas in Madrid (Henry Golding, aka Snake Eyes) is mourning the sudden loss of his girlfriend Daniela (Beatrice Granno) and not doing well until a friend gets him into a clinical trial for a lucid dreaming drug to try to get over it. Instead he now lives to dream about her. Surprises abound as his grief and selfishness interact.  Do we think of other people in our lives as just NPCs and our volition as the thing of paramount importance? If we think they’re not real, does that change how we should – or would – act? We start out as kind of a reverse Eternal Sunset of the Spotless Mind (remember the ex, not forget her) and get nearly to I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream with him playing God and getting unhinged before we end up with a converse Eternal Sunshine.  The emotional journey is deep and complex and thought-provoking. The waking world is filmed in old magnetic tape and the dream world in full 4k creating an unmistakable context to let you know where you are (until deliberately played with, of course). And it wouldn’t be a Nacho movie without some truly hilarious bits (their “monster costumes” of Dracula With A Chainsaw and Shark With A Gun had the audience hooting in glee). A new best for Nacho and a movie definitely as meaningful and memorable as Eternal Sunshine.

Sister Midnight (10/10) is a great slow burn comedy/drama in Hindi by first time director Karan Kandhari following a newly married Indian couple leading an estranged life in a 10×10 shack-end in Mumbai. Radhika Apte, the lead actress, gives a superb performance – even when she is just sitting isolated in her hovel all day while her husband is at work she is captivating and conveys entire soliloquies of meaning with every gesture or look. She is lonely and frustrated and it’s at least partially her fault because she’s a bit antisocial and difficult. She slowly learns how to do domestic basics and makes friends with a neighbor and the local trans women (hijras) who give street blessings and a guy who runs the elevator at her work, and then things take a dark turn as she starts to feel sick and have trouble tolerating – *normal* food…  I don’t want to give away anything about what happens because it was so rewarding to not know what was coming, but this movie is brilliant and one of my favorites of the fest. Trust and watch. Did well at Cannes and for a first movie from this guy…  Dang!  Also has a top flight soundtrack, Delta blues (we open on a train chugging down moonlit tracks to it) to Iggy Pop (the movie’s named after one of his songs).

Ghost Killer (9/10) is a fun Japanese action movie about a girl who finds a shell casing from a bullet used to murder a hit man, so his ghost haunts her and can possess her and share his martial arts badassery with her so she can bring the pain as she goes up against his foes and hers.  As you might expect it’s female empowerment / youth empowerment but not as goofy as that often is and has super solid serious action scenes. She refuses to kill but not in the usual naive self-righteous way.  The characters all have reasonable motivations that are not just “squealing” or “murder” unlike, frankly, a lot of other Japanese films in this vein. This is a formula we’ve seen before but here it’s executed way more skillfully. The director, Kensuke Sonomura, is the fight choreographer on the Baby Assassins series and this is his directing debut, and it beats those hands down for my money!

Get Away (9/10) – Midsommar meets Hot Fuzz written by and starring Nick Frost. A British family goes on vacation to a weird little Swedish island (played by a Finnish island) where they celebrate a dark local holiday.  I don’t want to give away any of the twists but it is funny and creepy and then Act 3 is a sudden orgy of gruesome yet still somehow funny blood and violence. Great acting all around; Nick Frost is Nick Frosting it up of course but the dynamic among all the family members was great and all the Finnish supporting actors were fun and weird. And when the Desert Eagle sings, you cannot mistake her cry.

Now, I did not manage to get in to see Anora (NYC sex worker goes to Russia) or U Are The Universe (Ukranian space truckers) but a bunch of people I talked with cited them as in their top 3 so give those a try too (I’ll be looking for them!)

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Fantastic Fest 2023 – The Best

Posted on September 26, 2024 | Leave a comment

I have enjoyed going to Fantastic Fest, the genre film festival started by the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse, Tim League, since… 2009!?! Holy shit I’m old. Anyway, I go, not every year, and I write up film reviews here, though not every year. It’s a week of black shirted men and tattooed women at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin watching 5 movies a day! They specialize in “genre” movies – SF, horror, action, weird, foreign…  Some are “secret screenings” where you don’t know what you’re going to see until you’re seated. Anyway, I just got back from FF 2024 and realized I never posted my 2023 reviews so time to get caught up!

My rating scale (in my opinion of course, YMMV, but I don’t bother beating around the bush if I don’t like something):

  • 5/5 – Great movie, I plan on actively promoting it to anyone who will listen, will happily rewatch it
  • 4/5 – Good movie, seek it out
  • 3/5 – OK, worth watching
  • 2/5 – Fair – don’t regret watching it per se but wouldn’t recommend it without some caveats
  • 1/5 – Bad – regret spending hours of my time on this trash (none of these this time, and usually there are!)

Let’s see… I’ll start out with the best ones, and do separate posts for the good, mid, and bad ones. There were four films I really loved this year and gave 5/5 to. Definitely check them out, they’re all on Amazon Prime and Apple TV as well as a long tail of other outlets, except sadly for Triggered.

Action!

Triggered, a Filipino action movie with loads of great and bloody action. A commando vet with PTSD is hired to guard a warehouse and two teens seeking refuge bring a waves of corrupt drug cops in to get killed with guns, knives, flashlights, hands, debris, table saws, explosions…. But with a remarkably deft hand with humanizing all out participants via their families and lives. First Blood meets Hard Target meets The Raid. Put it in theaters already! 5/5

Kill – an Indian (Sikh) movie that is a “Die Hard on a train” scenario (I refuse to mention Under Siege 2) where our commando hero and his clandestine fiancée gets caught up in a train robbery by a big extended family bandit gang like they have over there. He is all about “no just beat them up don’t kill them” for the first act, I was starting to roll my eyes and think poorly of our hero, and then one baddie just up and knifes his would-be fiancée to death and then it is MURDER TIME.  Brutal kills that had even a hardened Fantastic Fest crowd hooting and hollering. Death by knife, cleaver, hammer, fire extinguisher (both ends), lighter fluid, toilet, and more.  He scares the piss out of the bad guys to where some just bail. They all go forward to “get him” and find a dozen of their dead are hanging by sheets in the intervening train car and they have to take a good cry break. Hard core! [Editor’s note from a year later – I mentioned this to an Indian coworker and they were impressed, this had just come out in theaters and made a splash there.] 5/5

Cinema!

Animalia – Whoa that was deep.  You follow a pregnant Moroccan woman who was a poor Berber but married into a rich family. The rest of the family goes away on a trip and then weird stuff starts happening.  As she travels trying to get to her husband, there is constant tension and increasing weirdness. Beautifully shot.  “Confidently ambiguous” in the wording of this Variety review.  If something makes you think, is it “arthouse“ nowadays?  It blended social roles, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and science fiction slash the supernatural in a realistically complex melange. Reminded me a little of 2001: A Space Odyssey without taking as much of a sudden turn into weird.  I find it hard to believe this was Sofia Alaoui’s first film, it was casually masterful.  It had no clear firm resolution or statement, but frankly I like that. This film makes me want to think about it and discuss it with others. 5/5

Family Fun!

Riddle of Fire – Wowza!  Shot in 16mm and evoking the 1970s live action Disney movies, we get three roguish youngsters who run around loose like I did as a kid in the 70s and then go through some good old fashioned child endangerment, but with a faerie mythology layer slathered on top.  The mix of contemporary and literary language in the dialogue reminded me of O Brother, Where Art Thou, mixed with the original Bad News Bears and Pete’s Dragon.  And it was HILARIOUS.  The kid actors and their dialogue and mannerisms were so winning.  They meet a member of the gang they’ll come to loggerheads with, the Circle of the Enchanted Sword (a kinda Manson Family lite) who’s a big cowboy shit-kicker type and they say “he looks like he plays the jug in a hillbilly band” and then refer to him consistently as “that woodsy bastard” thereafter, which made me belly-laugh every time. Cute, foul, resourceful, and touching in turns.  This film is why I go to Fantastic Fest, to be completely surprised and delighted by something I didn’t know I was looking for but enjoyed immensely. 5/5 must see when it hits theaters next year and I’ll be telling everyone I know to go. [Editor’s note from a year later – I bought the Blu-Ray of this from Vinegar Syndrome so I can show it to anyone who will sit still.]

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Rules for Reviews

Posted on October 29, 2008 | Leave a comment

I read a lot of RPG reviews from many good sources – RPG.net is my favorite, but there’s a lot of places hosting them out there.  I’ve written a fair number of RPG reviews myself over the years.

Roger Ebert has issued a blog post called “Roger’s little rule book” for film critics, describing ways in which he feels film reviewers should write and behave in order to best serve the public who reads their reviews.  I think many of his points are equally valid for RPG reviews!  Except that no one’s flying RPG reviewers anywhere first class, sadly.    Anyway, if you write reviews, give it a read.

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