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:
- 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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