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Saturday at Fantastic Fest! And it was a really solid lineup I saw today.

Welcome to Dolly’s House – A Taiwanese rotoscoped animated movie about a “eerie sites” type influencer, her flower arranging boyfriend, and a famous and mysterious dollmaking lady. And then it goes bananas. It’s super stylish and beautiful, and is one of the few treatments of influencer characters that wasn’t trite or annoying. In the end it had a very effective message of a girl being an influencer trying to fill the gap inside her left by her craving love and only getting a bunch of poor substitutes.

Visually it sometimes reminded me of Paprika, but with modern techniques like you see in Blue Eyed Samurai. 5/5

And then – another VHS based horror movie, like Death of a Yellow Bird from yesterday. There was another VHS horror movie, Playhouse, that got really good buzz and I wasn’t able to get into all fest 😦

Posthumous – A VHS tape haunting slash familial trauma movie! Zoe, a thirty year old woman “with a shitty aura” goes back home to hang out with her burnout dad and rummage through historical knickknacks for her birthday, which is always marred by her mom dying of cancer when she was born. But mom made some proactive video birthday wishes for her first 21 years (over the course of time, and I was initially very concerned that her mom was pregnant every year like clockwork when she filmed these till it became more clear). Turns out her parents hung out with the new agers next door back in the day but Zoe’s dad warns her to stay away from the “pot selling witch” next door. Then it ramps up from your normal VHS tape supernatural horror to Hellraiser level. It’s really well done, though I kept getting turned off by the missteps – like there’s diegetic video viewing which was good but then also there were just gratuitously inserted video shots and/or filters direct to audience which were obviously manipulative and not necessary because there were good bones there already. Also in the end there was just a bit too much explaining and a bit too much denouement – 4/5, if it had been tauter it’d hit 5/5.

This next one was for sure on my must watch list if only because last year’s Indian vampire movie Sister Midnight was one of my favorites and this looked stylish as heck.

Half – A movie in Malayam, which as a dumb American I’ve never heard of but it’s the language of a southern Indian state. It’s their first international release and first time at a film festival! And it’s a banger.
We have a pair of smoldering twins (the girl is mute, the boy a hunk) who get run off the road and murdered by some road bandits in the Rajistan desert. However, it turns out they are half vampires! So when night comes they heal up and go on a revenge spree.
Apparently Indians also like them some torture porn as the pair meted out gruesome justice while the bad guys also get their dhampir torturing in. It has a bopping music soundtrack and intense action and Silat-infused fight choreography from Very Tri Yulisman who worked on The Raid and The Raid 2 among other high velocity actioners. Kinda reminded me of The Crow. Except Indian. And twins. And in the desert. Anyway, a wild ride! 4/5

Ever seen Role Models? Knights of Badassdom? I guess “norms go into a LARP” is a whole genre now. To explain this, LARP, or “live-action roleplay”, is where a whole bunch of people get together in the woods to pretend to be elves and stuff and have a big organized event where they do quests. Like Dungeons & Dragons but outside.

Game Master – A French movie about a single corporate salesman dad who pursues his daughter, who is skipping her business school interview, into a massive LARP. Hijinks ensue. The director, who does a TV series that is like a French Curb Your Enthusiasm, describes it as “the wedding of Lord of the Rings and cringe comedy” which is pretty accurate. Goofy fun, family values, solidly in the “good hearted LARP subgenre.” Suitable for the family, which is unusual for Fantastic fest movies. Sentimental but watchable. 3/5

And to round out the night, the midnight showing was a bood old fashioned brutal slum apartment murder fest, like they do.

Kick On – An Australian movie about four friends out partying all night. They need some more coke and so they go to a guy… a crack fueled son of a Russian mobster who has a Roman fixation. Well it all goes bad and gruesome bludgeoning, wounding, and killing go on and on since the crooks are only barely competent. Mean and brutal but pretty straightforward and solidly done. The Brisbane Bandits are in the credits for some reason. 3/5

Whew, day 3 of movies going well past 1 AM, I’m starting to feel it. Will Sunday be a day of rest?

I went to Fantastic Fest for the first time in 2009, and have been off and on since – 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2023, 2024, 2025, and now 2026! Eight solid days of film-watching with 5 showings most days. It is “genre” film, which is a weird term that means horror, scifi, “foreign”… Basically anything non-mainstream. It’s here in Austin, TX and is held by the Alamo Drafthouse.

The fest kicked off with a big feature…

Resident Evil! An organ delivery driver is given a special package to go to Raccoon City General Hospital and – if you know anything about Resident Evil that’s ’nuff said. A completely different take on Resident Evil than all the previous incoherent actioners, by the director of Weapons and Barbarian. It was humorous and scary in turns, going for an Evil Dead 2 sort of vibe. Many of the shots were video gamey but not, you know, bad, as you might be led to expect by that statement. The action is nonstop and gruesome, these aren’t just zombies, it’s tentacle mutating body horror from the jump and escalated over the course of our hapless everyman’s journey. A fun watch. 3.5/5

Then it was snakey time, hence all the snake decor.

Beware Boiúna – A medical volunteer mission on the Amazon runs afoul of both colonizers and jumbo sized wildlife. Can be summed up as “a better Anaconda” in terms of effects and most technical measures. Is nature or man more ruthless? Well, one has a giant ass snake in play. But team human has a scrappy indigenous girl! Filmed on location along the Amazon. Not Werner Herzog by any means but a solid giant creature feature. Well made by Michael P. Nelson, director of last year’s “Silent Night, Deadly Night” reboot and solid if B-movie acting from the leads. And I got to hold a big snake they had as a promo. 3/5

One of the two female leads was Jessica Rothe, who was starring in three movies at the fest! Scream Queen of 2026 for sure.

The Glorious Dead – By the Adams family, a local fest favorite family/group that generates a movie a year plus or minus. A small town sheriff, Deb, has weird things start to happen in town. Sounds like half the streaming series out now right? Well this is a really small rural town and the sheriff is used to everyone being crackpots or helpless and wanting random handyman help from her so it takes a good number of weird reports to get her attention but then it gets really weird and gruesome fast. A horror comedy about the dead coming back to life, but a much different take on it than you’d expect. I liked the premise – but it was the late movie and they needed to edit it, they went through the same core loop of being confronted by the problem/doing the same thing about the problem/seeing that doesn’t work 3 full times and I was falling asleep by the third. It’s only 81 minutes long though. 2.5/5, 3/5 after an edit.

The first night of the fest was a success – kind of a downward trend over the evening, but whatver! I was up fresh and early for day 2…