The opening scene of Aux yeux des vivants (Among the Living), the new French horror film from the makers of Inside and Livid and contributors to the anthology The ABCs of Death 2, is intense. Intense in this case translates to shocking, violent, and graphic. How intense? Even hardcore fans of the macabre may fear that they are in over their heads with this one. If the movie starts with this type of shock, you might ask yourself frightfully in the cool black of a darkened movie theater, what lies in store over the remaining 85 minutes?
Archive for the ‘2014 Fantasy FilmFest’ Category
Aux yeux des vivants (Among the Living) Review
Posted: December 6, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Foreign, HorrorTags: Alexandre Bustillo, French movies, Julien Maury, Slasher Film, The Hills Have Eyes
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Faults Review
Posted: November 11, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Drama, Reviews, ThrillerTags: Cults, Deprogramming, Lance Reddick, Leland Orser, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Riley Stearns
Faults, an out of the mainstream effort detailing an attempt to rescue a young woman from a cult, appears to have been made in the 1970’s as an ABC Movie of the Week and kept in a time capsule until its release on the festival circuit in 2014. Take the stray cell phone and the recent automobiles out of the picture, and you have a period piece that is better suited for a time and place that no longer exists.
Kids into cults seems a bit passé. The hippie phenomena of the 60’s spilled over into the communes of the 70’s, and parents saw their children play out the ageless act of rebellion first through drugs and then through philosophies; in either case, it meant the young leaving the old behind. While cults remain a phenomenon, they generally break into the mainstream press now only through apocalyptic predictions or tragic acts of self-destruction. (more…)
Bad Turn Worse (aka We Gotta Get Out of This Place) Review
Posted: November 4, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Reviews, ThrillerTags: Dutch Southern, Jeremy Allen White, Jim Thompson, Logan Huffman, Mackenzie David, Mark Pellegrino, Simon and Zeke Hawkins, Texas
The would-be teen noir thriller Bad Turn Worse was shown under the even more awkward title We Gotta Get Out of This Place at the 2014 Fantasy Filmfest. The new name is an improvement in that it is both more concise and a more accurate summation of the plot trajectory of this underwhelming little movie. For all its faults, Bad Turn Worse can now boast of truth in advertising as this movie starts out bad and, oh yeah, turns worse. A traditional premise that could have made for reasonable entertainment is undone by poor casting and a weak script.
These Final Hours Review
Posted: October 29, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Action, Reviews, Science FictionTags: Australian Films, Mad Max, Nathan Phillips, The End of the World, Wolf Creek, Zak Hilditch
As we await the reboot of the franchise with the May 2015 release of Mad Max: Fury Road, director/screenwriter Zak Hilditch offers a tantalizing glimpse at what a Mad Max prequel might look like in the early going of his feature, These Final Hours. It’s the end of the world, don’t you know it, but everyone is a hell of a long way from feeling fine. Suicide and homicide have become Australia’s twin national sports with rape, robbery, and pillaging hanging in there as sentimental favorites. Corpses dangle from lampposts, and machete-wielding maniacs carjack passing vehicles to drive them to their next act of retribution. What’s a young Aussie male to do, but run out on his pregnant girlfriend one last time and head for the true party to end all parties, where he can go out in a blaze of tequila, ecstasy, gunfire, and glory? Unfortunately, this promising start in nihilism, hyper-violence, and general bad-assedness is completely undone by the source of ruination of too many genre movies – children. (more…)
La cueva (In Darkness We Fall) Review
Posted: October 3, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Foreign, Horror, Reviews, ThrillerTags: Alfredo Montero, Cannibalism, Formentera, Found Footage, Spanish films
The only good that could possible come out of widespread viewing of the latest group underground, found footage, schlock horror film known as La cueva or In Darkness We Fall is if audiences united after suffering through it and demanded a moratorium on trapped underground movies or found footage movies or, at a minimum, trapped underground found footage movies. It’s not going to happen, but it is nice to think that every film, not matter how awful, has an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the arts.
The Mule Review
Posted: October 2, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Action, Reviews, ThrillerTags: 1983 America's Cup, Angus Sampson, Australian Films, Bangkok, Drug Trafficking, Fringe, Georgina Haig, Hugo Weaving, John Noble
Laws are laws (and the law is paramount in the new Australian black comedy crime flick, The Mule), but unwritten rules can be nearly as important. The applicable unwritten rule here is that one-note genre films should not run longer than 85 or 90 minutes. The Mule clocks in at 103 minutes, and that extra time, devoted almost exclusively to waiting for the main character to have a bowel movement, constipates the narrative. Its excessive length, the most common fault in modern cinema, is the only serious shortcoming in an uncomfortably original film from Down Under that dwells on activities down under. (more…)
Time Lapse Review
Posted: October 1, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Reviews, Science FictionTags: Bradley King, Danielle Panabaker, George Finn, Leonardo da Vinci, Matt O'Leary, Polyphasic Sleep, Sci Fi
Legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci slept only two hours per day, resting in periodic snippets of 10 to 30 minutes. This unusual sleep pattern is known as polyphasic sleep or “the sleep of genius.” Da Vinci put these extra waking hours to good use, pursuing his mastery of painting and sculpture, continuing his work as an engineer and inventor, and furthering the knowledge of man in disciplines such as anatomy and mathematics. A journalist once attempted to adopt this habit, and after several weeks was able to get by on less than four hours of sleep per day, but he soon found himself bored and wasted the extra time on television and junk food. The moral of the story is that you need a genius to make the most out of certain opportunities. (more…)
Extraterrestrial Review
Posted: September 29, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Horror, Reviews, Science FictionTags: Extraterrestrial, Michael Ironside, The Vicious Brothers
There are about 30 minutes of cinematic gold in the new science fiction-horror flick Extraterrestrial, scenes good enough to meet the expectations raised by the smart, sleek trailer for the film and give rise to the hope that The Vicious Brothers may have hit on the elusive formula to provide the Alien on Earth mash-up that has eluded this genre to date. Unfortunately, Extraterrestrial runs for a too-long 106 minutes, meaning that the 30 minutes of genius are subsumed completely by a sub-standard storyline that renders the overall product unfortunately unpalatable. (more…)
R100 Review
Posted: September 26, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Action, Comedy, Foreign, Reviews, Science FictionTags: Bondage, Hitoshi Matsumoto, Japanese Films, Matsuo Suzuki, Nao Ômori, S&M, Satire
Do you remember the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where it looked like Bugs was trapped, but he would pull out a can of paint and a brush, paint a door, and then escape through it? Hitoshi Matsumoto employs a similar device each time his movie, R100, is in danger of running into a dead end. Matsumoto simply changes the rules, not to mention the genre, and his madcap characters crash through the newly drawn door and veer off in another direction. For viewers willing to sit back and enjoy the ride without giving a whit about the destination, R100 is a blast of originality and a poke in the eye of the, at times, too staid Japanese film industry. (more…)
The Canal Review
Posted: September 22, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Horror, ReviewsTags: Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Hannah Hoekstra, Irish Films, Ivan Kavanagh, Patricia Douglas, Rupert Evans, Stephanie Clerkin
Director/screenwriter Ivan Kavanagh comes off as something of a dilettante in his new horror film, The Canal. Kavanagh dabbles in the subgenres of scary movies, never settling on a single theme or approach. Is this a psychodrama or a ghost story? Are there real demons behind the walls of the house or are those sounds just the voices inside a jealous husband’s head? Does that 100-year old archival film showing murders along the same canal indicate a spectral presence that now haunts a public bathroom in the area or is the laconic Irish police detective right in his assessment of the situation? We always think it’s the husband, he explains to the husband, because it’s always the husband – every time. (more…)
Meet Mr. Karma 