It was also apparently an unusually tricky shoot, even though he lives in the town where he shot it - not only did he have to find two houses right next to each other that had the right properties, but co-star Alex Breaux was doing Stranger Things on Broadway, which means he was only available to shoot on Mondays. It also meant getting the cast of Depraved and Blackout together, and while I suspect it's not as hard as it might be if you're based in New York and have a lot of friends like Fessenden, but with that schedule it's probably some work. That's also where he mentioned that James Le Gros doesn't really like horror, but they go back.
Anyway, I didn't really like their movie, and I sort of enjoyed their Q&A mostly as a comedy act where Resnick was the pro trying to make his friend look good. Sometimes you just aren't quite sure whether folks making a movie like this and taking it to festivals did it as a lark and are enjoying the ride even if they're kind of out of their depth, sort of contemptuous in an "I can't believe you paid money for this thing we crapped out" way, or doing a bit. It's usually the first, but, man, can this sort of thing not be my sort of thing.
After that, I had some time to kill before heading up to the Museum for Blaise, amused to overhear in line that Nicolas Winding Refn had been at the Ultraman documentary because he's a major fan.
Next up, an oddly late start on Saturday with some gaps as it's mostly events before the "Anime no Bento" package, then Break Free and Unidentified Murder; Sunday looks like Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise, with Blades of the Guardians, Pontypool, and Redline all recommended. Just a coupleof those weird days where you've got to stay in one screen to maximize movies but I'm apparently building in meal breaks.
Trauma or, Monsters All
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
One gets the feeling that Larry Fessenden had the idea for doing a crossover when he realized that Blackout would mean he'd directed vampire, Frankenstein, and werewolf pictures, but didn't necessarily have a great story when he started doing the work of a producer to bring people back, and one didn't come together when the schedules lined up. That probably makes the whole thing a little more meta than intended, with everyone sort of aware that they're in a monster mashup even if they're not quite winking at the camera.
He returns us to Talbot Falls, where historian Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) has moved looking for some quiet as she begins a book on George Washington Carver, taking a job in the library and making friends with Agnes (Aitana Doyle). Having read about the werewolf incident that took place a couple years ago, she begins to suspect that her next-door neighbor who locks himself in the basement during the full moon is actually Charley (Alex Hurt), whom everyone presumes is dead. Reading up a little more suggests that his housemate Adam (Alex Breaux) is the Frankenstein's monster that was said to beset a neighboring town a couple years earlier (in Depraved). Wanting to write about something in the present rather than from a hundred years ago, she pitches an editorial to the local paper about how the trauma of those events is like monsters in their midst, though Charley's girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is looking to get into contact with him. Not only does that raise the hackles of a lot of people who don't like an outsider coming in and trying to analyze them, but things like that get online these days, which attracts the attention of a biotech investor (Joshua Leonard) who has been looking for Adam, but also Sam (Larry Fessenden), who became a vampire 30 years earlier and is intrigued at the idea of other monsters relatively nearby.
If Sam's presence sounds kind of odd, it is; when Fessenden mentioned that this might be his next project after Blackout played the festival three years ago, it sounded like he intended to have Meredith Snaider from Habit return as Anna, but he apparently could not track her down or interest her in participating. I'm not sure she would have been a better fit, although the tone might have been different, since the exposition and "let me expound upon some themes" moments carry a different weight coming from the very recognizable writer/director of the film playing an earthier character than Snaider's Anna. Even taking that into account, there are an awful lot of people status-dumping more than conversing or acting, after doing things that the film needs even if they don't arise naturally, jawing about where things stand in the aftermath of Blackout, with Cassandra also spending a lot of time worrying about the book she's writing in a way that doesn't always feel like it connects to the rest of the story (and boy howdy, do people comment on how she's telling uncomfortable truths while being named "Cassandra" a few times). It's a scenario in search of a plot. Fessenden is kind of onto something in terms of poking around the idea of trauma and recovery, likening the end of a horror movie to a mass shooting/casualty event that scars a place and attracts outsiders trying to use it for their often good-natured but insensitive ends, but mostly winds up restating it rather than developing it.
He's put together a nice cast, though, especially in terms of the newcomers - young leads Laëtitia Hollard and Aitana Doyle are really charming, and although it can sometimes feel a little frustrating, there's something very real and earnest about the way Hollard's Cassandra naively stumbles and repeatedly uses "I'm just connecting what's already out there" as a shield. A hangout movie with Hollard and Doyle as these characters would be quite enjoyable, and that really helps when wheels are mostly turning in the background. The returning folks do a fair job of sketching out who they are in a little time, possibly enough that the exposition and flashbacks could have been cut back a bit. Alex Breaux is a standout as Adam, playing kind of simple and brain-damaged without doing Karloff or struggling to get words out to hammer that home.
There's a fair amount to keep track of happening kind of randomly, even if there's not a whole lot of actual horror movie action and gore for most of the film, with what there is feeling a bit obligatory even if it's well-executed. Even the climax seems like something a movie has to do rather than entirely where threads were heading, although Fessenden earns the emotions his finale is aiming to stir when they finally hit.
Would a little more time ruminating on the script have made Trauma a more fitting climax to 30 years of Fessenden putting his spin on classic monsters, or was the idea always more enticing than what could be pulled together from the previous three movies?
"Yucky Guy"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
What can I say, this is a sort of absurdity that doesn't really connect with me at all; I keep waiting for it go somewhere but it's really "'people sleeping through chaos in their grand but featureless mansion', 'dogs wearing diapers', and "tresspasser pees to mark territory' are funny" and not a whole lot else. I mean, sure, they are funny, but once the concept has presented itself, I just want a bit more than this movie does.
It's also 13 minutes long, and it kind of makes me think about how a lot of people don't necessarily need something to be funny to laugh, but it's sort of their default way of breaking tension, and a lot of this sort of comedy seems to confuse effect with cause.
Dance Freak
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
A thing about a lot of "Underground" movies is that they're not just acquired tastes that may not match one's sense of humor or kink, but they are often actively unpleasant to watch under a lot of circumstances, such as sitting close to the front of the auditorium for Dance Freak. It's a grainy black-and-white film with frequent strobing made by viral-video specialists and probably meant to be viewed on a tablet or maybe a television, a contained rectangle rather than the entirety of what one can see. It's harsh to look at and the filmmakers don't really give an audience a lot of reasons to do that.
It introduces us to Obie (Robby Rackleff), a sort of sad sack whose girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester) is running for office and starting to explicitly leave him behind rather than just by implication, and who is apparently mainly employed because everyone else at the office has forgotten how to access systems. He's trying to take up birdhouse building as a hobby, but it's not going that well. That's about the time when the Dance Freak starts showing up, somehow hypnotizing folks and deflating them while they are in their trance. A scientist at the lab where it was created, Dr. Dilly Gorgul (Sheila Mears) tells Obie it "looks just like you but is a separate entity" and then runs for the wasteland, mostly leaving Obie and Dorty to handle the situation.
Filmmakers Robby Rackleff & Alan Resnick give Obie the sort of surreal micro-budget film world where things are sort of empty and eccentric where we can see it though there are hints that it gets truly bizarre just out of sight, and that's good for a few good gags at worst and a fairly constant stream of chuckles if your mileage varies in that direction. The trick is often finding something that sounds not quite right in a particular way, such as names like "Obie" and "Dorty" and "Gorgul", and saying them with a straight face. It's easy to milk jokes like that too far; a street gang called "the Salad Boys" earns a chuckle when the name is tossed out but fizzles quickly when they try to play the gag much longer. A lot of the movie is deadpan where the silence after a joke without a punchline is held too long or they keep going, sure there's a bit that will convince someone that this is funny.
If the jokes in this sort of movie don't land, it can still work if there's something interesting to grab onto, but that's seldom the case here. Obie and Dorty are not particularly personable either individually or as a pair, and the idea of the Dance Freak doesn't quite coalesce, either as an awkward expression of Obie trying to feel joy or him draining/feeling drained by the world. It's like a whole movie based on the snidest reading of Peter Parker dancing like a dork in Spider-Man 3, and by the end, the storytelling is muddled - it's Obie's story, but he's out of action, and the chemistry between Obie and Dorty isn't enough to let her work as the lead later on.
There are a couple of bright spots - Sheila Mears actually gets to make Gorgul a character, giving a bit of a "knows what danger looks like" edge to her ivory-tower dorkiness - but I seldom found it funny enough to be worth looking at.
"Cardigan"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I don't want to belabor how much I enjoyed "Cardigan"; it's a five-minute short that doesn't quite have one joke but leans on its main gag enough that parsing it in a review can deflate it. But, as such things go, it's executed very well: Writer Hans Obma and Lois Meleri Jones hit the right notes as a couple that the audience can identify with when faced with something unfair but also just privileged enough that we feel like they may have something coming; Iwan John and Bethany Williams-Potter are an enjoyable odd couple as the police officers the run afoul of. The main joke of just how much this town identifies with its namesake clothing is goofily absurd and pivots to something that delivers a wry grin at the end.
It's a five-minute comedy sketch, but it's a good one.
Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where the short that preceded Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant is adroit with its gag, the feature uses a sledgehammer, but it's got a target that can use a good sledging and seemingly never forgets something that a lot of absurd comedies forget, including one I saw earlier in the day: Make everything as weird as you want, because people and situations are weird, but do it by pushing something very familiar to an extreme that one can still recognize.
So we meet Mary (Hannah Lynch), nearly 30 and still living with her mother Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), who simultaneously harangues her for being a layabout but also doesn't give her any space whatsoever. Mary's got an odd kink in that she really enjoys tentacle hentai, which brings us to the neighbors, whom we meet as Ann (Jackie van Beek) tries to get her son Boo (Arlo Green) to do something other than masturbate in his room, seeing as that causes the power to flicker. When Mary and Boo bump into each other in the laundry room, she discovers that Boo was conceived when his mother was abducted by aliens, and he has the glorious tentacled genitalia of her dreams. They only agree to masterbate, but, well, his jizz is powerful, spraying across the room and dissolving her pants - and, apparently, alien fetuses grow faster than Mary can convince people she wants no part of being a mother.
Writer Jordan Mark Windsor and his co-director Sean Wallace don't mess around, letting the audience see what Boo's got between his legs in the first ten or fifteen minutes rather than playing coy, and it's kind of a brave decision, because it's going to be a while before they can really escalate from that sort of prosthetic weirdness. They don't retreat from it - among all the other fluids, Mary's morning sickness is a colorful, gooey mess - but it's not quite the movie where they're going to try to top the last crazy thing you saw every ten minutes, although when the climax comes, it's great, just as weirdly practical and weirdly organic as one might hope after setting the bar high at the beginning.
Part of the point may be to get a big early laugh that hooks the audience - this movie is weird and gross enough that its theatrical run might be limited, so you've got to give the folks streaming it something to whet their appetites at the start - but I suspect that part of it is how frankness is the engine driving the movie, and spending the next hour and a half letting the audience see all the ways pregnancy can wreak havoc on a woman's turned up to 11 isn't really compatible with getting cute about just what put Mary in this position. Windsor & Wallace are careful never to be scolding; Mary wears her kink on her sweatshirt even if she doesn't want her mother, Boo, or anything else all up in her business, and folks being matter-of-fact about things is seldom played as foolish. There's not really a villain here - all these people are trying to do their best by Mary and Boo even as they're confused and trying to act normal in the face of it, despite the situation being pretty darn abnormal.
The cast sells that great, especially Hannah Lynch, whose Mary is annoyed and sarcastic and winds up snapping at a lot of people but seldom comes off as mean; she's probably funny if weird under better circumstances. She bounces off Yvette Parsons's Cynthia well, the latter always seeming to take up extra space with a working class accent that you can see as a constant embarrassment to Mary. Cynthia herself is a contrast to Ann, all reserve and fear that puts a quiver in her voice when she tries to protect authority. Arlo Green gives a really nifty performance, exaggeratedly reserved and tentative at the start, but in a way audiences will quickly buy into, but doing a nice job of coming out of his shell as having an actual friend and a sense of responsibility displace shame.
The secret sauce might be the small army of folks playing doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like who all deliver the right blend of disbelief, surprise, curiosity, and ultimately professionalism in the face of this bizarre pregnancy. As much fun as the gnarly practical effects are, a lot of what makes the movie work minute to minute is the mix of how health care can be an impossible bureaucracy to navigate despite being filled with individuals who mostly want to make things better on the one hand and how this crisis clarifies who these four people are, especially to themselves.
And it's impressively gross.
Blaise
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia Animation Plus, DCP)
Buy the original book en français at Amazon
Blaise is kind of a weird-looking movie, not quite the CGI equivalent of animating mouth movement onto photographs, but residing in a very particular spot in the uncanny valley where a still looks like it might be live action but looks more and more unreal and off-putting as you stare or watch it in motion, and that's the movie in a nutshell: Seemingly-relatable cringe comedy that gets very weird, very quickly, but still has the chops to get some big laughs.
Blaise Sauvage (voice of Timéo) is 16 and friendless at high school because he's more than a bit weird, but comes by it honestly - father Jacques (voice of Jacques Gamblin) is a ball of neurosis and mother Carole (voice of Léa Drucker) has a real knack for saying the wrong thing and being absolutely unable to explain her error and recover. They try to get him to reconnect with the daughter of Carole's friend Marisa, which leads to him getting dragged along to a party and protest where he meets Joséphine (voice of Nina Blanc-Francard), who crushes on him immediately but both make things needlessly complicated by pretending to be something they're not.
The film is co-written and co-directed by Dimitri Planchon, who created the original bandes dessinée, and it feels very much like a certain style of comics: It's made of a lot of little vignettes, as likely to end with a sort of unnerving ambiguity as a punchline, which helps the movie bounce around a bit, rather than get mired in the boringly serious moments that connect one funny bit to the next, very helpful for this sort of dry, French comedy where what's functional could dilute what's deadpan or transgressive without the viewer quite realizing why it's not as funny throughout as it could be.
That deadpan style puts a fair amount of responsibility on the voice cast, since the animation isn't going to help out with wild takes very often, so there's got to be a fair amount of nuance. Jacques Gamblin is maybe the standout, giving Jacques a sort of soft-spoken nervousness that adds to the slightly shaggy image on the screen, while Léa Drucker makes sure Carole seems (over) confident at home and then brings a hint of panic to her voice that doesn't quite contradict the professional mien at work. Timéo's performance as Blaise is kind of flatter, an introverted teenage drone, while Nina Blanc-Francard does a good poor little rich girl, sympathetic even as she's often kind of awful.
That all makes the film sound kind of small, offering a chuckle or two at most, but Planchon, co-writer Clémence Lebatteux, and co-director Jean-Paul Guigue both make sure that the film has outstanding timing and a satirical punch, often positioning the Sauvage's petty concerns against angry protesters in a way that makes the family look petty and thus more absurd even as a lot of the radicals are plenty ridiculous in their own way. There's not a misconception that they can't escalate into a disaster, with the path out of it both clear to see and impossible to take, and when all else fails, there's Chekhov's hand grenade threatening to take what is an irritation and make it literally explode.
It's a very, very funny movie, bouncing expertly between the squirms of recognition and belly-laughs of disbelief, and only enhanced by how it so often looks almost normal.
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