Fantasia 2025.08: "Methuselah", A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House with Laughing Windows, "Things That Go Bump in the East", and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

This day started early:

3:30am, to be precise, with the alarm right in the room, rather than just the hallway. I don't know what it was about - I just headed out and tried not to bother the firefighters who showed up impressively quickly - but I'm glad it wasn't serious. This is a twelve-story building with 10 rooms on my floor, and there were not 100 people milling about afterward. Maybe it's just usually filled with college students and mostly-empty for the summer (there are about a dozen keyboxes for AirBNB rentals and brokers showing it to prospective tenants locked to the front steps, and that doesn't even include me), but I have a hard time imagining the folks who sleep through that din or say, man, that's a lot of stairs, maybe I'll evacuate when I smell smoke or firefighters pull me out.

So, it was almost 4am by the time I got to bed, which is just shy of the line where I usually say it's not worth going back to sleep. My body was going to wake me up at 8am or so anyway, though, and I wound up dragging something fierce for most of the day. It didn't help that most of the afternoon programming was from the Underground section and I'm not really a giallo guy, so I wound up dozing off or zoning out until the shorts package in the evening.

I mean, after "Methuselah" by Nathan Sellers; his short was 4 minutes long and pretty darn strong. Obviously, Justine was not really looking at my giant lens-covering finger in disdain (why Samsung designed this phone so that ones finger naturally rests there whne using the buttons to snap a picture is beyond me).

On the other hand, Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon made a movie that was often dark and grainy and very easy to zone out to, so I missed some the film, their Q&A gave the impression that Brisbane is not exactly an Australian hive of creative expression, but it was a scene where everybody sort of knows each other, and they wound up working together, if in unfamiliar roles at times.

Mickey Reese and Josh Fadem were really "on" in their intro and Q&A for Every Heavy Thing. I dig the energy which I didn't have, and that Reese wrote it for Fadem, who had played over a hundred supporting roles but never had a lead, so this was made with him in mind, and pretty much the entire cast. I suppose, as with Brisbane, when you're making movies in Oklahoma City, you know who you're working with.

After that, it was The House with Laughing Windows, and, as I say below, I am just not a giallo guy.

At some point after that, though, the caffeine kicked in or something, or maybe the "Things That Go Bump in the East" selections were just more my speed. Here we've got our moderator (Xige Li?), "Mom, Stay Dead" director Lee Na-hee, programmer/translator Steven Lee, "Dhet!" composer Dameer Khan, and "Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension" co-star/producer Eriko Nakamura & director Koji Shiraishi. As you can see, it was a pretty fun session, with Lee talking about how her short was inspired by how her mother actually blossomed once she finally moved out of the house, gaining a bunch of new hobbies and creating art, which got her thinking about how there are a lot of movies about how children grow at times like this but not necessarily parents.

Khan, meanwhile, is local to Montreal, representing "Dhet!" since director Ummid Ashraf had visa issues. There seemed to be more trouble with visas this year then I remember being a case before, although that could just be random variation. It does demonstrate how even relatively small-scale shorts like this have international collaborators, and Khan talked about how the giant highways the protagonist is traveling make Dhaka a very loud city, so the music had to be layered and a bit discordant, enough so that when it is suddenly quiet, the eeriness of it really hits.

If you look at IMDB, "Red Spider Lilies" is listed as "Pilot Version", and Eriko Nakamura said that, yes, they were very much looking do something more with it. I hope they do; it's a fun premise! She also mentioned that she was in another film at Fantasia this year, Dollhouse, but also not to go see it on her account because it wasn't really one of her great acting roles.

Finally, I made it across the street to Hall, where this is sort of the best picture I got of the surprisingly big contingent for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: Writer/director Kenichi Ugana plus actors Lissa Cranadang-Sweeney, Rocko Zevenbergen, Madeline Barbush, Estevan Muñoz, Ui Mihara, and Katsunari Nakagawa. One thing Mihara mentioned is that she felt a lot like her character going into the movie: If you look at her IMDB page, she seems to be have done an episode of TV every week or so for the past couple years, and felt pretty darn burnt out before doing this one. Though she maybe could have done without the amount of gross things she had to put in her mouth to spit out.


That's the start of Week Two on Wednesday the 23rd; Thursday would be Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and my first go at Transcending Dimensions. Today (Saturday the 2nd), my plans are Foreigner, Circo Animato, Mononoke II, and Queens of the Dead. The School Duel and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake are pretty good.


"Methuselah"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP):
:
A poem of a short film, using striking words and imagery to how trees are both dynamic and static features of nature - always growing but persisting for centuries in some cases - and how too many have been used by humans as sites for hangings and lynchings, tainting them forever. The narration by Jordan Mullins walks a line between reverence and rage, and the images from filmmaker Nathan Sellers manage to emphasize the evil men do with these marvelous things.


A Grand Mockery

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A Grand Mockery is engrossing for as long as it feels like an 8mm pseudo-documentary, but as soon as it tries to consciously be transgressive or experimental, it starts to get a bit tiresome. The filmmakers have vision, but it's not necessarily clear.

It follows "Josie" (Sam Dixon), initially seen walking through a Brisbane cemetery, seemingly one of the few green spots in the city and a sort of postal network where folks leave messages and meet up. There's not much going in the city - things are cool with his girlfriend, the father he tends to is mostly non-responsive, and his job at a cinema involves either cleaning up the disgusting messes customers leave behind or trying to handle their obstinacy. It wears on him, both physically and in the increasingly unhinged notes from possibly-imaginary correspondents.

The wear doesn't really kick in for audiences until the film's final scenes; up until then, even the moments when it approaches the grotesque and despairing feel immediate and earnest, the portrait of a man in a place where his artistic instincts seemingly can't take him anywhere, the cemetery seemingly the only source of tranquility. There are drugs and drink accelerating it, but one mostly sees a situation where folks get ground down because there's no seeming mobility. Josie doesn't necessarily seem inclined to make a living out of his drawings and the like, but they go unshared and he seems to have no other avenue to express himself to others.

The finale, though, is just endless. The filmmakers are good at sneaking up on the audience for a while, Josie's increasingly scraggly hair hiding how some health issue is distorting his face until he winds up in a strange bar that may only bear a passing connection with reality. At that point the movie starts banging on past any point it could be making, drawing out its grotesquerie until Josie is a drunken, distorted mess. Fair enough, I guess - that's arguably where lives of quiet desperation wind up - but after a while the filmmakers have eroded a lot of the goodwill the film had earned.

It goes on a bit as he gets outside the city, and the green of the woods and swamp seems like a bookend to the cemetery at the start (8mm green seems like a very specific color), and for a bit I wondered if it was intentional, starting in a city graveyard and ending outside the city in a place dense with life, but, apparently, the decay is too strong at this point, and the film trundles on until it ends in a whimper.


Every Heavy Thing

* * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm mostly giving this a pass, because even though I didn't doze off much, I feel like I missed a lot of pieces that were important to the story.

It starts out conventionally enough, with a Scream-style pre-credits murder before introducing the audience to Joe (Josh Fadem), who sells ads for the local alt-weekly, one of the last in the country, reluctantly accompanying a friend to a show - he and wife Lux (Tipper Newton) seem to have separate social lives - only to enjoy it more than expected, and see the singer get murdered. Killer William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) says he's going to let Joe live because it amuses him, but it will amuse him much less if Joe does anything stupid. Like helping the paper's new writer (Kaylene Snarsky) when she has leads on the disappearance William is responsible for.

The problem in a nutshell is that the story really doesn't have any place to go after William reveals himself, about ten ten minutes into the movie; Joe winds up in this holding pattern but it plays more like awkward social situations rather than walls closing in or real danger. Writer/director Mickey Reese puts in other threads - Shaffer as the vanguard of various tech companies moving their operations to the city, an old friend (Vera Drew) returning to town after her transition, various family concerns - but none of them seem ironically more urgent than the man who is murdering women and apparently disposing of the bodies very well, which isn't presented as a big deal itself versus how it puts a man in an uncomfortable situation.

Plus, the jokes are only about half as funny as the writers seem to think. It gets by on volume for a while, and Tipper Newton is maybe the film's most valuable asset as Lux, seeming to put a weird and amusing spin on just about everything. After a while, though, things just aren't that funny, and the film made in part to give Josh Fadem a lead role after a lot of character work winds up showing why he hasn't been cast in one before: He's affable and has pleasant chemistry with almost everyone else, but it highlights him as a glue guy in a cast the way Joe is in his community, but maybe not with the sort of charisma that puts him at the center of a story.

One admires the attempt that this sort of outside-of-Hollywood indie is making. Unfortunately, it seems too committed to a twist that seems inspired at first but goes nowhere.


La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Order the old DVD at Amazon

I've probably posted some variation of this before, but I think I'm just not a giallo person. No matter the extent to which the director is regarded as a master, or how sexy the cast is, or how shocking or lurid the twists are, I just don't get drawn in, and The House with the Laughing Walls was not an exception to this rule. Like so many things in the genre, it falls in that gap between intriguing mysteries and unnerving horror for me.

(In fairness, all the films this afternoon suffered from my sleep being interrupted the night before, so I wasn't absorbing as much as I'd like.)

It feels like it should be a little more intriguing than it is, with an art expert (Lino Capolicchio) arriving to restore a church's peculiar painting, mysterious disappearances, and secretive villagers, but the film is too arch for much of its running time. Stefano doesn't really feel like anything, drifting through the story as strange things happen around him, not particularly defining himself as an academic or artist, and there seems to be an opportunity missed in using the restoration as a thing to hand the story and investigation on, where immersing himself in this artist's life and techniques draws him closer to the man's demons. Even with a new restoration, everything feels pre-faded, like there's never been any life to the story to start with. The mystery feels too distant.

It gets crazy toward the end, even audaciously so, but maybe it's a problem of genre-awareness, where knowing something is a giallo means that one is awaiting rather than dreading the inevitable, and the finale is surprising just because it's random rather than lying in wait to blindside a viewer. Sure, okay, the sisters are messed up, but not in a way that has anything to do with what Stefano has experienced, so it's not resonating.


"Magai-Gami"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Magai-Gami" has a pretty darn basic premise - folks in a scary place investigating an urban legend come face to face with monsters that will kill them if they look away - but it executes exceptionally well: Leads Ion Obata and Nagisa Toriumi are a fun pairing even as most of their banter is done over the phone, and the audience picks upon their dynamic very quickly even as the movie starts with them already on the ground. Mostly, the monsters are kind of great, feeling like a mix of visual effects and practical work that capture the freaky images of old illustrations while not looking more out of place next to a girl in a puffer jacket talking on a cell phone than a more modern design would.

Filmmaker Norihiro Niwatsukino doesn't have a particularly long résumé, but he seems very assured here, keeping the film moving even when it involves standing still, displaying a good handle on using what his effects team gives him, and setting up a supernatural-containment mythology in the closing minute or two that doesn't feel too much like it's trying to impress with how clever it is. The program guide describe the short as a proof-of-concept, and, yes, I'd like to see more.


"Ba Dong Yao" ("Hungry")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Taiwanese puppet fantasy adventure is one of the best bits of any Fantasia Festival that contains it - I've rearranged schedules to make it work - and it was a really delightful surprise to see it show up in the middle of what initially looked like an animated short. It's a good animated short - it's got a strong style and a story about an ailing kid and his busy father in the middle of a festival that spans the traditional and the modern - but the live-action puppets means this film zigs where one expects it to zag, making his fever dreams feel a bit more real in the moment than his actual world even as they're clearly mythic.

Oh, and bonkers, as these goddesses fight to become his mother and the puppet combat is a kick to watch, fully embracing the capabilities and limitations of what these things can do, especially with a little FX work to eliminate rods and strings. It's great fun that leads into neat music and a satisfying finale.


"Mati Adat" ("Kill Tradition")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Compared to the others, "Kill Tradition" is a nifty slow-burner of a short, keeping just what the stakes are on the horizon as it builds the relationship between Idah (Nik Waheeda), the sort of precocious kid that gets into trouble, and her recently-widowed mother Iman (Ezzar Nurzhaffira) as they prepare a meal for an upcoming ritual. Waheeda is charming, and Nurzhaffira really nails this vibe of how having this girl is wonderful yet tiring. They're highly watchable, especially Nurzhaffira, once the inevitable reveals itself.

That's when the audience sees where the title is going, in a couple of ways, and while Nurzhaffira plays up how this is more than she can take and the devastation of it, writer/director Juliana Reza and the rest of the team emphasize what sort of inertia tradition and ritual have. It's evil tradition - even with what appear to be actual supernatural entities, there's no strong justification that this is effective or necessary - and Reza highlights the callousness of it as much as the grace of those consumed by it.


"Mom, Stay Dead"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Lee Na-hee kicks off her short with a fun image - grieving daughter Sora (Oh Sohyeon) working her way through a book with "101 Ways to Summon the Dead", with #44 being the Ghost Summoning Dance - before coming up with a neat twist: The ghost she summons (Cho Ahra) seems to be roughly her age, having moved on from Earthly concerns, including the daughter she left behind, into her idealized form. There's maybe a fun sitcom premise in here, something about how family members would really relate if you removed the societal obligations and expectations from them.

It's maybe not far from the likes of Back to the Future or Chinese hit Hi, Mom - though I can't think of any that pull someone into the future rather than having their kids in the past - but aside from what Lee discussed in her Q&A about discovering what her mother could become once she was no longer worried about taking care of her daughter on a day-to-day basis, there's something intriguingly weighty here about spirituality. Sora has been using religion and magic as a way to fulfil her desires rather than really contemplating what all this implies, even as the mother recognizes innately that this girl needs something from her.

A very nifty twist on the idea of moving on that feels all the more honest because of how absurd and thought-provoking it can be simultaneously.


"Dhet!"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

There's a really strong theme across short films and anthologies this year of how gig work like rideshares and delivery is a sort of hell designed to be inescapable until it finally crushes a person, and I kind of worry that it will wind up staying in shorts and their equivalents in other media, because if you've got the money to make a feature, the business model behind this is kind of an abstract thing and you mostly see the convenience. It's a longer distance between classes than it used to be.

"Khet!", from Bangladesh, is a pretty decent example. The story itself is pretty basic - motorcycle-taxi guy (Ahsabul Yamin Riad) ignores a homeless man (Fozie Rabby) telling him not to take a certain turn and winds up unable to leave one of Dhaka's highways - and is perhaps ultimately more about the maddening geography of the city than the rider's circumstances. It's not a bad idea, since cities built around such highways are a topic of conversation in themselves, but it leaves writer/director Ummid Ashraf without a metaphorical offramp on top of the literal lack of one; the story kind of runs in circles without much chance of an ending that truly satisfies.


"Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Red Spider Lilies" isn't quite made just for me, but it does take a genre I tend to really like - the haunted family calling the sort of professional exorcist who carries themselves more like an exterminator than a religious fanatic - and eventually twists it into one I like even more (which would be telling). Here, that's the Aoi sisters, living in an old family house, where one night something possesses Kotoko (Tomomi Kono), leaving Nana (Tomona Hirota) to call the famed Teshigawara (Hirotaro Honda), whom younger sister Ami (Eriko Nakamura) has seen a lot on television. Once there, though, Teshigawara finds this to be much more serious than his usual situation.

It's not a new observation that exorcism stories arguably work better in East Asian environs than elsewhere is that there is a sort of formal place for ghosts and demons in local mythologies with the opposing forces less formalized (in the West, there's the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the likes of snake-handlers but not a lot in between). So there's room for Teshigawara to be a professional and a celebrity and a lot of entertainment as the Aois interact with him like that, but also to be able to go in another direction when a twist comes without a whole lot of effort. Honda sells it well and injects dry humor into the film that doesn't undercut what else is going on, but the three sisters are great fun as well: Eriko Nakamura gets attention as the very funny Ami, but Tomona Hirota and Tomomi Kono solidify their older siblings as the short goes on.

Like "Magai-Gami", this is pretty explicitly a pilot/proof of concept, and I would quite like to see more.


I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festiva, laser DCP)

Watching this film, I chuckled at a low-budget horror-film producer being named "Rusty Festerson", and the actor playing him. Are they going to get that this Larry Fessenden cameo is a joke in Japan, or is this a film made for an extremely specific audience? If it is, that niche definitely includes me, and I'm glad to see it.

It opens by introducing two folks from different worlds. Shina (Ui Mihara) grew up in Japan with things coming relatively easy: Naturally pretty and doing okay in school and sports despite not really having to work very hard at them, show business was the first time she really had to apply herself, and really take pride in succeeding. Jack grew up in Eugene, Oregon, without anything ever coming easy, diving into horror movies and heavy metal, and eventually moving to New York City to work for Festerson's company and getting frustrated when it's just a job. Shina is frustrated too, showing disdain for her work, and taking a trip to New York with boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa) to escape the limelight. Once there, though, English-speaking Ren finds himself frustrated by her nonsense and she feels disrespected, and an argument winds up with Shina, with no money or ID, outside a bar where Jack and his friends are commiserating over the star of their movie dropping out at the last minute. When Shina has nowhere to go at closing time, Jack lets her sleep on his couch, and manages to communicate that he'll pay for a flight back home if she acts in his movie, not knowing she's a big star rather than just a pretty face.

All in all, it's a fun little movie, charming as all get-out with the filmmakers keenly aware that a romantic comedy must be that, with everything else a secondary concern. And it works; even if I don't entirely buy that this pair falls in love with each other, I do believe that they fall in love with making movies with each other, and that's nearly as good for the movie's purposes. If that's something writer/director Kenichi Ugana planned for, that's smart, giving him a fallback position in case the romance doesn't quite get over, as the "making movies with friends" energy is solid enough to believe in Shina's half of the story.

That's sort of the film's biggest issue - Shina is a lot funnier and sympathetic, with a stronger arc than Jack, and I don't think it's necessarily a matter of assuming a foreign-language preform meets a certain standard even when you'll notice the flaws in one's native tongue. Ui Mihara is given a lot of assignments and mostly pulls them off, from the celebrity who is shallow enough that one can laugh at her arrogance to the professional kind of appalled by the mess she's found herself in to smitten to hurt; all kind of tying back to her opening mission statement. Estevan Muñoz isn't quite just given one note as Jack, but he's always playing it at full volume, and I don't know that it's a matter of Ugana being more comfortable in his native language and culture. The English-speaking supporting characters are by and large fun, but Jack is not a complementary half of the movie.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is a good time, full of deadpan humor, missed translation jokes, and the ability to walk the line between getting laughs from what a sketchy production this is for what will almost certainly be a terrible movie and earnest respect for them making it. Ugana seem genuinely fond enough of its scrappers and has the knack for getting the audience to smile at them, which not all movies rooting for underdogs manage. He and the cast make the tricky transition from Jack and company clearly exploiting Shina in an uncomfortable way to her being part of the gang, and if you can feel an ending being jammed into place, it is at least jammed solidly into place.

I do kind of wonder how well this plays at places other than Fantasia, which is in large part about this sort of love affair between Eastern and Western pop culture, as well as mixing the global mainstream and the lowbrow. Still, even it's obviously going to play like gangbusters in that specific room, I suspect it's going to really amuse the folks who would enjoy being in that room if they could.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.01: The Surfer and Muerte en la Playa

I don't imagine there were a lot of guests scheduled for BUFF, especially the first night where the schedule was Sunday-evening tight, but I wonder how many are backing out. Nicole & Kevin might be joking about how the audience chooses the awards at this festival which means there's still democracy here, but the stories about people getting arrested by ICE folks trying to meet quotas at Logan aren't good, and film festivals sure seem like something where someone might come in on a tourist visa only to have someone who might have looked the other way before decide that was working. Like, I might not risk it.

Bleh.

Still, it was a fun night where the studio movie with indie roots and the restoration shared a theme of rage leading to murder in a sunny beach community. If you want more, The Surfer director Lorcan Finnegan's debut feature, Without Name, is currently sitting on my shelf in a disc released by Yellow Veil, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome, who are apparently behind the restoration/re-release of Muerte en la Playa. The weird horror community crosses over a lot!


The Surfer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Huh, I don't think I've ever heard Julian McMahon's actual accent before (and maybe I haven't; if the Sydney-born actor is laying Perth on something thick). There's something kind of funny about how he's been playing [North] American folks for twenty-five years without really scanning as Australian while Nicolas Cage's character is supposedly Australian but they've got to spend a couple minutes claiming that a few years in California twenty years ago has him talking like Nic Cage.

Or maybe it was longer; whatever the length, he's back in Australia now, intending to take his son (Finn Little) to the beach where he surfed growing up, pointing out the childhood home that he is repurchasing from the crest of a wave, presuming he can put together the financing to beat a last-minute all-cash offer. Since then, though, the locals have been bullying any outsider who comes to the supposedly-public beach, led by Scott "Scally" Callahan (McMahon), a motivational speaker who whips the local men into a frenzy. As Cage's surfer continues to haunt the beach, various things start going wrong, and the only ally he's got is a bum living out of his car (Nic Cassim) who blames Scally and his crew for his son's death.

The Surfer is the sort of Nicolas Cage movie that makes you wonder what would have happened if Cage hadn't taken the role. it might have been more timid, or it might have been the same but more unnerving because we're not looking for him to Nic Cage it up. He's good at this, and good in this movie, but it's not necessarily going to take one by surprise; we can sort of track how Cage will play his escalation from seemingly reasonable everyman to deadpan sarcasm to manic violence from previous experience at this point.

I do like the compact setup, though, with director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin clearly establishing stakes and how the title character is trying to recapture things that are gone, in large part due to his own self-destructive action, and seeing up little bits of entitlement that keep him from being totally sympathetic and get him deeper and deeper in trouble. It's so keenly and carefully set out up front that what comes after is kind of drawn out as a result, stripping away everything he's rebuilt in maybe too finely granular a fashion, before a turn that maybe requires more or less of the movie, because there's a whole other basket of issues that demand a bit of attention after that, from the "localism" that seems to drive the folks on the beach to how Scally's guru status is likely more about giving people permission to be cruel than channeling aggression.

The film's got a look, though, a real way of getting across how Australia is unforgivingly beautiful (it is a place where dehydration can sneak up on you while you enjoy the sunshine and interesting plants and animals), and an eye for how the rich folks near this beach are kind of cosplaying at being hooligans enough for it to become real. The comic timing of each new bit of cruelty is impeccable, and the frustration and heatstroke making this guy feel even more unstuck in time is effective.

I hate to be a "cut 15 minutes" guy, especially since the grindhouse flicks that inspired this were often sort of padded themselves, but it does feel like there's a 90-minute version that attacks the viewer as ruthlessly as the opening does throughout rather than vamping because it's going to take a couple of days to wear this guy down. Maybe there's not quite a correct pace for this story, and you've just got to roll with how good many of the moments are.


Muerte en la Playa (Death on the Beach)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon or direct from Vinegar Syndrome

You never totally know about IMDB entries for filmmakers outside the English-speaking mainstream, but to watch Muerte en la Playa is to be surprised that this comes near the end of the career of Enrique Gómez Vadillo rather than the start; it's got the feel of a young filmmaker trying to get things out as an outsider rather than a veteran who has had a decade or so and plenty of opportunities to hone his craft. That's both good and bad; transgressive energy pushes the film through periods where there are awkward talent gaps between some of the folks involved.

It opens with a nastily sexual murder at a boarding school that will have it closed, sending student David (Andrés Bonfiglio) home to his wealthy mother Lorena (Sonia Infante) and her latest paramour, Paul (Rodolfo de Anda), who seems an honest and pleasant enough gigolo. Lorena figures this will be a good time to start teaching David the family business; although she is disappointed that he would rather spend time with a pair of male hippies and deaf-mute servant Ruffo (Antonio Eric) than the various "secretaries" she has recruited to show him the ropes and prove he's the sort of man she imagines him to be, even if Paul and the rest quickly suss out that he is gay. Eventually, he finds new friends Tony (Humberto Lobato) and Nubia (Angela Alaltriste), while Paul quietly makes sure that the unusual amount of dead bodies showing up near the estate aren't investigated too closely.

I am mildly curious about the sources of Vinegar Syndrome's restoration, because the very start and end of the movie look like they are sourced from VHS copies, priming the audience to see it as the sort of disreputable, shot-on-video underground cinema of the 1980s, except that it quickly shifts to 35mm film and the sort of pretty darn passable cinematography that comes from pointing the camera at people with good physiques in sunny locations and not messing up the framing or the lighting, even if the point of view often movies like someone who just got their first camcorder for Christmas. Much of the rest of the movie feels like they only had so much time and film, so there's not always a great take or two to when they got to the editing bay.

Or they might have been going for a certain level of camp from the start; there are lines that it's hard to imagine being written in sincere fashion, although the actors do a fair job of delivering them without winking or stumbling over just how the character is supposed to be feeling to say this. The film isn't delivering great performances, but everyone is a well-cast match of the sort of guy they're meant to be.

Mostly, the vibe is right; one can feel the movie riding the line between the characters who are cosmopolitan enough to accept David as gay and the ones who will view that with contempt or disappointment. Squint, and you can see the bodies piling up as Lorena refuses to see her son for what he is in more ways than one. Any sort of message you might try to get from the film might be mixed at best and the ending is a bloody mess, but you can't really argue that maybe there's an argument to make being in the closet less scary in circa 1991 Mexico.

Or maybe it's not that deep, but just a portion of sleaze just capable enough to be watchable while also being quite ridiculous.

Fantasia 2024.05: "Meat Puppet", The Paragon, "Bladder Shy", Scared Shitless, Tatsumi, "AstroNots", Meanwhile on Earth, "Be Right Back", and The Beast Within

Ah, thought I'd be able to run this right around since I'd gotten everything on LetterBoxd, but this is a lot of shorts.

Anyway - guests!

Being a Canadian thing, Scared Shitless! brought some people: From the left, writer/director Brendan Cohen, director Vivieno Caldinelli, producer Lewis Spring, and cast members Daniel Doheny, Steven Ogg, and Chelsea Clark, who all seemed to have a great time making it to the point that when someone asked about sequel plans and one of the producers said something's in the works, Ogg barked a question about who was in it.

No guests for Meanwhile on Earth, but Mitch Davis brought up director Andrew Seaton and DP Matthew Samperi from the accompanying short "AstroNots".

There were actually a lot of guests for The Beast Within - I was sitting directly behind a couple that were whooping at every opportunity and sneaking pictures on their phone - but it was actually a pretty small group up on stage; aside from the host, we've got writer/director Alexander J. Farrell, co-writer Greer Ellison, and producer Alex Chang. It's kind of interesting that, while the movie is in large part being sold to the public with Kit Harrington, most of the questions about the cast and characters centered around co-star Ashleigh Cummings, who is pretty darn terrific here.

(Quick jump to IMDB, and, oh, she was Dot on Miss Fisher? Wow!)

If you're reading this on Wednesday the 31st (Day 14), it's probably my shortest day: It looks like I won't get to De Sève in time for Hell Hole (but it's okay; I haven't exactly love the Adams family's previous stuff), Rats! looks like the sort of thing I don't usually go for, Electrophilia looks interesting but is listed as subtitled in French rather than English, and I saw The Roundup: Punishment a few months back (do these movies just not play Montreal? I think this is the second time this has happened with this series). So maybe just Timestalker!


"Meat Puppet"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Are high-school and university graduations the same throughout the English-speaking world? It's one of those things where some bits of pop culture tell me that there are differences but others make it look universal, though I hear that's kind of influenced by American pop culture. Anyway, this looks pretty American despite being set in the UK, from what I see, but that's kind of not the point; the point is that Cuba (Máiréad Tyers) and Oz (David Johnsson) are a couple but Oz is kind of immature, tending to sit around his room messing with toys and collectibles unless she drags him away, like she does with a phone call on the day of graduation, only to be tempted again when a delivery person shows up. He thinks it's a statuette he's ordered, but it's a weird puppet, and can't resist taking a look. It's a bad idea; not only does his consciousness enter the little guy, but the thing fuses to his arm, and it looks like his body is dead or dying!

Writer/director Eros V isn't particularly shy about saying what "Meat Puppet" is about - half of Cuba's lines are about Oz needing to grow up and become self-reliant, and there is, in the last bit that is built to get the audience to give a grossed-out howl, a pretty obvious illustration of taking control of your own life even if you're too busy laughing to notice - but that's kind of fine; these are emotional kids probably prone to blurting stuff out and it's the kind of short where everything's so screwy that the sudden "hey, I'm going to bring up this mundane thing!" switch is part of the screwiness, even if there's a puppet curse that you'd think would be more urgent.

And the gags are pretty good. The usual deal with someone in a puppet body - it's weird that this is a trope, right? - is having them be as mobile as a puppet character is, and instead having Oz having to deal with his body's dead weight is quality slapstick. The puppeteers do a decent job of playing things so that he's expressive without looking like Muppet-y flailing is his natural state. And, yes, they build the jokes to an impressive crescendo with quality bits after the climax and through the credits.


The Paragon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I really dig the vibe of The Paragon, which pulls off the trick of making one believe that a potentially multiverse-shaking narrative could play out in a small New Zealand town with a slacker protagonist without being so tongue in cheek that the comedy takes over. It's weird and offbeat but not poisoned with self-awareness. That makes it a sort of oddball movie and one where you've got to live with the reaction to your recommendation being "uh…okay". It's fun but in a small way.

It introduces the audience to Dutch (Benedict Wall), a tennis player who was good enough to be ranked but not good enough to be famous, at least until a hit-and-run left his leg broken in four places and his bitterness drove wife Emily (Jessica Grace Smith) to an affair with a co-worker. Crashing with his petty-criminal brother Oates (Shadon Meredith), he starts canvassing the town for the very common model of car that hit him, impulsively taking a slip from a poster promising psychic training. The woman who put it up claims he has great psionic potential in part because his heart stopped for six minutes during the accident, but Lyra (Florence Noble) is also frustrated at his insistence on taking easy ways and shortcuts, especially since she needs a disciplined ally to help her find a powerful crystal before it falls into the hands of her evil brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh).

Folks have made much more serious movies with that general description, and The Paragon has stakes, but it's also a comedy that recognizes that everybody in it should be funny in some manner, whether it's Dutch's bluster or the deadpan weirdness of Lyra and Haxan, raised to be psychic warriors by their messed-up father. Even Emily, who could be written and played to be a generic sort of ungrateful shrew or as understandably overwhelmed is written so that Jessica Grace Smith can make her funny in a very specific way. No matter how serious the moment is, there's a joke available, but the characters are also fleshed out enough that there's nowhere to go but the gag. Benedict Wall is very funny as Dutch, but can play it straight and demonstrate just enough self-reflection that his scenes with Michelle Ang don't go as one might expect. Florence Noble's Lyra is socially stunted but not to the point of stupidly following a menu of tics.

The film gets a lot of value out of sort of screwing around, with a lot of time spent on training and resisting it and side quests, and not feeling the need to tire everything together. There's a temptation to make everything interlock too much, or toss in a romance the film doesn't need, or hammer home an obvious theme. These guys don't do that, just telling their little fantasy story with a few jokes and not worrying about making it bigger than it need be.

The filmmakers are also fairly smart about how they deploy modest resources. They don't add visual effects to psychic powers that can work just as well if invisible, and don't tease that there's something bigger and flashier on the way. It helps keep the focus on Dutch, but also keeps the audience able to believe that maybe this has been here all along and there's been no way we could notice it. That may not be the actual primary intent, but it works, a case of pieces that fit together not making one look for the spots where they don't.

All told, The Paragon is fairly modest, but that modesty works for it in ways that ambition might not have. You often here talk of people squeezing a lot out of resources, but this doesn't look like there's that much strain.


"Bladder Shy"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

"Bladder Shy" is one pretty obvious joke - a man who just dashed into a restroom has performance anxiety when someone else stands next to him and, no matter where he imagines himself being instead so that he can loosen up and just go, the other fellow shows up - but it's told well. There are variations full of gay panic or something otherwise uncharitable, but director Joel Goundry, writer/co-star Christopher Duthie, and co-star Mike Tan keep it from ever being mean-spirited or anything much more than folks being used to privacy when they pee.

I'm also kind of amused, after the fact, at how this five-minute short which feels like it all takes place in an ordinary restroom and could be done in an afternoon, probably actually took days or weeks because the small cast and crew was going around to various locations and shooting a few wordless seconds of people standing in or near water. Movie magic by Goundry and editor Dan Perrott right there, and I say that without jest.


Scared Shitless

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Scared Shitless is what it looks and sounds like and it's good at being that thing, or at least certain parts of that thing: The filmmakers push things a lot less than they could and than they probably should in most cases, to the extent that I wonder if there are harder-edged cuts of this movie in the editing suite, with what a lot of horror-comedy fans might consider the good stuff set aside because the filmmakers found the upbeat vibes working best.

Not that the story is upbeat to read the bullet points: It opens with a mad scientist (Mark McKinney) fleeing a burning lab after a confrontation about his extracurricular activities goes wrong in the usual way, and then movies elsewhere in Hamilton, Ontario, to introduce Don (Steven Ogg) and Sonny Donohue (Daniel Doherty), a father-and-son odd couple; father Don is a gruff plumber and Sonny, already suffering from chronic stomach issues, has also become a shut-in due to traumatically-induced germophobia. Don figures the way to help Sonny get past that is to have him start coming along on jobs, starting with a regular client who he suspects gets her toilet clogged because she wants attention. Of course, the guy from the opening has an apartment in this building, the thing he brought home has found its way into the pipes, and the nice young lady at the front desk who was a classmate when Sonny could still attend college, Patricia (Chelsea Clark), would kind of like anything weird the Donohues find kept quiet because between her med school tuition and her father's health issues, they really need to sell this building.

The movie is very much more comedy than horror, but more affectionate than mocking, from the old couple doing some BDSM play to how, even when Don and Sonny are introduced getting on each other's nerves, there's tons of affection between them. The filmmakers seem to actually like most of their characters and presume that they're going to try their best - Patricia even sounds apologetic as she delivers the "this deal has got to go through" lines - rather than building up conflict that's going to feel silly soon. Where it's aware of horror tropes, it's aware in the way that actual people tend to be rather than as a winking way to flatter the audience.

It's cheerfully gross, maybe not Steve Kostanski's most creative work as an effects artist, but he and his crew execute the basic tentacle/slug thing well, with all the attendant goop, blood and guts, and severed limbs. I suspect a lot of folks will appreciate that there's plenty of blood and guts but little actual toilet stuff, because that's two different ways of being disgusted. Kind of related, perhaps, is that the film has one of the tamest "naked camgirl gets attacked by a monster in the shower" scene it could, like they're going to kill a lot of people but don't want to be leering creeps while they do it.

Most of the fun, then, comes from the main cast. Steven Ogg casually sells a punch of goofy plumber jokes and has good father-son energy with Daniel Donehy, who also has a fun vibe with Chelsea Clark; they're a trio that seems pretty fun to hang out with and are the right kind of smart to treat this as a problem to be solved without seeming unreasonably capable for three sort of random folks. The building full of potential victims are entertaining right up until they sell being eaten as horrible but also twistedly funny, and the opening scene with Mark McKinney as a schlubby mad scientist (he kind of gives off "dumb Captain Kangaroo" vibes) and Julian richings as the guy looking to steal his work is more or less exactly what one would expect from those particular pros. Nobody seems to be trying too hard, especially once the film is set up and just rolls forward.

Like I said, there's probably a gorier, more exploitative version of this movie that could show up as an unrated director's cut on disc if those were still things, but it would probably have the wrong vibe somewhere and collapse. This is good bloody fun all the way through.


Tatsumi

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Tatsumi is the sort of crime movie where one is surprised that the veteran criminals don't, at some point, let out an exhausted sigh that the behavior of some loose cannon is just not professional, because, really, that maniac is the real liability. Unfortunately for its characters, maniac loose cannons get stories started and keep them going; you kind of need one to get a crime story this good.

That is not Tatsumi (Yuya Endo), who tries to stay out of the violent part of crime and just stick to keeping things running at the yakuza-controlled docks where the fishing boats come in, calling his boss Takeshi (Ryo Matumoto) "Skipper" and unsentimental in how he treats his meth-addicted brother (Kisetsu Fujiwara). He can't entirely escape it, though - he's still Takeshi's go-to guy for when he needs a body disposed of, and ex-girlfriend Kyoko (Nanami Kameda) is asking for a favor: Her high-school dropout sister Aoi (Kokoro Morita), a mechanic at the garage Kyoko manages for Takeshi, has sticky fingers and a bad attitude, and if Tatsumi could help cool things down, that would be great. Unfortunately, another gangster (Ryuhei Watabe) has even stickier fingers, and when Takeshi sends his maniac brother Ryuji (Tomoyuki Kuramoto) to handle it at the garage, Kyoko and Aoi are witnesses, and Aoi is none too impressed when Tatsumi's plan seems to be "just accept what's coming".

Gangster narratives use the word "family" a lot, and without necessarily tipping his hand that much, writer/director Hiroshi Shoji casts a critical eye on this: Sisters Kyoko and Aoi are polar opposites and get on each other's nerves but also clearly love each other more than anything else; it can also be easy to miss that Takeshi and Ryuji are actual brothers as opposed to just being in the same gang, or at least lose sight of that. Mostly, it's Tatsumi grappling not so much with his own sins but seeing a reflection of his own screwup brother in Aoi. Skipperrepeatedly speaks to how the yakuza is family, but eventually Tatsumi comes to realize that that's not a measure of loyalty, but something that has caused him to treat other relationships as similarly transactional, or at the very least conditional.

It's a good background and way to add some uncertainty to a nastily grinding story of characters who can't run but are almost certainly overmatched if they choose to fight back, let alone seek revenge. Despite not being constantly beset by new dangers, things move fast enough that Aoi can't change out of her bloody hoodie - the film's take on mob violence is that it relies on overwhelming force by people who know what they're doing, and someone like Aoi getting a blow in is pretty lucky - and there's just enough time to watch Tatsumi and Aoi show the wear of their situation. It helps show how, maybe, Tatsumi was worn down in a similar way.

Yuya Endo is impressive in how he gets that across, because Tatsumi doesn't particularly change aspect or the habits of a lifetime, instead just seeming to realign what he considers worth fighting for and maybe feeling a little better about who he is in the film's later moments compared to his feeling on the subject earlier, even if it comes with regret. His hard, overly practical manner clashes nicely with Kokoro Morita as Aoi, whose emotions are always right on the surface and whose immaturity is allowed to be frustrating rather than innocent. She plays off Nanami Kameda's Kyoko well, as does Endo - there's familiarity between these two but also little doubt about why it ultimately didn't work out, despite their both being smart, practical people. Of course, Tomoyuki Kuramoto steals nearly every scene he's in as Ryuji and isn't particularly subtle about it; he's a mad dog where one is never quite sure just how tightly Takeshi is holding his leash, speaking with a raised voice most of the time and with a tendency to push his head forward a bit, getting further into personal space to show there's nothing stopping him from getting further. It's the sort of vicious gangster performance that could wear itself out, but is present just long and often enough to keep the audience from getting the least bit sentimental about the enterprise.

It's the sort of energy that lets this feel like a road movie at times even though nobody ever gets very far on a map: It matters in which direction Tatsumi turns the wheel regardless of how far he's going.


"AstroNots"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

This is another short that has one really joke, but where "Bladder Shy" was looking to repeat, "AstroNots" is seeing how well it can be drawn out. It starts with the first manned mission to Mars about to launch, and as Mission Control runs down the checklists, pilot Abraham Adams (Aaron Glenane) confesses to Commander Thomas Collins (Adam Dunn) that he's spectacularly unqualified, somehow having BSed his way through various tests and gotten lucky on others. Collins knows he should abort the mission upon hearing this, but not only would that likely end the program, he's a descendant of Michael Collins, the man who stayed in the orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, and the idea of also being so close but forgotten is something he can't bear.

Dunn and Glenane are also credited as writers, and one can imagine the writing process as one of sitting around and riffing, trying different ways to crack each other up and challenging each other to figure out ways in which the whole thing doesn't work and which snappy answers are funny enough to become dialog and lead to something else. Somewhere in there, they figure out just what will keep things going for long enough to get to a near-perfect deadpan punchline, just really tight comic scripting.

It's good work all around, getting the right level of panic and recognizing that this gag calls for a reaction shot and this one should linger. Comedy direction and editing seems like it must be thankless and invisible whether done right or wrong, but it's pretty much always right here.


Pendant ce temps sur Terre (Meanwhile on Earth)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There's likely a better example of the phenomenon than Meanwhile on Earth, but it feels like a bit of an inversion to a certain formula, where you promise weird aliens and horror with the idea of sneaking some sort of loftier ideas to the audience. This one, arguably, can be sold as a meditative drama, maybe one set in the future but where those elements are a metaphor, only to deliver something weird and chilling on top of that.

Elsa Martens (Megan Northam) was always close to her astronaut brother Franck (voice of Sébastien Pouderoux), and just as she was excited for him being selected for a deep-space mission, he couldn't wait to see how she grew as an artist, fully expecting her to be having shows in Paris when he returned even though she was crashing with parents Annick (Catherine Salée) and Daniel (Sam Louwyck). But he didn't return; winding up lost in space, and now Elsa is still living at home, occasionally defacing the statue erected to memorialize her brother and working at the palliative care center Annick manages - and even there, best friend Audrey (Soifa Lesaffre) is moving away to take a job somewhere on the coast - while Daniel scans radio bands hoping for a message and Franck's son Vincent (Roman Williams) is a frequent visitor. It's Elsa that receives a signal, though, via a strange biological receiver, from entities that say they have rescued Franck, and need Elsa's help to prepare for their arrival.

This is a pretty nifty situation for a movie even before the science fictional elements start appearing, although they are welcome when they do; if it is not going to be fantastic, why have the brother vanish while in deep space as opposed to at sea or in the country, after all? Writer/director Jérémy Clapin gives the viewer a good sense of who Elsa is and the way that this sort of grief and loss can feel tremendously isolating, as can a hostage situation, and like nobody can possibly understand because who has faced such trials before? She's confronted daily with the tragedies and indignities of the end of one's life and cannot find acceptance, much less solace in the idea that her family has avoided all of this. If this is all there was, it would be a great role for Megan Northam, who can hint at the vivacious young woman who should be there but who looks worn and spent instead.

After that, it's got a bit of a horror-movie story, although the story is carefully built to keep it on a certain path (fittingly enough) that it's not exactly suspenseful much of the time, but turns a screw or two nicely. The way that Elsa starts out initially seems like the way Clapin has set things up is designed to absolve her, but it leads to is more horrifying, that Elsa's good intentions have set her on a course she cannot escape, as it is made very clear to her that not making a certain choice is itself a decision with consequences, but where she also can't escape the guilt.

Though the live-action debut of someone known for animation, it's far less gaudy than many such films. There are animated pieces - it's kind of telling that the animated renditions of Elsa's comics about her and Franck having adventures from their childhood cast her as an alien, suggesting she didn't fit in and her brother was nearly her only friend - and there are a couple sequences and bits of weird biological design in the middle that definitely spring from the sort of mind that starts from this sort of visual, but the filmmakers take care to highlight the mundane nature of many situations, giving us a thoroughly lived-in world where most have moved past the thing that has devastated this family, even though it is extraordinary.

It's nifty work that can be sold as boutique-house science fiction even though, for all that it plays as something about human dilemmas and difficult moral choices, he also does not hesitate to use a chainsaw to point out how far Elsa might go if push came to shove. Just being smart doesn't make it any less a nifty genre thriller.


"Ahora vuelvo" ("Be Right Back")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I don't know that I've ever really considered how bizarrely incongruous raising a modern child in one of these old European apartments must be - most of the time when they show up in this sort of movie, the kid is dour because a parent has died or they've had to move in with a weird grandparent, but here we get Maria (Anastasia Russo), bouncing off the walls, watching cartoons at ear-splitting volume, shoveling microwave popcorn in her mouth. It's kind of no wonder that her mother (Belén Cuesta) is looking frazzled, and maybe doesn't feel that bad about stepping out to run a couple of errands.

She doesn't come back right away, of course, so it's not until the sun has set and Maria's stomach starts rumbling even though she's just finished the last kernel of popcorn that she realizes that this is actually a pretty scary place, and the person knocking at the door claiming to be her mother but having really weak excuses for not having a key might be faking. It almost seems to be about the shifting tone at times, how things that seem harmless can suddenly become spooky with the right shift, and a brash, kind of bratty kid can lose her nerve. It tips its hand fairly quickly, but also has some fun exploiting the idea that the sort of child who could be the resourceful heroine of this kind of story might also be a real frustrating handful for her parents.


The Beast Within

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There's ambition to The Beast Within, and talent, but it's not exactly evenly distributed: The performances I love are all build around one that leaves me cold, and the ending isn't quite enough for me to circle back and consider how it all fits together. The pieces are seemingly all there for a fine psychological werewolf story, but they don't click together in solid fashion.

It takes place on a gated plot that doesn't seem to be very productive beyond a few backyard chickens and hogs despite the large, ancient stone farmhouse; with 10-year-old Willow (Caoilinn Springall) confined to it due to a respiratory disease that has her lugging an oxygen tank around. Or maybe it's just enough to be worked by father Noah (Kit Harington), mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), and grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo), who despite the size of the house lives in a mobile home parked on the grounds. It's the sort of isolation where things faster, and maybe there's a reason why they live that way rather than in town - after all, every once in a while, Imogen takes Noah to another corner of the property for the night, along with a bit of their dwindling livestock, to be chained up until something passes.

So, do folks like Kit Harington on the show with all the dragon nonsense? I ask this because I can't recall ever seeing him in a film where he displays much in the way of star power or charisma, and it really kind of kills this. There's this terrific small cast around him, but much of the film almost seems to be hiding him rather than give the audience a chance to be charmed enough by his character to be shocked when his monstrous side comes out. He's admittedly got a particular challenge that some of the other members of the cast don't have, needing to play certain things as ambiguous enough to be reconsidered later, but the end effect is that this movie doesn't work if Noah's not interesting and he barely makes an impression. Bland, in some cases, is worse than bad.

I like much of what the filmmakers are doing otherwise; the rest of the cast in particular is strong, playing the metaphor pretty straight and building this really earnest core. Carolinn Springall gives the impression of someone who is used to her physical limits as Willow, which even more experienced actors often stumble at managing, while Ashleigh Cummings shines as the tough but often overloaded Imogen and James Cosmo gives off the very specific vibe of someone who never liked his daughter's husband but is there for support even when he doesn't say as much. They cover a set of family relationships that is likely very familiar to many even before the monstrous elements start to surface.

Once one gets a hang of the sort of timeless setting, it's a really nice thing to settle into, although I admit, I thought we were looking at multiple time periods at the start. The werewolf effects are mostly kept out of sight for much of the movie but do feel impressively tactile even as they're right on the border of where some in the audience would laugh at the man in a suit. It's fine for them to be kind of crazy and hard to believe, as it's a werewolf in a movie mostly told from a child's point of view, and works best when it's part of the shadows. The action-oriented finale is pretty well-staged, a good balance of things lurking just out of sight, sudden violence, and why you should not use antlers in all of your decorating.

There's not a lot there, though, with the film and audience biding a lot of time until that finale. I do feel, at least on a first watch, that the ending revelations are fortunate to have the emotional impact that they do one doesn't really care to examine just how hard the movie worked at pointing in another direction at times but just let it be. Folks will make excuses if they care about the characters enough, although it's likely better if they don't have to, and The Beast Within has an unfortunate tendency to straddle that line.

Fantasia 2024.04: The Avenging Eagle, International Science-Fiction Short Films, Not Friends, The Old Man and the Demon Sword, and Mash Ville

Falling a day behind here, because Sunday was a full day and Monday an early start, and the breathing room I'd hoped for didn't materialize. There's also no desk in this hotel room, so it's a little slow going.

Apologies for the terrible panorama from the Sci-Fi Shorts; some weird fisheye stuff going on. Anyway, my notes also stink, but from the left, there three folks from "Headache", with director Björn Schagerström in the center; two from "ZZZ", with director Philipe Vargas on the left; director Connor Kujawinski of "A Little Longer"; directors Daniel Shapiro & Alex Topaller of "Escape Attempt"; and Eddy Martin & Elena Rojas, two of the cast members of "ZZZ".

It was, as usual, an enjoyable Q&A, with the "Headache" folks talking about how it's kind of easy to find brutalist architecture that give you massive concrete slabs for exteriors, it's not so easy when you want that inside, and they wound up shooting in an art museum space that was between expositions, and seemed to be relatively welcoming of folks making a short film. They also talked about how using that space was tricky at times, since they didn't want visible light sources, in one case creating a weird spot where light was coming out of a shute that illuminated the head of a bed. They mentioned that it was a proof of concept for a feature, and that unlike a lot of shorts, they actually found themselves adding stuff into the initial cut, because the timing just wasn't right.

The "Escape Attempt" team had the opposite problem; their initial cut was almost an hour, too long for the shorts section of most festivals (the Oscars define one as 40 minutes or less and most festivals are similar). They initially cut it down to half that, but at times wondered if they should try to boost it to a feature. I'm not sure there's really enough in the story for that, and I imagine that at that length they'd be spending a lot on the FX budget. That said, they did mention that a lot more was practical than you might think, especially with the spaceship interiors; the production design team was eager to build rather than just send things along to the effects house.

I'd hoped to head across the street for Ghost Cat Anzu after that, but it would have been a tight fit and a shorts package with a lot of filmmakers to wrangle and have Q&A with always runs long, so I stayed in De Sève for Not Friends, which turned out fine schedule-wise, chipping away at Tuesday so I'd be able to see Customs Frontline outside the festival but part of it in spirit.

I stayed in De Sève for The Old Man and the Demon Sword, with the festival's Jusine Smith hosting writer/director Fábio Powers, producer Christiano Guerreiro, and visual effects artist Jules Spaniard. It's the sort of Q&A where, even if you didn't love the movie, makes one say "good for you!", as Powers talked about his love for B movies, having the idea for the movie in his head for a long time, and wanting to make something with António da Luz, a non-professional actor and the uncle of a cousin who had a distinctive vibe and energy, and how he started from the going-meta finale because he figured he'd need to explain a lot of slip-ups only to find the movie mostly went fine. He also brought in a couple of folks he remembered from television when he was a child, one of whom had surprisingly retired to his town, and contacting Spaniard on Facebook to get some pointers on how to do effects and winding up with a collaborator.

It's also apparently very specifically Portuguese in a lot of ways, including how the village where they filmed has a population of 14: Apparently a lot of those mountain towns are hollowed out in that way, which gives you a lot of freedom to make a movie but has its issues, like how there is obviously no coffee shop or grocery store in a place of that size.

So, very much an "Underground" entry, though not exactly full-on Outsider Art. I'm glad there's a place for that, beyond just "folks not interested in the wrestling horror movie on the bigger screen".

The day ended across the street in Hall with the World Premiere of Mash Ville, with host/programmer Steven Lee, director Hwang Wook, the translator whose name I missed, producer Lim Dong-min, and actors Kim Hee-sang & Chun Sin-hwan. They talked about wanting to do genres you don't see very often in Korean movies, specifically name-checking westerns and John Ford, and it's kind of funny, because if this is a Western, it feels more Sam Peckinpah than Ford to me. I don't really know that it's actually a Western; it feels more like the Coen Brothers doing small-town crime with a heart of pitch-black darkness.

Anyway, I was kind of wiped out at that point, maybe not properly appreciating it and retaining it well. I'll probably give it a look if it pops up somewhere else.

Long day! And a couple more since; if you're reading this on Saturday the 27th (Day 10), the plan is trying for Killer Constable, crossing the street for Capsules 2024 if I'm not far enough up the pass-holder line, HEAVENS: The Boy and His Robot, Kizumonogatari, and Infinite Summer.


Leng xue shi san ying (The Avenging Eagle)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)

I haven't seen nearly enough Shaw Brothers material to know where this stands in the pantheon - they made so much and I've mostly watched it hit-and-miss as it plays various repo programs! I'm guessing this is close to top-tier, with a hook that makes it stick out enough to be worthy of the spiffy new restoration and forthcoming release on disc.

It opens with a man who calls himself "Vagrant" (Ti Lung) falling from his horse as he desperately rides across the desert; a passing rider who calls himself "Homeless" (Alexander Fu Sheng) stops to assist him, only to have Vagrant run off with his horse. Homeless eventually catches up to Vagrant, who reveals that he is a former member of the Boat Clan, a group of vicious marauders commanded by Yoh Xi-hung (Ku Feng), and Vagrant was one of the notorious Eagle Warriors. He has attempted to turn over a new leaf, for reasons he chooses not to share, but Yoh has sent his comrades to bring him in dead or alive, and ultimately it appears that the only chance at survival is to go on the offensive. Homeless chooses to help his new friend, although he remains cagey about his own past.

The restoration/scan of The Avenging Eagle that played Fantasia's Retro series is good enough that you can see the glue holding the wigs on, one of those things that makes you wonder if maybe movies were made with the expectation that a little projector motion and the like was expected to smooth such things out. Honestly, it can be shocking how good movies you associate with beat-up grindhouse prints and bargain-bin VHS look given a chance. And this one looks fantastic, full of bright colors and garish costumes and a world created on soundstages that feels both mythic and squalid, terrifically and clearly shot.

It's just generally a very fun movie, as well. A lot of Shaw Brothers martial-arts flicks have tended to feel like arcane and arbitrary reasons to fight, and this has a stretch like that, but eventually it has things click into place and push forward for the rest of the movie. Ti Lung and Fu Sheng nail the sort of reluctant brotherhood that is in many ways the mainstay of Hong Kong action cinema, with Fu especially giving a performance that initially feels fake but is revealed as fake with a purpose, eventually becoming something unexpected, while Ti Lung makes his Black Eagle someone with a heavy emotional burden who is nevertheless a man of action even when confronting it. Ku Feng, meanwhile, is the sort of larger-than-life monster who convinces audiences that the other two will have to fight together even before they throw the first punches.

The fighting itself is terrific in a way that's not necessarily a given, sometimes a little heavy on slow motion that becomes freeze frames but giving the feel of something spontaneous rather than overly choreographed. Director Sun Chung, writer Ni Kuang, and fight choreographers Tong Kai & Huang Pei-Chih have an excuse to throw waves of enemies at Ti Lung and Fu Sheng, all with distinctive weapons and styles which have the heroes having to adapt their own tools. It's never just "more", and the filmmakers make the mind games that are part of the finale just effective enough to make things nicely wobbly.

Also, I chose to believe that several scenes with sleeve knives were meant to look like the guy was flipping his enemies the bird. It's that kind of movie, straightforward in its serious, deadly intentions but well aware that the object is to have fun<.BR />

"ZZZ"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

A woman (Julieta Ortiz) comes to what appears to be a closed-down mattress store, but the inside is revealed as a place where one can enter and choose their dreams. She chooses to see her husband Sebastian (Eddy Martin), a truck driver who died in an accident twenty years ago, but even a dream of being your younger self (Elena Rojas) and reuniting with the love of one's life will be tinged with the memories of the real world.

Writer/director Felipe Vargas leans hard on some familiar tropes here, but combines them in interesting ways. The flophouse explicitly recalls images of opium dens but the actual injection is laced with Sandman imagery that carries through to a desert landscape that helps make it clear that Marcella is less injecting herself into a memory as building a desired environment; it's also kind of amusing that this is all located in a storefront that used to be a mattress shop, things that were briefly and unsustainably ubiquitous in recent years. It's occasionally somewhat short of brilliant; the finale with a police raid and "will she choose to extricate herself" feels kind of old-hat, and the film could maybe use one or two more explicit reminders that, ultimately, Marcella is talking to herself.

Vargas and Eddy Martin do seem to get that, though; even if they don't say it out loud, Martin has Sebas vacillate being Marcella's idealized memory and also her own guilt and need to be forgiven. Julieta Ortiz and Elena Rojas do very nice work of making Marcella and "Ella" the same person, even if they aren't entirely cast for being dead ringers for one another; they capture a lot of the same body language and way of speaking, and Vargas often shows that the older Marcella is not a solid block of guilt, but someone who still has a lot of what made Ella vivacious.


"Headache"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

"Headache" opens with the appearance of taking place in a prison, but that's maybe not quite it - at least, there's no mention of there being an outside world that put the people in there with their flatly colored jumpsuits and rigid hierarchy. Frank (Torkel Petersson) starts out wearing blue and in Production, moving pills from one bin to another, but he is told that he has been one of the least efficient workers there and is moved to Consumption, where he is given a gray uniform and tasked with popping the pills Production is creating. To make sure, they are regularly given regular bonks on the head. It finally strikes him as so absurd that he tries to escape.

Director Björn Schagerström and co-writer Agnes Jeppsson have a number of satirical targets, with a bit of Stanford Prison Experiment thrown in as well. The sharpest barbs seem to be aimed at late capitalism, where businesses are completely focused on growth at the expense of what people actually want and need; the broadest ones which maybe get the biggest laughs target bureaucracy and a sort of algorithmic obedience that cannot handle unexpected actions. They are all, by and large, good jokes, but kind of at right angles to each other, so that what's going on at the end had kind of drifted from what was really working at the start.

I do like how Torkel Petersson sells it all. He's got the job of being the audience surrogate who sees this society as nuts but also being of it, and he really nails that deadpan alarm. There's a nice cast around him; I believe Jenny Elisabeth Gustavsson plays the member of management who is either cheerfully evil herself or an effective enough mouthpiece that she might as well be, and really nails that quietly predatory vibe to stand out. Even folks who show up late for a gag or two really fit into this odd situation without issue.


"The Move"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

I really like the structure Eric Kissack does with this short film: Establish things in relatable, entertaining fashion, throw some fantastic wrench into it, and then double down in a way that hits a nerve and pushes to a dramatic climax without sacrificing what's been making the whole thing work. Eliminate "fantastic", and that's probably the way most comedies are supposed to work, especially at this length, but a lot of people forget that or get the proportions off.

Here, we meet Kate (Amanda Crew) and Todd (Dustin Milligan), a young couple whose relationship had recently hit a few bumps but are now moving into a new apartment, getting ready before the movers show up. Initially, Todd is complaining that the previous tenants left an armoire behind, but they soon find it's not the weirdest feature: There's an itty-bitty invisible wormhole that zips things over to the other side of the living room, and it probably says something about their relationship that Todd is terrified and panicky while Kate sees it as the coolest thing that she's ever seen.

It's really fun to watch Dustin Milligan and Amanda Crew work here. They give Todd and Kate great opposites-attract energy, trading rapid-fire barbs in a way that's genuinely funny but also shows the strain relationships built around such different temperaments can have, and kick it up a notch when the portal makes things weird. They are both genuinely funny and go big in a way that complements each other: Milligan's whiny neuroticism might be a lot except that Crew's rapid acceptance and excitement creates a middle they can orbit around without ever getting too far apart. And when things get weirder, the energy level is such that it's not even really a pivot to making a choice that may be entirely against one's nature for the one one loves.

Pretty darn good in under ten minutes.


"Escape Attempt"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

During the Q&A, the filmmakers mentioned problems with the runtime, in that the initial cut was almost feature-length but they probably couldn't stretch it further without killing the pacing, so they cut it down to something which qualified as a short. The pacing is good now but the storytelling has some big gaps. It's listed on IMDB as a TV series, but I kind of can't see it working better in that configuration. It kind of feels like the crew made something they couldn't complete but the material was too good to waste, so they put it together as best they could - which isn't bad.

It opens introducing us to Saul (Andrzej Chyra), who describes himself as a professor with particular knowledge of Twentieth Century conflicts, and who is looking to leave the Earth and get away from humanity. Most jaunts are to Pandora, but that planet is nearly as crowded. Emma (Anna Burnett), the pilot of a private spacecraft also on her way to that planet, offers to drop him off at one of many uninhabited worlds, a detour her linguist husband Vadim (Ieuan Coombs) is less excited for. They warn somewhat over the trip, but when they make landing on this supposedly empty world, they find that people are already there, villains Saul recognizes all too well working a slave labor population to death.

There's backstory or lore here, more than a half-hour short winds up having time to explore and which might have been slated for future episodes if this did indeed start life as a TV series. You can probably do without to a certain extent - you don't really need to explain Nazis - but there are some very odd jumps in its story, especially as Emma and Vadim never seem to be more than wealthy vacationers before encountering this huge and horrifying mystery, and while they seem a little too well-equipped to handle it. It is really stopped down to just Saul reckoning with a long-ago decision to run.

Looks really nice, though, if very much in the Apple Store vibe with white jumpsuits seemingly the only fashion in the future. There's a stark contrast between the 2020s Star Trek look and what they find on the planet, and even though the effects are likely mostly CGI, there's a satisfyingly model-like feel to how the ships move.


"Sincopat"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

Another short with a devilishly simple idea played out well, "Sincopat" introduces Ona (Núria Florensa), an executive and designer who has taken her company's newest device out for a spin: The "Narval", a fashionable smartwatch which synchronizes with injectable nanotechnology that takes up residence in the audio processing center of one's brain, beaming music directly into your head. It will make the company a fortune, and Ona loves it. At least until a malfunction has the nanos stop receiving and just repeating what's in the buffer, meaning the same two seconds of music are playing in her brain on a loop, and there's no way to stop it.

I've kind of got my doubts about the whole "no way to stop it" thing - it initially seems like a problem that can be solved with a hammer if you don't want to wait for the transmitter's battery to die - but the basic idea is good enough to let it slide for ten minutes of jokes about how having this in your head on a loop will drive you absolutely mad and how, obviously, a big tech company is going to consider this a one-time fluke or an acceptable risk with the launch so close. Co-writer/director Pol Diggler gives the short a "stages of grief" structure, which proves a good fit and allows the film to jump forward to the next gag rather than feel trapped by the implications of any one idea. The punchlines for the short as a whole are a bit obvious, but they work.

Núria Florensa sells the whole thing well, too - there's a likable sort of fecklessness to Ona at the start, capturing the intersection of "this is so cool" and "this is going to make us so rich" tech executives, while later projecting the horror that comes with each stage of this torment. This could have just been a fable about a tech person hoisted on her own petard, but it plays more darkly comic when you realize the company will treat this all as collateral damage.


"Katele (Mudskipper)"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

I must admit, I was more often interested in "Katele" as an idea than drawn into its particular story. "Modern fantasy rooted in Australian aboriginal culture" is something I hadn't seen, and it feels like you could do a lot more with that than what we see here. Which isn't much of an outline: Martha (Elmi Kris), an indigenous woman working the late shift in a laundrette, sees one of the machines go haywire and pulls a man (Waangenga Blanco) out. She hides him, argues with the white guy making deliveries to various institutional clients (Tony Nixon), and when the man vanishes, ruminates on what her life should be like.

It may just be that this short is a bit miscast as part of a science-fiction block, especially for someone like myself who tends to gravitate toward the nuts-and-bolts end of the genre; in that context, one may tend to fill in a fantastical narrative that's not exactly there. I, for example, read the ending as Martha following Katele back through the portal to a world where Australia had never been colonized, but there's not exactly anything in the text that says so. Indeed, not a lot really happens.

Still, Elmi Kris has a face, and she projects the frustration and sadness of her current situation well, and even for those not in her particular circumstances, the feeling that one's life shouldn't be like this and maybe there is someplace where it isn't is powerful. She's terrific at communicating this mood.


Phuean (mai) sanit (Not Friends)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

My first reaction to seeing the description for Not Friends was "Dear Evan Hansen, but Thai", which is probably unfair, in that I haven't seen that film or the play that spawned it and they could be completely different in their details (though Not Friends at least has a cast full of folks believable as teenagers). It's not a bad take on the basic theme, but doesn't quite have the confidence to remain darkly comic or the agility to pivot to something heartwarming.

The film centers on Pae (Anthony Buisseret), who has transferred to a new school for his senior year after an incident at his previous one, where he was often treated as an outcast because the smell of the family flour-mill business seemed to stick to him, and which his father (Pramote Sangsorn) expects him to join because he's on his own for university. He's assigned to sit next to the gregarious Joe (Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit), who says Pae is his 150th friend and a person only has that many in his life. That will be true for Joe, who is hit by a truck and killed crossing the street. It's an opportunity for Pae, though, as a fine-arts school is having a short-film contest which can deliver a full-ride scholarship without having to worry about entrance exams, looking for tearjerkers, so Pae opts to make a film about his best friend Joe, using the story that won Joe a writing contest. The snag is Bokeh (Thitiya Jirapornsilp), who was Joe's actual best friend in junior high, but winds up reluctantly offering her services as cinematographer despite her initial plan being to expose Pae as a fraud.

It feels like this was the most fun version of the story for about five or ten minutes, right around the school assembly, when Pae shifts into full huckster mode, the other students falling for it and Bokeh joining up to make sure he doesn't screw it up. The cynicism of the premise is on full display, but writer/director Atta Hemwadee can't really sustain it; the movie shifts into "let's put on a show!" mode and a later twist just never sits right. It also doesn't help that Joe's award-winning story, while being useful in offering a lot of ways for Pae, Bokeh, and the AV club to shoot wacky things, feels mawkish and simplistic, something that may win an elementary school contest but not one for high-school seniors and not something that will make adults cry. People in the film keep saying it's great but it doesn't hold up when the audience hears it.

The heck of it is, the film clearly has the right folks in the leads. Anthony Buisseret is genuinely funny when playing Pae as a dumbass with an instinct for scheming and faking it until he makes it, giving the impression of someone less a monster than desperate enough to grab onto anything and figure out how to make it work later. Thitiya Jirapornsilp is a good foil for him as Bokeh, making her smart enough to realize her own faults as well as Pae's and both relishing the chance to sabotage him and to make a movie about her friend. Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit pops in and out of flashbacks as Joe, and does a good job of riding the line between being the pest Pae often saw him as an the earnest good friend of Bokeh.

Gags about amateur filmmaking dominate the middle section, and there's a fun sense of absurdity on the one hand and fondness for the scrappy improvisation. There's a certain stabbing at us older folks when Bokeh suggests doing an homage to the most famous scene in the first Mission: Impossible film and her classmate points out that the movie is old, from before they were born, but I guess it's fair (and I wouldn't exactly mind if Tenet becomes the zoomer equivalent). There's a stab at the characters of similar quality when it's revealed that they didn't know everything about Joe, but Hemwadee kind of gets into a mire playing it out.

Eventually, he's seemingly working hard to make everything retroactively a lot nicer, and while maybe that's the emotions he wanted to evoke, it's less entertaining to be assured that folks weren't that bad than to see them work to overcome their worst impulses. As a result, Not Friends has its moments, but can't quite lean into how it's often at its best when the characters are at their worst.


"Space Dumbs: The Fly"

* * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

Man, we're going on 60 years of people making the same jokes about Star Trek and 40 making the same jokes about The Next Generation, aren't we? It's kind of amazing that some folks are still howling when they get the reference.

But, hey, more power to the fact that people are still having fun with Star Trek decades later in Kazakhstan. We've seen these jokes before, but everybody's got to start making movies somewhere, and writer/director/co-star Alan Talkenov is a disconcertingly good match for Brent Spiner as Data.


O Velho e a Espada (The Old Man and the Demon Sword)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

There's kind of a weird tension to watching something like The Old Man and the Demon Sword because half its charm and reason for existence are the way it is a DIY labor of love, while in the other, some of the material is good enough that one might want to see it a bit more refined. If this were a professional production, you'd call it a bad movie, but if it had to make money, it would not exist, and the world might be a bit poorer for that.

It opens with a warrior monk wandering central Portugal with a sword in which a loquacious demon is trapped, discovering a town shielded by a force field that is overrun with demons, which apparently only the town drunk António (António da Luz) can see. The sword, of course, will end up in the hands of "Tohno", and there's a seemingly never-ending supply of monsters which only he can see that need to be dispatched before the sword is recharged enough to cut their way to the outside.

A lot of this is actually kind of cool if you like the stuff filmmaker Fabio Powers is drawing from. The monsters are often rendered with effects straight out of the video games of some prior decade, but some of the designs aren't bad at all; I particularly like the guys who are like a vantablack hole in the image but still give off an impression of unkempt furriness. The design of the sword is straight out of a baller anime, and there's some fun in how the filmmakers have clearly figured out how to get the eyeball in it to turn and blink and are going to do this in every damn shot, and voice actor Paulo Espirito Santo is great even if you don't speak a word of Portuguese. They love and own the cheese.

On what you may consider to be the other hand, though, António da Luz was not an actor, but a guy the director liked and wanted to put in a movie, more or less telling him to be himself and maybe improvise a little. This sometimes works, especially at the start - he's got this sensation of sadness and whimsy filtered through what seems to be a genuine bone tiredness that professionals don't always capture - he often feels undirected and like he's got the same few ideas to spew, and Powers never manages to turn conversations between his alcoholic screwup and the demon sword into something one can really build a film around.

Perhaps anticipating this, the film also ends on something that is weirdly meta and maybe too clever by half, winking so hard at the audience as to sprain something but doing it in such a way that it's not particularly satisfying no matter how you look at it. It can be seen as throwing away some of the fun fantasy, or raising the question about whether this sort of DIY film can be exploitative but not actually engaging with it. It doesn't quite play as cynical, but it also feels like walking away, not actually doing anything with what got the audience's interest.

It's a handmade underground thing, so it's going to be kind of rough. I'm glad I've seen it, and I'm glad Powers has this odd artifact that he made with a friend. It's a pure curiosity, but there's room for that.


Mash Ville

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

The listings for Mash Ville describe it as a Korean Western, but I don't really know if it scans as part of that genre, aside from there being a sense of rural isolation; it's too frantic and the themes don't exactly line up. It feels more like some of the meaner Coen Brothers movies, full of small-town nastiness and weird nihilistic violence, but only sporadically managing that sort of compulsive watchability.

It starts with two people in traditional dress murdering some farmers in what one would initially assume to be some sort of gangland assassination; the only survivor in the town, it seems, is Kong Hyun-man, and him quite by accident. In a nearby city, movie propmaster Jeong Yo-ji is drinking her breakfast, arguing with a producer about delivering a corpse dummy, unaware that another drunk woman, Moon Seo-in, has selected her trunk for a nice comfy place to lie down. Yo-ji rebuffs a waiter's attempts to sell her on a local moonshine, which liquor executive Park Won-jeon is seeking out to explain why his company's sales are so low in this specific area. He happens upon Joo Seo-jeong (Jeon Sin-hwan), not realizing that he's the distiller in question, working with his perpetually out-of-it half, impressively bearded-brothers (Park Jong-hwan & Park Sung-il). The bad news from them is that someone just died after drinking the latest batch, so they start heading to the next town over before the local law enforcement finds out. Because the brother accidentally buried his car keys with the body, they wind up carjacking Yo-ji, and those cult killers from the start are heading in the same direction.

This seems like it should be a lot of violent fun, and it often is: There's an art to the punctuation headfirst that filmmaker Hwang Wook seems to have mastered, the film by and large looks great, and there's a fun soundtrack. Each of the three main threads is a good candidate to be part of a movie like this, off-kilter enough to feel new but also not quite big enough to be the sole support for a feature on its own.

The trick is how you play the threads out and, more crucially, crash them together, and that's often just not very good. For every inspired idea like the screw-up brothers winding up in the middle of a weird death cult, there's two cases of really not having any idea of what to do with Seo-in after her unique introduction, or even Yo-ji. There should be some sort of surprising alchemy in play, but too often, these elements pass our bounce off each other. Even within a thread, there's seldom the sense that a couple characters bouncing of each other is particularly interesting or something you'd like to see more of. The best moment is probably Won-jeon waxing rhapsodic about his knowledge of spirits to Seo-jeong, who claims he just likes a bourbon with a cigar. It's good "we're in a movie and here to entertain you while increasing tension" talk that the film otherwise lacks.

Much of the cast is underused like that, but they handle their assignments well. Jeon Sin-hwan is the closest the ensemble has to a lead, giving the sense of someone with potential beyond small-time moonshining but never quite able to push himself in that direction. Park Jong-hwan anf Park Sung-il make a fun comic team. The folks playing Yo-ji, Won-jeon, and Hyun-man squeeze what they can from their scenes, and the killers feel both deeply weird and dangerous.

(If anybody wants to hook me up with a press kit or update some websites so I can credit people peppery, it would be appreciated!)

On top of never feeling like a Western, Mash Ville too often feels like a lesser version of the genres it's closer to: There's a good Coen-inspired movie or Pulp Fiction knockoff to be made with this material, but this all too often isn't it.