Recap Fantastic Fest, the opening weekend

Attempting to reconstruct three days’ worth of Fantastic Fest from a dizzying swirl of exploding zombie skulls, hastily scribbled notes, and incapacitating sake drinks is perhaps not quite as harrowing as what Willem Dafoe endures in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (hint: it’s gonna hurt when he pees for a while), but it’s a daunting proposition nonetheless. Our four writers survived to file this day-by-day wrap-up of the festival’s first weekend.

Friday

Leave it to the Japanese to redeem Fantastic Fest’s lackluster first day with an evening of Far East insanity: flamethrowers, bikini-clad demon swordfights, ass-stabbing needles, gravity-defying pole dances, and enough sake to put down a samurai—and that was just the after-party. Their movies were pretty good too.

The decapitation-laden double feature of Hard Revenge, Milly and its sequel, Bloody Battle, delivered all the ridiculous, over-the-top action you’d expect from Japan. The title lays out the plot pretty succinctly: Drug-dealing lunatics savagely murder Milly’s family, leaving her for dead after performing a particularly nasty double mastectomy. Unfortunately for the killers, what doesn’t kill Milly only makes her more badass. Strapped with a killer rack and a kneecap shotgun, she hunts her assailants down one bone-crunching fight scene at a time. The first film’s meager budget is apparent in the rock-bottom set pieces (almost the entire movie takes place in an abandoned building), but the old-school gore is a sight for CGI-sore eyes. 

Hard Revenge, Milly: Bloody Battle fleshes out the barebones structure of the first film, expanding on the post-apocalyptic setting and adding depth to Milly’s character without sacrificing the core concept of Milly kicking ungodly amounts of ass. Due to a significantly larger budget, Bloody Battle succeeds in becoming an actual film, whereas the original Milly was merely an extremely entertaining special-effects reel. Japanese ultra-violence is an acquired taste, but film fans who get a special tingle from severed limbs will find plenty to love about Milly’s quest for vengeance.

The theme continued with the first of Fantastic Fest’s famous secret screenings, though Robo-geisha was hardly a secret by the time it screened—director Noboru Iguchi was spotted walking around all day in a Robo-geisha T-shirt.

Endlessly violent, and unapologetic about director Iguchi’s affection for the female hinder, the film tells the story of Yoshie, a young Cinderella type who—after displaying innate abilities in phonebook-tearing and martial arts—is drafted into an elite team of assassins disguised as geishas. Following a series of bionic upgrades and her discovery of the assassins’ true purpose, Yoshie goes rogue, eventually melding with her similarly enhanced, formerly evil stepsister in order to take down a castle-turned-giant-robot bent on dropping a massive bomb into the middle of Mt. Fuji. Visually rich, with gore and imaginative kills aplenty, Robo-geisha seamlessly melds the ridiculous things that make Japanese B-movies great (old-school monster effects; katanas that shoot out of armpits, mouths, and asses) while providing a poignant reminder that, 64 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese have neither stopped worrying nor learned to love the bomb. (Why else would Iguchi include two scenes with acidic breast milk that melts faces?)

In fierce juxtaposition to the first not-so-secret screening, The Men Who Stare At Goats caught even festival co-founder Harry Knowles off-guard. With thematic similarities to Burn After Reading and starring roles for both George Clooney and Jeff Bridges, comparisons to the Coen Brothers are inevitable—and apt. Funny and quickly paced, The Men Who Stare At Goats travels to Iraq and back following an intrepid reporter’s search for spiritual enlightenment in the world of U.S. government PSYOPS. The film flits between believing its own bullshit and winking at the New Age joke, but regardless of objective truth, the “hippie super-soldier” premise delivers enough comic action to avoid becoming a self-important, muddled mess.

Some self-importance leaked into director Mike Dougherty’s post-mortem on Trick ’R Treat’s ignoble direct-to-DVD dump. He blamed everything from the industry’s “fear of anthologies” to the fact that “it’s not a remake.” Granted, those are troublesome issues, but it might have helped if Trick ‘R Treat were a better film. Particularly at fault are centerpiece storylines involving everyone’s favorite pedophile, Dylan Baker, and current horror “it” girl Anna Paquin. Even a climactic battle between Brian Cox and the film’s Cryptkeeper-like character—the “Halloween rules enforcer” Sam—goes from stupid fun to just plain stupid once it’s revealed that [mild spoiler alert] Sam is, in Dougherty’s own words, “what would happen if Satan fucked a pumpkin.” After the screening, Dougherty openly admitted his desire to make his own version of Creepshow—something that was already desperately palpable in the film’s comic-book-inspired opening credits—but the distracting leaps of logic, broadly sketched characters, and an oddly detached visual style that held every supposed scare at an arm’s length put Trick ‘R Treat more in the league of “particularly unmemorable episode of Tales From The Crypt.”

On the other side of the spectrum was Zombieland. The world needs another zombie film like it needs another romantic comedy about harried professional women (or just “romantic comedy”), but Zombieland is the sort of genre exercise that ends up arguing for its continued existence. Too many battles with the undead get bogged down in dull pathos—even Shaun Of The Dead, the film it most resembles, had its weepy undercurrents—but Zombieland runs with the premise that being the last living human could actually be a lot of fun, provided you didn’t much care for other people to begin with. It’s a clever, squabbling road comedy with occasional breaks for nihilistic kicks like trashing an abandoned gift shop, squatting in a movie star’s mansion, or running wild in an amusement park; it’s about time a movie realized that the apocalypse doesn’t have to be such a downer. The Q&A that followed was equally bereft of unnecessary intellectualizing, but we learned that Zombieland was initially envisioned as a TV show, Harrelson enjoys smoking weed, and that Eisenberg is actually pretty funny—though the best line went to Harrelson, who lamented a “lost scene” where Eisenberg kills a zombie “with kindness.” 

Saturday

The zombies continued their attack on Saturday with the man who practically invented the genre. To paraphrase Barton Fink: “George Romero. Zombie picture. What do you need, a road map?” That Survival Of The Dead needs no introduction—or likeable characters, or compelling plot, or reason for existing—is accepted by read as everyone, including its director. In fact, in his introduction, Romero seemed to be explaining his reasoning for making yet another entry (as well as three more promised sequels, if he gets his way) in purely capitalistic terms, arguing that he didn’t own the rights to anything before Land Of The Dead, so it was important to him to control a piece of his own legacy. Of course, of all the franchises to be kept alive this way, you could do worse than …Of The Dead, which requires next to nothing in terms of new storylines. This entry transports it to what Romero described as a quasi-Western setting—but really, it could take place during the Jewish high holidays in Queens, so long as it featured lots of close-up shots of heads exploding and guts getting ripped out. Which it does, so there.

The disappointment continued with Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. Despite star John C. Reilly’s assertion that “it’s not Goosebumps,” the Paramount had a stiflingly “family-friendly” vibe Saturday. Junior high (and much younger) kids packed the front rows, and Tim League appeared visibly strained while resisting the urge to drop his usual F-bombs. Reilly’s right: Cirque is more in line with the just-slightly-charcoal humor of Barry Sonnenfeld films like The Addams Family and Men In Black, right down to aping some of his camera-spinning trickery. It would be easy to lament the tragedy of its two wooden leads—seemingly genetically engineered in a Disney Afternoon incubator—or that Reilly feels as reigned in by the overall PG-ness of his surroundings as Tim League did during his introduction. However, the real waste is casting actors like Jane Krakowski, Kristen Schaal, and Willem Dafoe, and then giving them nothing to do. (Krakowski and Schaal, in particular, get only a pair of lines apiece.) As such, the film feels like an excessively long prologue to some future payoff, but it’s difficult to see it connecting with wider audiences enough to merit one. (Certainly the hardcore fans of the books weren’t entirely pleased, judging by the young girl who demanded to know why they had to go and “make it funny.”)

She would’ve had better luck over at the Alamo, where the Toy Story films were showing in 3-D. Does the world need old films redone this way? Sure, because audience immersion is likely de rigueur for all of Pixar’s post-Up projects. With Toy Story 3 on deck, there are bound to be fewer complaints about compromising John Lasseter’s original vision if we can witness it through RealD-tinted glasses. An undisputed classic dated only by some background characters (looking at you, pink-haired Russ Troll doll) and a few stale punchlines, Toy Story loses nothing with the 3-D treatment, which adds little more than visual depth—something Lasseter and his animators established on their own 14 years ago. Nonetheless, the difference between the scenes in Andy’s room and in the outside world is staggering: There’s still a close-quarters comfort during the bedroom sequences, but when Woody and Buzz Lightyear wrestle at the gas station, the sky hanging above them is beyond infinite—it’s intimidating. (At least chunks of Combat Carl don’t come flying out from the screen, The Final Destination-style.)

Saturday also brought the sole documentary feature on this year’s slate. Cropsey contains all the raw materials of an instant classic: a murder mystery, satanic cults, a creepy setting in the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island (exposed in the early ’70s as a horrific snake pit by an ambitious, mustachioed young reporter named Geraldo Rivera), and a compelling central figure in Andre Rand, a drifter accused of murdering one child and suspected in the disappearance of several others. Co-directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio set out to uncover the truth behind the missing children, but the promising material never coheres in a satisfying way, and the filmmakers don’t help their cause with a handful of stagy moments. When they roam the decaying tunnels beneath Willowbrook, it’s as if they’re self-consciously re-enacting The Blair Witch Project.

The day closed with The Fantastic Feud, an excellent place where Alamo programmers, visiting critics, and cult filmmakers come together and get embarrassingly drunk, then argue about stupid inconsequential shit that is, nevertheless, intimidating to people who pretend to pride themselves on their pop-culture knowledge. Two teams, one American, the other foreign, battle it out, though the contest was decidedly weighted toward American pursuits like “hip-hop horror films” and the oeuvre of Jamie Lee Curtis. That’s not to say the foreign team didn’t represent, particularly the always-colorful Nacho Vigalando, who pulled off an impressive point-grab by successfully arguing that Curtis did, in fact, star in the little-seen director’s cut of The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension. It’s the kind of triumph that would only merit raucous cheers in this kind of setting.

Sunday

Sunday was mostly spent recuperating from the rigors of festival-going, though festival-goers who emerged to take in Down Terrace saw perhaps the most peculiar offering of the weekend. There were no zombies, vampires, or robot geishas—just a mordant crew of British lowlifes who spend most of their time smoking pot, sniping at each other, and singing traditional folk songs. The movie’s first half unfolds in almost Pinter-esque fashion, as oblique references to criminal activity occasionally surface amid head-scratching non-sequiturs and observational comedy straight out of the UK version of The Office. The second half is a bit more in line with the Fantastic Fest agenda, but it would be unfair to say much more, save that those looking for a respite from supernatural shenanigans could do worse than catching the replay on Wednesday.

Like zombies, the “demon child” genre has spawned more forgettable fare than classics, but it’s one that’s unlikely to die even with movies like Orphan outweighing the Village Of The Damned. And given the inevitability of its premise, Tom Shankland’s The Children offers far more suspense than expected, and it does so by perfecting the formula rather than trying too desperately to reinvent it—and more impressively, by doing away with any and all mystery. As a family’s idyllic winter holiday starts going horribly wrong, and the snow starts becoming artfully drenched in blood, there’s no question who’s behind it all: Everyone can tell that the children are behaving strangely, and even better, there’s no attempt to discover why they’re acting that way. There’s no supernatural explanation, or frantic research into possible antidotes here—no attempt at all to put things right. The Children willfully embraces the idea that these spooky little bastards are beyond saving, and pulls no punches in making them the villains, which means not shying away when it comes time to putting them down. It’s creepy, satisfyingly gory, and completely beyond redemption—which probably means it’s due to be ruined by an American remake.

Uwe Boll could certainly help with that. Boll’s faith in himself and his movies is unwavering, and despite critical lambasting and run-ins with the occasional smartass—like the Q&A participant who told him his “friend” asked him to ask Boll to “stop making movies”—he’s thoroughly convinced that he’s making more purely artistic statements than almost anyone else on the planet. Of course, if Rampage is an artistic statement, it’s a cross between a 13-year-old boy venting all his pubescent rage by scribbling pictures of his teacher’s head getting blown off, and the first awful batch of “wake up, world!” poetry a teenager writes once he finally discovers the newspaper. Boll’s “protagonist” is a white, middle class male who’s so pissed off about his parents gently urging him to move out, the rude indifference of various customer service people who can’t seem to make the perfect macchiato, and just the general shitty state of the world, dude, that his only recourse is to walk around town machine-gunning every man, woman, and child in sight. Boll attempts to lend his masturbatory revenge fantasy a veneer of sociopolitical commentary by having his character pump iron and meticulously build body armor for 30 minutes while various soundbites about Osama Bin Laden and the BTK Killer loop in a hallucinatory frenzy, but there’s really no pretending that Rampage is anything but angry, juvenile wish fulfillment. Or rather, there’s no pretending for anyone but Uwe Boll. But then, he’s the kind of guy who will toss off casual joking references to 9/11, Hitler, and rapes in Darfur in a Q&A, then seem taken aback that anyone would think they were in poor taste. Borderline pathological, or deliberately confrontational mad genius? As always, it’s open to interpretation, but Rampage probably won’t sway anyone toward the latter just yet.

At least Buratino: Son Of Pinocchio had an easy excuse: sub-par subtitles. But its inspired premise—boy from wrong side of tracks falls for girl with rich dad, boy happens to be made of wood—lacked an inspired execution, the very thing that lifts A Town Called Panic out of the stop-motion animation ghetto. Driven by a manic energy and characters that require only a few moments’ development to become fully realized, the film plays like a Looney Tunes short stretched to full-length. Sight gags and physical humor abound and rarely miss—like when the horse (named “Horse”) climbs into bed, the camera lingering just long enough to reveal that the bed is made to accommodate his need to sleep standing up. Horse dreams of a gorgeous ice ballet with his romantic interest (the music-instructing mare, Madame Longrée), one of several sequences that provide a welcome breather from the film’s frantic pace. But there’s a joy in that pace that makes Panic one of the best movies screening this year. As Alamo programmer Lars Nilsen noted in his intro, A Town Called Panic stars a cowboy and an American Indian, but it feels like the filmmakers aren’t aware of the roles a cowboy and American Indian are supposed to play. Operating by its own logic, A Town Called Panic delivers on its premise, and then some.