I am planning to see a grand total of 76 movies at Fantasia, which sounds ridiculous for a week and a half until I remind myself that I’m seeing four of the short films programs so 43 of those are short films. That leaves only 33 features. Maybe that’s still ridiculous.
I got impatient to write about the festival so I decided to do a top ten list of my most anticipated features, in no particular order. I’m curious to see how this balances out against my rankings once I’ve seen everything.
Travel starts tomorrow. Can’t wait.
Trauma, or Monsters All, directed by Larry Fessenden. My first Fessenden was Blackout, which I also saw at Fantasia, and I thought the way Fessenden used the werewolf myth to examine toxic masculinity was really cool. Depraved and Habit lived up to Blackout and it’ll be nifty seeing the three movies come together. Universal monster movies indeed.
Alice Maui Mackey’s Our Effed Up World is gonna be fun because Mackey’s work is always fun; what’s not to love about a young director making enthusiastic genre movies on no budget? Another filmmaker I first saw at Fantasia, which is a bit of an accidental theme here.
You Are The Film is the first film from Makoto Ueda, who I know and love as the screenwriter for Junta Yamaguchi’s time loop movies. This is not a time loop movie; it apparently has an entirely different unusual story structure. I’m hyped.
Penny Lane Is Dead is Australian exploitation horror and that’s a plus for me. I want gore, thrills, and bad decisions, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get all of that. This seems like the kind of movie that’s going to really benefit from the Fantasia audience, which is the best movie audience I’ve ever experienced.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: I mean obviously. I’ve loved everything Jane Schoenbrun has directed since We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I love Gillian Anderson, and the premise is golden. High expectations here.
Godhead is the second movie from Mark H. Rapaport (and yeah, I saw Hippo at Fantasia.) I couldn’t stop thinking about Hippo for weeks; it captured aspects of cults and conspiracy theories in ways you don’t often see. Godhead seems like it’ll cover some of the same ground.
I know nothing about Matapanki except the blurb. I’m excited to be seeing a South American low budget superhero movie. This is the reason I love Fantasia.
Los Vampires is about the twin movies made on the set of Tod Browning’s Dracula in 1931. I didn’t know about the Spanish one until I heard about this. I like movies about movies and this has some good actors, so I was pleased to be able to add this to my list.
New Kurosawa that’s not at least adjacent to J-horror! Well that’s an absolute must. The Samurai and the Prisoner is a historical mystery/thriller and it looks tense as hell. Buzz on the Internet is good.
And finally, a revival, La Gammick. It’s a 1975 crime movie from Quebec, reputed to have a real poliziotteschi vibe. I’ve been watching a lot of 70s crime movies in the last few years, none of which were Canadian, so how could I resist this?
Honorable mention goes to Pontypool which I love. The opportunity to see it on the big screen was irresistible.
I should also mention two movies that I’m quite sad to miss. The first is The Glorious Dead, the new movie from the amazing Adams family. I love what they do and have ever since I saw my first movie from them at, yeah, Fantasia. The second is Nicholas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell – a predictable choice, but I like Refn most of the time and I like the premise. Come to think of it, the first Refn movie I saw was Pusher 3 at Fantasia back in 2006. Perhaps if I’m repeating myself this much I’ve gone to enough Fantasias…
Nah.