Category: Film Festivals

Fantasia lists this as The Order of One, but IMDB has it as Order of One. Who knows? The official website uses the article, so there you go.

It’s a total DIY low budget indie flick, shot for under $100,000 in and around Montreal. The big bad evil martial arts master is played by a real sensei from a local dojo, and I’d bet on a bunch of his thugs being students from the dojo. This makes, anyhow, for some pretty fun martial arts scenes — I can’t complain about that.

Well, and I can’t complain about much of anything. I mean, it’s an enthusiastic low budget tribute to Sonny Chiba and 70s action flicks, right down to the split screen. Yeah, the picture quality sucks and some kind of transfer sync issue was doing something weird with the frames per second, but whatever! It’s a guy just out of prison getting his hands on a mystical sword and fighting off waves of assassins while trying to decide if he should deliver it to the good guys or keep it himself. What more do you want?

… no, you don’t get good acting, but they’re all having fun.

Grade: B- if you don’t mind the complete indie nature, C+ if the bad lighting bugs you. For me? B-.

(Back! Back in the saddle again!)

Evil Aliens is the goriest film I saw all week. You know what you’re getting when a rotating spiky probe hits someone’s delicate rear end within the first five minutes of the movie. Sploosh!

It’s also a total riot. Everyone’s comparing it to Evil Dead, which is exactly accurate. You get all the gore in the world, a wickedly nasty sense of humor, plenty of self-aware parody, and evil alien monsters. I laughed all the way through when I wasn’t cringing in shock. There weren’t any really scary bits; the aliens are gonna do damage and people are gonna die and none of that comes as any kind of a surprise. There are a couple of jump scares, but the point is definitely blood, a bit of sex, and funny stuff. Also, the scene with the harvester is the best use of music in a horror movie ever, no really.

The whole plot is parody, really. Real aliens show up on a nearly empty Welsh island, and a tabloid journalism show heads off to film there after some cryptic reports. Inbred Welsh farmers kick the crap out of aliens; the crap kicking is returned. There are ley lines. It’s damned snarky.

We saw three British horror flicks over the week (two from England, one from Ireland), and they couldn’t have been more different: the gorefest Evil Aliens, the monster movie Isolation, and the survival horror flick Wilderness. All were excellent. British horror is completely rocking the house right now and I give them huge happy thumbs up and I want more, please.

Grade: A.

A combination of slight illness and scheduling mishaps is about to lead to a slightly early departure. Alas! The remainder of the reviews (everything up through The Great Yokai War) will come when we get back to Boston. It’s been an excellent week.

So this is easy: it was a big collection of short films, everything from trailer remixes to Flash animation bits to traditional animation. It was fairly good. I guess you could reasonably stick your name on this kind of thing if your cutting and editing of shorts was really innovative, but in this case a bit of static between shorts doesn’t count. It was still fun to watch. I’d probably go for taking a break instead of watching one of these again next year, just cause it’s all viewable elsewhere fairly easily.

Grade: I dunno, how do you grade a compendium? I liked it.

There’s a difference between horror and terror. Terror is being scared; it’s the long creepy shot of the end of the corridor in the split second when the monster appears. It’s the adrenaline rush. Fear. Terrified. Horror, on the other hand, is the knowledge that something incredibly awful is going on. It’s the grim certainty that a monster will appear: gut-churning time. Horrified.

Reincarnation is interesting, cause you expect J-horror to be a lot of each. In good J-horror, there’s lots of built up tension plus the oft-gory rush to judgment. Reincarnation really isn’t very terrifying; it didn’t leave me looking over my shoulder on the way home. But man, the slow patient playing out of fate is amazingly horrifying.

This is perhaps because it’s so non-surreal. The blurb in the program really wanted this to be the same sort of blurred Takashi Shimizu horror that he’s known for with the Ju-on films. It’s not; the horror comes from the clarity with which the inevitable plays out. You need to see the future clearly in order to understand how doomed the cast is.

Bonus points for clever use of film within a film, not just once (the movie being made about a senseless set of murders in a hotel), but twice (the 8 mm film shot by the hotel murderer himself). That provides the opportunity for a triple overlay of events, which is damned effective. So is the rest of the movie.

Grade: A.

From one low budget horror film with a message to another. The Descendant is very earnest, and better filmed than Subject Two — less polished, but better pacing, and better acting on the whole. The protagonist, Jamie, is somewhat stiff, but his grandparents and the reclusive denizens of Ste. Harmonie make up for him performance-wise.

It’s hard to describe the movie without giving away too much. Jamie’s mother dies, and he goes to find out why she didn’t talk to her grandparents in twenty-odd years. The town they live in has a secret, and that’s the movie right there.

The earnest part comes in when you hit the plot twist. This is, I think, the movie M. Night Shyamalan should have made instead of The Village. It’s his sort of gut-punch impact, or it would be if it had been made with a bit more skill.

The message is powerful, but the desire to get the point across seems to have led Philippe Spurrell, the director, into skimping on plausibility. His desire to make the crimes of the village as immediate as possible instead make them so implausible as to weaken the whole movie. A step back from the material would have benefitted the whole thing immensely.

Grade: C+ for the movie, B- for the intent.

It’s a bad sign when the promotional material for a movie spends a lot of time talking about how it was shot under adverse conditions. Say, the whole movie was filmed in 8 days several miles from “civilization” in a cabin with no electricity in the middle of the winter. Me, I’m hard-pressed to say you’ve left civilization if you’re close enough to get back via snowmobile in less than an hour, but that’s me. Either way, the shoot shouldn’t be the most important thing about a movie.

The promotional material for Subject Two also talks a lot about how it’s a new take on the Frankenstein legend, and that’s true enough. It’s the strength of the film. Mad scientists, nanotechnology, and hints of darker stuff are pretty effective. The concepts are great, and the setting is pretty good too.

However, the acting is wooden and the script doesn’t inject the concepts with life. Further, the movie squanders its sense of isolation a little more than halfway through when a visitor shows up. There’s a nasty little twist at the very end, but that’s the only place where the movie shows any sense of humor. It’s a regrettable waste of a pretty decent idea.

Grade: C-.

It’s a bad sign when the promotional material for a movie spends a lot of time talking about how it was shot under adverse conditions. Say, the whole movie was filmed in 8 days several miles from “civilization” in a cabin with no electricity in the middle of the winter. Me, I’m hard-pressed to say you’ve left civilization if you’re close enough to get back via snowmobile in less than an hour, but that’s me. Either way, the shoot shouldn’t be the most important thing about a movie.

The promotional material for Subject 2 also talks a lot about how it’s a new take on the Frankenstein legend, and that’s true enough. It’s the strength of the film. Mad scientists, nanotechnology, and hints of darker stuff are pretty effective. The concepts are great, and the setting is pretty good too.

However, the acting is wooden and the script doesn’t inject the concepts with life. Further, the movie squanders its sense of isolation a little more than halfway through when a visitor shows up. There’s a nasty little twist at the very end, but that’s the only place where the movie shows any sense of humor. It’s a regrettable waste of a pretty decent idea.

Grade: C-.

The program book makes all these wild claims about how The Echo (aka Sigaw) is the most gorgeous thing since sliced bread. If they’re to be believed, Yam Laranas, who wrote, directed, and shot the film, is a peer of Christopher Doyle in his cinematography. The praise is nigh on fulsome.

And as you no doubt knew with an opening paragraph like that, it’s pretty much accurate. The Echo is a ghost story set in a ramshackle old condo complex. It’s minimalist in cast, without ever putting too many people on screen at once; it’s one of those movies where the haunted building is perhaps the most important cast member. The cinematography has a key role, thusly. It bears the burden well. Almost every shot uses natural light, and Laranas must have had perfect timing and an unerring sense for appropriate times in order to make the long decrepit hallways and looming doorways as perfect as he did.

This is paired with a deft sense of horror. The Echo is, in fact, a pretty scary movie, which is a neat accomplishment considering that nothing ever lays a hand on our protagonist. The tension ratchets up nicely over the repeated course of a circular haunting, as if the worn patterns of the ghosts were building momentum until they must by the laws of physics break their wheel and careen into the lives of those around them.

When this played in L.A., Laranas was pretty much an instant hit. He’s signed up for a Hollywood remake, he got an agent, and from his blog (linked above) he’s pretty much on top of the world. I hope he keeps making movies with this kind of talent.

Grade: A- (and I’m not actually a big ghost movie fan).