Tag: fantasia

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.

I have absolutely no idea what Resonnances was doing on the program. I mean, there’ve been some movies I didn’t enjoy, but I get why they were there — interesting ideas, or love of the genre, or whatever. But this just bit.

The program says that Philippe Robert, the director, worked on a number of French flicks. When I finally found him on IMDB, it turns out he was a camera operator (and Ressonances isn’t listed at all). I’m surprised that his first feature film was so damned muddy and impenetrable; it looks like it was filmed at night with very little lighting. You’d think a camera operator would know better.

Peering through the murk, I tried to take the movie as a parody/homage to the classic monster in the woods movie. But it wasn’t really funny. I think the biggest laugh came when one of the characters referred to Zidane’s jersey as his lucky number, and that’s only funny because of the headbutt, which happened after the movie was made.

Grade: D.

(Yeah, it was Scandinavia night up at the old film festival.)

So Pusher 3 is advertised as a crime drama, which I guess is accurate in that it’s not a comedy or a thriller and it’s set in a criminal milieu. On the other hand, before the movie Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, told us that he was inspired by reality TV. That’s a lot more of the feel right there.

It’s a bleak night in the life of Milo, Copenhagen drug dealer. He’s attending NA meetings to try and kick his habit, cooking dinner for his daughter’s 25th birthday party, and dealing with the unexpected arrival of 10,000 Ecstasy tabs instead of the heroin he’d expected. If that sounds like there’s a comic aspect — yeah, there is, but it’s used to highlight the empty grind that’s Milo’s life.

His cooking and his human interactions are a tired hulk of a man bulling his way through an existence he doesn’t particularly enjoy. He doesn’t want to engage in the sudden bursts of violence that come later in the movie, but he’s got to do it. There’s no path that’d take him out of the swamp.

Not so much plot. It’s a slice of life; it’s reality TV focusing on criminals. Things happen, and Milo doesn’t particularly change as a result of them. It’s Zlatko Buric’s performance as Milo that binds the movie together. He’s ugly, tall, and weary in every moment of film. Refn isn’t afraid of the long wordless reaction shot; Buric bears out the director’s trust. This was probably my favorite performance of the festival so far.

Grade: A-.

Storm is an odd duck of a movie. It’s a psychological thriller about memories and childhood dressed in a supernatural, apocalyptic thriller’s clothing. The opening is a classic Matrix-inspired chase scene, right down to the tough female protagonist, and our shallow hero — DD — slips right into the Neo role. But then the midsection of the movie lurches over into Memento territory and the movie never really recovers.

The problem for me was that I couldn’t bring myself to want DD to be redeemed. Hm; the more I think about it, the more I think Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein (our writers/directors) were trying to do the Matrix all over again. But DD is no Neo, and his sins are not as easily forgivable for me as the movie might have liked them to be, which left me detached from the movie’s emotional core.

And then there’s all that comic book and video game imagery. After a lot of post-movie conversation with S., I couldn’t decide if those images were hanging on a coherent core structure, or if they were just thrown in to look cool. Why does Promise appear to have a real comic book existence? Who knows? My benefit of the doubt theory is that she and her opponent are too grand, too awesome, too angelic to be seen as they are by human eyes; that the comics and the video games are the filters through which DD and others see them. There’s nothing to prove or disprove that theory, though.

Still, it was a gorgeous movie. The sense of style was solid without getting in the way of the narrative. Apparently the whole thing was filmed on three million dollars, which staggers me. So it was enjoyable, just not entirely filling.

Grade: B-.

The Gravedancers is a home for bad acting, in no way saved by poor directing, a bad screenplay, and half-hearted special effects.

The bad acting was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was the regrettable tendency towards teasing direction — in a horror flick, I tend to feel that shock jump cuts should have some kind of underlying rationale. Jump cut to the monster’s perspective, jump cut to reveal a new perspective, but don’t jump cut for cheap thrills. Alas. By the time the second or third monster-eye cam shot turned out not to be a monster’s point of view at all, I’d decided that Mike Mendez wasn’t going to be particularly honest with his scares, and a lot of his tricks for scaring me went out the window.

The setup — dance on a grave, earn the hatred of the inhabitants — wasn’t bad. But it was wasted. Three monsters is too many to distinguish if you’re not even gonna begin to differentiate them until two thirds of the way through the movie. Bah.

Oh, and some of you will remember Clare Kramer as Glory in Buffy. Don’t expect too much from her. Sorry.

Grade: C-.

OK, so, you are probably thinking the same thing I was thinking, which is to say, “Ha ha ha, a horror movie about mutant cows. That’ll be a hoot. Possibly laden with mordant Irish wit.”

Do not be fooled like I was. Holy shit. Take the mutant cows very fucking seriously indeed.

It turns out, who’d have known, that when you film on a ramshackle failing Irish farm with a limited cast, and you get the classic horror tropes of disease and nature gone Gigeresque wrong and slow-mounting tension right, and you threaten the world because one stupid genetic researcher forgets that science will mess you up something fierce, and you do all that stuff? Yeah, that is pretty visceral stuff right there and it is indeed capable of scaring the crap out of you and no, the mutant cows are NOT FUNNY.

At all.

Seriously. Best monster SF/horror flick since Alien. Farm, spaceship, it’s all the same in the end, which is none too pleasant, let me tell you. It creeped me out a lot. There was nothing wrong with this movie.

Grade: I can’t grade it right now because I’m too edgy cause fuck, mutant cows. But probably an A+.

Yah, so, J-horror, long black hair as a signifier of angry spirits, everyday object as a carrier of the horror…

Red shoes, actually. Except these were more fuchsia. And yes, the idea is to evoke Hans Christian Andersen, but it didn’t work out very well. Lots of ballet, but no horrific mandate to dance forever, more’s the pity.

The twist, as seems to be obligatory in Korean J-horror influenced movies, has to do with family dynamics. Sadly, the director didn’t manage to overlap the ghost story and the family horror story at all, which meant that the last twenty minutes of the movie felt like an overdone coda: “Ah, you’ve resolved the ghosts? Now we will show you the real ending, because the dramatic tension we just built up and resolved was only the beginning!”

So I coulda done without that. I mean, it wasn’t abysmal, but it sure wasn’t good.

Grade: C+.

OK, so the whole theory about unpleasant people trapped in an unpleasant situation making for bad movies? It needs a revision. Wilderness taught me that it’s all about seeing ‘em get their comeuppance — which means, actually, that it’s all about having characters who you’re invested in, whether you like ‘em or not.

The reformatory lads of Wilderness were pretty much the latter, so there’s a lot of joy to be had from seeing them stuck on an island with something dark and terrible stalking them. Said joy was aided and abetted by excellent acting on everyone’s part.

It maybe started a little slow; I think we could have cut more quickly to the island, and the first set of fake scares was clumsy. Then again, they may have been worth it for the plot complication that resulted, and in any case things start to move really fast when they start to move. Excellent sense of tension, excellent action.

And it’s nice to see a movie that isn’t trying to be about the end of the world or superspies or any such. Wilderness is a small movie about a personal and particular set of issues. It doesn’t need to be more than that, and it cuts right to the bone. Succinct.

Grade: A.

Meh, Junk. I’d had high hopes, but it turned out to be royally dull. Reporter gets stuck in a bad place, which is pretty clearly a metaphor for something cause it’s completely stupid for her to be stuck there, and encounters people, including someone who may or may not be a serial killer. Speeches ensue.

At no point is our heroine proactive. Nobody’s really proactive, in fact. There’s a vague attempt at pretending there’s a coverup. Russia decays. Etc.

Grade: D.