Fantasia: Weekend One

This weekend marked the opening of the 11th annual Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Chock full of horror, kung-fu, science fiction, fantasy and other films of similar genres from around the world; this is always the film highlight of my year. Forget the summer blockbusters...over the next few weeks I'll see more movies in Montreal than I will the rest of the year most likely.

That being said, I caught four different screenings this weekend. The first was a collection of six Korean short films. Unfortunately traffic was brutal and we missed the beginning of the first film (The Hell (Two Kinds of Life...a cool rotoscoped examination of death), but the rest were mostly good. I did not like The Forest that much, but the two films by the Park Brothers (Mighty Man and The Freaking Family) were awesome.

The second film, which we decided to catch at the last minute, turned out to be the best one of the weekend. The Signal was a very smart and well shot film. Even though there were three sections to the story shot be three different directors, the style and pacing felt consistent enough that it was not at all distracting, nor did this make the film feel segmented. The successful blend of humor and suspense made this film extremely enjoyable...oh, and it was plenty rough. I hope that this film goes on to find a large audience, because I am looking forward to the next project these directors work on.

The last feature on Friday was the midnight showing of Flight of the Living Dead which was like watching Snakes on a Plane with zombies substituted for the snakes. Honestly, in about six months, I will probably confusing the two films when I try to think about different scenes from either one. Still, it was a lot of fun and reveled in its own cheese.

Friday also threw two shorts my way preceding the features. Before The Signal was a pleasant little escapade called The Morning After (click on the title to watch now!) which brought to life the expression coyote arm/coyote ugly. And preceding Flight... was The Fifth, a lighthearted look at a poker group having a hard time keeping a fifth player, which I couldn't find anywhere online, but you should keep you eye out for.

Saturday night I caught Hell's Ground , which is the first Pakistani horror film that I have ever heard of, much less seen, and is considered the first Pakistani gore film to date. All in all it was pretty good. I felt a little bit led awry by the more polished trailer, but this extremely low budget film was still a great experience in cultural exposure...with zombies. My original complaint for this film would be that halfway through the story it inexplicably drops the zombie plotline that it had been nourishing with lost tourists and suddenly morphs into a slasher film with a sexually confused, mace-wielding maniac chasing the teens through the woods. While I felt initially put off by this unconventional movie-making decision, I now feel that perhaps the point wasn't to resolve that the zombie crisis is at heart a pollution problem and our heroes will fix it (as would have happened in the Hollywood version), instead the point might simply be that bad shit goes down in these woods...so stay away!

The best parts of the Hell's Ground experience were the surrounding elements. The film was presented by the founders of the great "Mondo Macabro" DVD label, who had also put together a 20 minute clip reel of earlier "Lollylwood" horror films. Please do yourself a favor and do a YouTube search for Lollywood; some of the clips from the reel seem to be posted there. Also, the presentation before and Q & A session afterwards with director Omar Ali Khan was wonderful. He is very down to earth and has a fantastic sense of humor.

So it was a stellar opening weekend with everything I have come to expect from Fantasia: exposure to films that I would never catch on the big screen domestically, entertaining presenters talking about their work, and most importantly, an audience built entirely of people with the same questionable tastes. You gotta love an audience that cheers loudly when a man's forearm is screwed into the wall with a drill, or when a woman's throat is sliced open with a pair of pruning shears.

Same to same,

Capt. Hendry