Review Category: Movie

“Nine Strains Of Nightmares From Five Countries”, proclaims the publicity for this year’s core (or gore) group of shorts in another series of small, compact visions from those film-makers out to shock and thrill audiences at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

Classic influences coupled with individuality were the thrust of the shorts on show, and there is much optimism from these contrasting film-makers. Cronenberg, Cloverfield and Fulci hold their wand over the stories on show.

Mateo Marquez’s The Invaders tells of a young woman on the run from an unknown source in post-9/11 paranoia. Marcos Mereles’ two-minute The Dead Man Speaks shows a montage of Dutch town photos as an anonymous spirit reflects on the virtues and desires of a ghost living amongst us. Mael Le Mee’s French offering Aurore will have much appeal for fans of David Cronenberg’s perverse physical horror in the tale of a teenage girl’s unique talent for physical touch during intercourse, reminding one of Teeth and Videodrome. Ryan Oksenberg’s American short Damage Control tells of a couple who arrive at what appears to be a slum homestead which the man has plans and a vision for, but they soon discover that an unwanted occupant is already inside with a chilling revelation.

Those of you who have only ever experienced the Tasmanian Devil through those classic Looney Tunes of yesteryear will get a kick out of Heidi Lee Douglas’ Devil Woman, an entertaining Australian short in which some female travellers run into some local thugs in a forest, but the local wildlife has a vicious bite in reservation for all of them. Entropia, from director Marinah Janello, is the most unusual of the pack, chronicling an ageing woman’s desire to stay young with various natural therapies, as well as trying to satisfy her bizarre sexual desires.

Riley Was Here, directed by Jonathon Rhoads and Mike Marerro, tells of a young man who is sent to a house where a lady seems to offer something called “The High”, but before long it turns out she wants something dark and desirable in return on a personal level. Josephine Darcy Hopkins’ The Day My Mother Became A Monster, based on a dark folk tale, tells of a mother and daughter relationship and the dynamic affected when she is infected in her hand.

The final entry, Aurelien Digard’s Besoin Dead, is firmly and proudly in the realm of classic Fulci like City Of The Living Dead and The Beyond. Here we see an engaged couple preparing for the best day of their lives, just as the locality has transformed into the undead. Quite funny in parts, and possibly the first time a mobile scooter has been used as one of the transports of choice.

Another winning set of ideas and concepts, and some promising talents on the horizon.

The Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal instigated a specially-selected series of diverse shorts to promote auteur talent, titled ‘Born Of Woman’, and has become one of the key picks of viewing for attendees. This year’s selection came from eight countries and, based on the evidence here, the horror genre has a new host of promising talents who will certainly uphold the classic form as well as creating and stamping their own trademark.

Classic horror was homaged and honoured, starting with Ida Jogler’s The Gaze, the tale of a female scientist prone to blackouts who also has a penchant for ESP. The influence of Brian De Palma’s classics Carrie and The Fury was also felt in Lucy’s Tale, directed by Chelsea Lupkin, which tells of a high-school female misfit, picked on a la Sissy Spacek, but who also holds a dark genetic secret.

Anybody who managed to survive the climax of Takashi Miike’s ruthlessly vicious Audition will feel the same way about Jiwon Moon’s Nose Nose Nose Eyes!, which tells of a one-child family and a father who is bed-ridden, whilst the mother holds strange feelings towards her husband while comforting her impressionable daughter.

John Carpenter’s Starman and his now-legendary remake of The Thing helped flavour Voyager, directed by Kjersti Helen Rasmussen, in which beings from beyond who have connected with the Voyager probe like Jeff Bridges’ alien alter-ego arrive at an Arctic station and make themselves comfortable.

Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People can be tasted in the Irish short Catcalls, directed by Kate Dolan, in which ladies of the night hold their own and have a desire for a catfight – literally!

This writer’s picks of the shorts were Petite Avarie, a French short directed by Manon Allirol and Leo Hardt. Although this one probably is as far from horror as you could get, it did provide an interesting reflection on modern relationships in the tale of a man who dumps his girlfriend after she is diagnosed with breast cancer, only to find that a woman scorned is not the way forward in personal development.

The other pick was Puppet Master, a Finnish short directed by Hanna Bergholm, a haunting account of a woman abducted by a marionette maker, soon discovering that his work likes to take him further than home.

The weirdest of the shorts had to be Who’s Who In Mycology, a USA/Czech co-production directed by Marie Dvorakova, which tells of a helpful man who takes a woman back to her apartment after she collapses. Unfortunately, he is entering a surrealist world where a bookcase holds dozens of books on the study of fungi, as well as all manner of physical oddities within the confines of her place. The style suggests classic Gilliam a la Brazil, as well as a dash of Monty Python. Strange, but strangely compelling at the same time.

The final entry was The Old Woman Who Hid Her Fear Under The Stairs, a British short directed by Faye Jackson in which an elderly woman living on her own decides to invest in an online programme to overcome her fear, thus creating a manifestation that she has to hide away as per the title.

Overall, the shorts were all competently created and directed, though some may take or leave what was on show. In summary, it was a passable watchable series of new visions.

A film starring a giant shark and Jason Statham was never going to be a serious affair. While every shark film ever made is in some way going to be compared to Jaws, this is definitely more in Sharknado territory; somewhere inbetween The Shallows and Deep Blue Sea.

If you’re wondering how the man behind Arthur Bishop, Deckard Shaw, Frank Martin, Chev Chelios, Turkish and Bacon ends up fighting a Megalodon shark (‘The Meg’), it all starts with a scientific expedition in the Mariana Trench. Of course, things don’t go quite as well as hoped and the crew (nearly everyone in the film except Statham) become trapped. The only man to have ever survived such a daring deep sea rescue (Statham) is called upon to rescue them. You can probably imagine what happens next.

The action mostly delivers – it’s pretty much all water tanks and CGI – and there’s the satisfying horror element of a bloody great big shark eating people. The comedy mostly falls flat apart from the dialogue though, which is reliably, laughably terrible. Examples: “I prefer you alive” and “this is bad for science”.

Rainn Wilson’s uber-rich investor steals the show in several scenes, as does an instantly popular character called Pippin (you’ll see). The film is nearly two hours long yet seems much shorter – a testament to director Jon Turteltaub and editor Steve Kemper’s excellent pacing.

There are a couple of twists, and obvious ones at that (spoiler: no vengeful reincarnations of a tabloid mystic appear). But it’s an enjoyable movie. The problem with The Meg is that while it definitely chomps at your senses, it’s just not ridiculous enough to be memorable. Just when you want Turteltaub to push the boat out (sorry), he reigns it in a little bit to the point it almost takes itself too seriously.

THE MEG / DIRECTOR: JON TURTELTAUB / SCREENPLAY: DEAN GEORGARIS, JON HOEBER, ERICH HOEBER / STARRING: JASON STATHAM, LI BINGBING, RAINN WILSON / CERT: 12 / RELEASE DATE: 10TH AUGUST 2018

Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut Of The Dead will heighten every single nightmare you have had about this genre of film-making and actually, if you weren’t one of the core group of fans in its initial years of release, will make you appreciate the effort and work that went into the film that influenced One Cut more than anything, George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. Tom Savini’s legendary make-up is now part of horror folklore, and although the original version of the film does tend to stop a little dead in the middle, the gore effects are still part of the charm.

The premise of One Cut Of The Dead sees an ambitious TV executive proposing to a director the idea of doing a one-take zombie movie for their brand-new Zombie Channel station. Before long, the line between fantasy and horrific reality takes shape as it appears the location where they are shooting is the site of an urban legend. Naturally our beloved director in the film wants to sacrifice others in the name of art and incorporates some of the alleged moving cadavers into the film, freaking his cast and crew out while getting the footage he requires as best he can.

One Cut Of The Dead plays more like an episode of Monty Python coupled with Hellzapoppin, albeit with less crazy zest, but is still as amusing at times as those comedy classics. The structure is haphazard, but that is part of the curious charm of this Japanese offering, which has already had festival bows at the likes of the New York Asian Film Festival and the Udine Far East Film Festival this year.

It’s a flawed piece at times, and the central idea might well have been better played with broader strokes of wit and irony. All in all, it does seem a little like a one-trick pony, which is a shame. Its key strength is to take the zombie genre and tip it on its side. Sam Raimi and Simon Pegg might well have done a much more efficient job on this, given their talent for mixing comedy with horror, but for a Far Eastern offering, it is a light-hearted affair compared to some of their more extreme cinematic offerings like Takashi Miike’s Audition. That in itself is an encouraging reason to see this film, and given the standard of the other lower-budget range of indies, it does have potential.

ONE CUT OF THE DEAD / DIRECTOR: SHINICHIROU UEDA / SCREENPLAY: SHINICHIROU UEDA / STARRING: TAKAYUKI HAMATSU, YUZUKI AKIYAMA / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Receiving its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, Brazilian writer-director Dennison Ramalho’s The Nightshifter brings horror fans back to those all too familiar settings of the cemetery and the morgue represented in films like Phantasm and The Beyond, with a dash of more contemporary classics like The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage.

Night shift work, particularly anything like working in a morgue, is probably not going to hold much appeal to mere happy folk like ourselves, but for enterprising morgue worker Stenio, not only is he seeing dead people, but he can also speak them too. The complexity of his condition hasn’t really endeared him to his long-suffering wife Odete, and a local bakery owner soon becomes her focus of release. Coupled with the defiance of his two young children and the fact that his clothes tend to bring home the aftermath of all that blood and cleaning after looking after the cadavers, things aren’t going particularly well. Things begin to get worse when Stenio, suspecting his wife is having an affair, implicates the bakery owner in the death of a local gangster and he and Odete are killed as a result. Before long, the consequences of the killings of innocents are coming back to haunt him tenfold..

The Nightshifter generates a spookiness which fans of Guillermo Del Toro will pick up on from the get-go. It’s the sort of film that you might expect Bruce Campbell to remake, as the screwiness of Stenio’s own paranoia creeps in as the film builds to its chilling climax and we could sense that a more humorous approach to the material would make an equally enjoyable American version.

The make-up and gore effects are effectively rendered and the CGI is more subtly coordinated than in some American releases, but it is the skill of the film-makers and the style of this Brazilian gem that should enable it to find an audience out of the festival and domestic circuit. Some great performances help to heighten the context of the piece, particularly from the two child actors playing Stenio’s children.

THE NIGHTSHIFTER / DIRECTOR: DENNISON RAMALHO / SCREENPLAY: CLAUDIA JOUVIN, DENNISON RAMALHO / STARRING: BIANCA COMPARATO, DANIEL DE OLIVEIRA, CAUA MARTINS / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Although not as wide-ranging in subject and contrast as the other strands of short film showcases in this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, one senses that the creative voices behind the ones on show have tapped into classic traditions and ideas that always provide such an interesting manner of filmic expression. Destiny, fate, time-travel and virtual reality are covered in these works, originating from five different countries.

The sole Canadian entry, Be My Guest, focuses on the misuse of headsets and a desire to get to the heart of honesty in a relationship.

The American contingent of shorts began with Greater Good, in which a woman is visited by two representatives of a time-travel corporation who provide her with a strange conundrum which could affect the dynamic of her family. The next American entry, One Day The Sun Turned Black, is an intriguing analysis of the relationship between a man and a young woman when the sun does exactly what it seemingly does in the title. Exit Strategy focuses on two brothers who meet after a break of four years in a diner. The consequences of their relationship are scrutinised when one of them claims he can alter history, after the two of them go on a local drive and discover that certain things have to remain constant.

The sole United Kingdom entry, They Wait For Us, looks at the efforts of a hospital worker and his determination to help an elderly woman who has been placed in a coma after an episode.

France’s duo of entries began with Spin, the tale of a man living in an apartment block who becomes bemused and confused when he finds his existence called into question, particularly with the attractive female neighbour that holds the key to his future. The final entry, Exhale, focuses on a post-apocalyptic world when everyone seems to be wearing Personal Protective Equipment and having to deal with relationship issues and emotions.

While a few of the shorts are a bit hazy in their execution and some are a little contemporary for what people might classify as science-fiction, the concepts and ideas at the heart of these stories have some style and substance. It is always well worth checking out the short film works at festivals like Fantasia and Frightfest if you get a chance to attend. Sometimes you may discover a real gem that taps into significant voices and ideals that the creative force behind them want to share with the world.

Starburst’s recent coverage of the “video nasties” era will certainly offer some context to this film, which recently screened in a World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. Memories of the spirit of many a Saturday night were brought back for this writer when he read the article, which discussed much of the key films that defined that era of open availability. Subsequently, the enthusiasm and excitement he felt about those days came flooding back during and following this viewing.

This writer is happy to report that, despite one or two obvious flaws, Drew Barnhadt’s Rondo is a delightfully perverse and extreme piece of suspense thriller that has at least three moments that place it in the realm of those immortal classics like Dressed To Kill and Tenebrae particularly that many of that generation grew up watching.

The story concerns a troubled veteran, Paul, suffering the trauma of PTSD after serving overseas. An alcoholic who is pitied by his sister, she sends him to a female therapist who suggests that he look for something to fill the void once he goes cold turkey. Surprisingly, the therapist talks of strange sexual fetishes and desires and offers him a card and a password – the ‘Rondo’ of the title, which has an address.

He heads to the address where he sees two other men sent under similar circumstances. All three are offered a contract and the chance to perform sexual acts on a young woman. The task seems simple enough, but while he is having a smoke break on the balcony outside the room, he witnesses a brutal act being performed within the room upon one of the other men…

Rondo is not by any means a perfectly executed work. However, what it lacks in logistics, it more than makes up for in terms of shock moments. This is actually what carried some of those vintage offerings that we would repeatedly watch over many a Saturday night. Attendees of recent Frightfests will remember the excitement generated pre-screening of two Giallo offerings, Giallo and Tulpa, which promised so much but delivered nothing but mirth. In the case of Dario Argento’s Giallo, the chemistry between Adrien Brody and Emanuelle Seigner was laughed off the screen and Tulpa got it’s official premiere days after the film-makers had completed the film. On the evidence presented here, after those false starts, it is pleasing to have a genuine contender for the crown.

Rondo will certainly be one of interest to the fans of Argento’s filmography and there is some appeal for fans of Peckinpah and Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion in tone and intensity. The setting evokes some memories of Cronenberg’s Shivers, although there isn’t any sign of a sexually-charged parasite, save for the men lured into the hotel room for the acts of sexual consent.

A cult classic in the making.

RONDO / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: DREW BARNHARDT / SCREENPLAY: DERW BARNHARDT / STARRING: KETRICK COPELAND, REGGIE DE MORTON, GRANT BENJAMIN LIEBOWITZ, IVA NORA / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Given Stephen King’s Cujo – which is the tale of a St. Bernard dog that becomes rabid – and the fact that this is an entry in this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, this writer was half-expecting St. Bernard Syndicate to be an excessively bloody story of a group of gangsters who breed killer St. Bernards, who terrorise Little Italy. Cue Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro as a group of underground cops trying to bring down the gang with lots of profanity and Goodfellas-style torture.

OK, well, it’s a thought – and one suspects that Martin Scorsese probably does have a cast-off in his vault along those lines – but this Danish entry is nothing of the kind and will definitely throw people off expecting a film like the one described above.

Rather, St. Bernard Syndicate is a bittersweet tale of two ne’er-do-well individuals, Rasmus and Frederik. Rasmus (Rasmus Bruun) has just been diagnosed with ALS (Muscular Dystrophy), the same condition that affected the late Stephen Hawking, whilst Frederik (Frederik Cilius Jørgensen) is an ambitious but unsuccessful entrepreneur. When they bump into each other at a school reunion, Frederik persuades Rasmus to invest in his latest wild idea of selling St. Bernards to the apparently-thriving Chinese market, against the wishes of his unsupportive father who happens to own one by the name of Dollar.

With Dollar in tow, stolen by Frederick for business and show, their odyssey takes them to Shanghai, where the problems begin with a series of misadventures and misunderstandings that leave them teetering on the brink constantly, but the underdog spirit of both our heroes (and the audience) hopes that good will become of their goal…

De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival has certainly embraced the film this year, given that it has won awards for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. Director Mads Brugger has already shown a knack for this type of material with his previous documentary works Red Chapel and The Ambassador. St. Bernard Syndicate is his debut scripted feature and in terms of manner and style. It is very much in the realm of Borat and The Office, though not as extreme or funny as those examples.

Bruun and Jorgensen, who seem to be playing their namesakes, are excellent and capture the discomfort of people who are out of their league and strangers in a strange land in a classic culture-clash tale of woe. There are some great exteriors of the Shanghai city and there is a real tragic air to the story, given the revelation at the outset that Rasmus has been diagnosed with ALS.

St. Bernard Syndicate is an adequate film for what it is, but it is still a surprise that it emerged as an entry in a festival that seems to deal with more specialist genre offerings, given that it would be more suited to mainstream festivals like Berlin, London and Toronto.

ST. BERNARD SYNDICATE / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: MADS BRÜGGER / SCREENPLAY: LÆRKE SANDERHOFF / STARRING: RASMUS BRUUN, FREDERIK CILIUS JØRGENSEN / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Kurtis David Harder continues to be prolific with a number of projects on the back of his interesting virtual reality thriller Incontrol, which played at last year’s London Frightfest. One of his latest films, which he co-produced, is Knuckleball, a psychological family horror film which has been screened at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

Canadian horror does have a prestigious history, given the legacy of director David Cronenberg. The 1980s VHS generation certainly had its fair share of it, with his trilogy of science-gone-wrong cult hits Shivers (AKA They Came From Within), Rabid, and The Brood. Throughout his career, Cronenberg maintained independence from Hollywood, although he did make The Fly for a major studio (Twentieth Century Fox). Peter Medak’s The Changeling is another well-loved Canadian horror film, with as shocking an opening as you could get and a tour-de-force performance from George C. Scott.

And so to Knuckleball, directed by Michael Peterson and a film that is already an Official Selection at Cinequest, Calgary Underground Film Festival and Dead by Dawn, all in 2018. It’s a dark tale of family trauma and relationships that uses some classic horror motifs and through-lines to subvert expectations.

Henry (Luca Villacis) is left in an isolated farmhouse in the Canadian countryside with grandfather Jacob (Michael Ironside, returning to the Canadian horror arena that made his name in Scanners) by his parents. A family emergency has forced them to leave Henry here, amidst a bad winter storm. Jacob makes his point to his grandson straight on by getting him to perform tasks around the farm, like shovelling manure and fetching wood. However, Henry soon meets screwy neighbour Dixon (Munro Williams), who seems to have more than a passing interest in the young arrival.

Peterson takes his time setting out his stall here, and initially you might think that the movie is going to take a predictable path. Characters seem to be standard for the genre and you will probably think overall it isn’t particularly convincing, but this is where the film’s key strength becomes apparent and you are subsequently wrong-footed into seeing how all this will pan out. Refreshingly, unlike a lot of horror films, characters are not passive bystanders like those wandering stupidities you see in Friday The 13^th. Henry does have a fair amount of intelligence, and plays off both Jacob and Dixon with a sense that something isn’t quite right here.

There is a bit of Home Alone and The Shining about Knuckleball, but those are more visual points of reference than a direct comparison. It is a movie about listening as well as seeing, as vital points and background to the story are revealed gradually, particularly in the final third. This is a slow-burner that will draw you in, with an eerie sense of atmosphere and style coupled with some excellent cinematography by Jon Thomas. One to be applauded for trying something different with conventional horror themes.

KNUCKLEBALL / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: MICHAEL PETERSON / SCREENPLAY: KEVIN COCKLE, MICHAEL PETERSON / STARRING: MICHAEL IRONSIDE, MUNRO CHAMBERS, LUCA VILLACIS / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Isn’t it interesting that there never seems to be a shortage of vampires in the world? Well, fans of Draculas and Twilights past are going to have an absolute ball, as this writer did, watching Sion Sono’s new film Tokyo Vampire Hotel. Before we continue, we must direct your attention to one of his earlier works, Love and Peace, which combined the X-Factor with a subplot involving a turtle that grows to giant size when his owner becomes a star on a talent show and runs amok a la Godzilla. Tap into that, and you will whet your appetite for more of Sono’s work.

Amazingly, this is a theatrical cut-down, which was originally broadcast via Amazon as a nine-part super mini-series. Although you might want to seek out the full series after you see this, rest assured that you won’t miss any key story or character elements here. It may run at two hours and twenty two minutes, but it only felt like half that by the end. This version has played at several film festivals and recently received a July 2018 screening at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

Sono has encompassed all the traditions of the Stoker classic and its’ universal (and Universal!) influence in an epic and operatic tale crossing centuries to modern Japan in the year 2021. Two rival kingdoms, the Draculas and the Colvins, decide to reignite their rivalry through the essence and life-blood of modern girl Manami, celebrating her 22^nd birthday.

The gravity of her situation becomes clear right at the outset during an extreme mass-shooting by a woman out to protect her Reese-like. Before long, the intention is clear, as the backdrop to this story is the Hotel Requiem, where young men and women are enticed into a near Utopian existence. Unfortunately, the very life-blood of a living, breathing hotel has to be satisfied in the shape of a matriarch figure, who needs Manami’s blood to evolve.

Unlike the teen angst of the Rob and Kristen blockbusters, this is firmly entrenched in a gloriously blood-thirsty tale that will not fail to satisfy vampire movie fans. If you want to cross-pollinate a few other classics in the mix, add a touch of Cronenberg’s The Brood, more than a squeeze of From Dusk Til Dawn, and John Woo’s Hard Boiled as well. Violence is the driving visual here, with some spectacular fighting and gun-play, plus well-coordinated physical gore effects echoing Brian Yuzna’s Society and the work of Alexandre Aja. However, these are clear influences that colour the vision without making it feel like a derivative homage to the vampire genre.

Sono knows what his goal is, and audiences are certainly going to get their money’s worth. Add some memorable one liners (listen out for one Manami says to the matriarch who’s bound to the hotel later on in the film!), a little bit of screwy sentiment, and a couple of songs, and it’s mission accomplished.

One last thing – if there was a record for the longest pre-credit sequence, this would win it – it is an astonishing forty (yes, forty) minutes before the title appears here. Whether or not this was a hang-over from the mini-series, we don’t know, but that has to be a record. No ten-minute Bond sequence here! Tokyo Vampire Hotel is one of the best vampire epic of recent years. A must-watch.

TOKYO VAMPIRE HOTEL / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: SION SONO / SCREENPLAY: SION SONO / STARRING: AMI TOMITE, KAHO, SHINNOSUJE MITSUSHIMA / RELEASE DATE: TBC