Father Geek here with a report on Spain's NEWEST horror/terror fest... the MUESTRA DE CINE FANTASTICO Y DE TERROR... Taxin offers up a report on the Festival and some cool reviews of a group of gory genre flicks...
On April 29th and 30th a new spanish fantasy film festival, the 1st Muestra De Cine Fantastico Y De Terror was born in Madrid, organized by Adrian Guerra and Calle 13 (Spains very own Sci-Fi Channel). I visited this inaugural event in Spain's sleepless, party hard capital and can report back that it will now become an annual event, well worth a visit for any thrill seeking film fan.
The weekend marathon opened with Tobe Hooper's remake of THE TOOLBOX MURDERS. I had a vague recollection of the original 80's nasty and given the fact that Hooper has not directed for a while, I feared the worst. But how wrong I was. TOOLBOX is an impressive return to form by the genius who brought us the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. I can't remember the last time I jumped watching a horror film and with TOOLBOX it happened several times. You probably already know the plot, so I won't go into detail, but what I will tell you is why I liked this film so much.
First is the faded Hollywood setting, a Silverlake apartment block (The Lusman) that accommodates an eclectic range of Holly weird eccentrics. It's in a permanent state of disrepair with various areas blocked off for refurbishment, giving plenty of opportunity for the odd hammer or screwdriver to be left around. Add to this the architects tragic history, which led to the building being constructed with a series of hidden rooms and corridors, and you soon find yourself in the sort of labyrinth that inhabits many a Dario Argento film, if not, your own nightmares.
Angela Bettis (May) plays Nell, the young wife who has to make the Lusman her home whilst her husband works, and like her namesake from Robert Wise' THE HAUNTING, she is slowly driven paranoid by the building and its occupants. Given more time, her psychological decline could have had a similar impact to that of Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY, but TOOLBOX is a different type of horror film, greedily intent on taking its audience on a nostalgic fun house ride through everything that was cool about 70s/80s horror.
The violence is brutal and the sense of dread evoked by the first claw hammer killing reminiscent of that first, infamous sledgehammer attack in TEXAS, as is the discovery of human teeth hidden in the wall of Nell's apartment and the revelation that the killer is a veritable Leatherface cum phantom of the opera who traps Nell in a room full of rotting cadavers with a huge circular saw. Suspense and chase sequences are on a palpitating par with the best of the FRIDAY 13TH and HALLOWEEN franchise, with nods to both Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers in Toolbox's coffin birth backstory, tendency for jumping through windows when you most expect it, and apparent indestructibility. Plot is a Ten Little Indians whodunit with an equation of symbols reminiscent of Vimcenzo Natali's CUBE which leads to a grotesque unmasking.
Gripped to the edge of their seats, hearts racing from numerous thrills and spills, the Madridians lapped up TOOLBOX. So much so that its Spanish distributor has apparently delayed plans for the straight to DVD release in order to make room for a theatrical run. My advice would be to forget Mark Nispel's music video/jeans commercial re-make of TEXAS and go see Tobe Hooper's remake of TOOLBOX instead - unlike Nispell, Hooper is one of the few directors working in Hollywood today that truly knows how to make the horror genre tick.
Another director with an impressive command of the genre is Julian Richards, who was in Madrid to present his deeply subversive THE LAST HORROR MOVIE.
The poster in the festival catalogue suggested a predictable teen slasher and after the first few minutes, which involves a waitress being stalked by an escaped killer in a roadside diner, I was ready to duck out....then suddenly the picture breaks up into tv white noise and up pops Max Parry, a 'real life' serial killer who has recorded over THE LAST HORROR MOVIE with his own video diary snuff film. Why? Because he wants us, his captive audience, to understand what it is to be a serial killer and test our complicity with viewing violence as entertainment.
Could it be that we share more similarities with him than we would like to think? And could it be that Richards was looking for a unique way to attack 90's horror whilst deconstructing the psycho-killer film?
Max is no repressed social outcast like HENRY in PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, nor is he an irreverent cavalier like Ben in MAN BITES DOG. No, the truly unsettling thing about Max is his normality and the fact that he has friends and family who have absolutely no idea what he is capable of doing. Kevin Howarth (who plays Max Parry) is the spit of Wilem Defoe and uses charm, humor and intelligence to command our attention throughout. Each scene is shot from beginning to end, without cuts, giving a strong sense of actuality and voyeurism, which makes the numerous killing scenes so much more disturbing. On some occasions the murders are explicit but in others Richards hides the violence by having the camera fall over or pan away, knowing that the sound effects will replace the missing images, leaving our imaginations to do the rest. On other occasions Richards plays with our expectations by focusing on a person who we think will be the next victim, but instead they turn out to be a friend or member of his family that Max has no intention of killing.
Another interesting ingredient is Max's relationship with his assistant (Mark Stevenson) who follows Max around recording his atrocities with a video camera. When invited from behind the camera to join in the killings, the assistant backs out, unable to deal with the reality of the situation. This harks back to Michael Haneke's BENNY'S VIDEO and FUNNY GAMES in which the line between fictional violence and real violence has become blurred in the minds of the perpetrators.
Finally, there's a twist at the end of THE LAST HORROR MOVIE that I didn't see coming and which will make an enormous impact when the film is released for home consumption. I don't want to get into this here, as it will spoil your experience, but if you do watch LAST HORROR on video or DVD, just make sure you have a good home security system.
The first night of Madrid's first fantastic marathon ended with Peter and Michael Speirig's UNDEAD, an Australian zombie romp made in celebration of Peter Jackson's BRAINDEAD and Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD. Unfortunately I fell asleep, so I can't review it, but the impression left by the first reel was that of an ultra low budget gore/fx movie, amatuerishly directed and probably best suited for a drunken frat night in front of the tv.
Day two of the Muestro began with DEAD END, a supernatural road movie which has the feel of a TWILIGHT ZONE episode with a SIXTH SENSE style twist at the end. A family are driving through a forest that never seems to end and their efforts to find their way out and the ensuing panic that results when they realise they are going around in circles quickly turns them against each other. Although the acting is pretty good, the cast have a B movie feel about them and the darkly comic tone suggests that the film should not be taken seriously.
Next on the menu was the two and half hour asian sword fighting saga AZUMI starring the gorgeous Aya Ueto as an assassin raised to kill renegade Shoguns in feudal Japan, and not since Sergio Leone's spaghetti western trilogy have I had so much fun watching the good guys kill the bad guys, or in Azumi's case the good girl kill millions of bad guys. The plots runs like NIKITA meets SHOGUN ASSASSIN and focuses on Azumi's struggle to come to terms with the ethics of her cast; that of a born assassin. At one stage she decides to become an everyday girl until she is forced to return to the way of sword when her friend is raped by a bandit. The final denouement when she takes on an army of bandits, ninjas and samurai led by a camp homicidal maniac who also happens to be a master swordsmen has to be seen to be believed.
The appropriately titled DEAD AND BREAKFAST was the closing film of the Muestro and writer/director Matthew Leutwyler and actor Erik Palladino were in Madrid to introduce the film after travelling from DEAD BY DAWN (another horror marathon in Edinburgh). Through bleary eyes I watched a group of friends turn up at a mid west B&B where the local population have turned into country and western loving, line dancing zombies in a living dead spoof that could be the US answer to SHAUN OF THE DEAD. I say could be, because I had an attack of the zzz's again towards the latter half of the film, so missed some important bits. What I do remember is a chainsaw and lots of blood followed by chocolate and churros in the lobby, which is apparently a Spanish tradition before going home to bed.
That's all for now...
TAXIN
