Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a rundown of my favorite flicks I saw at Fantastic Fest, the first annual Alamo Drafthouse team-up with the big wigs of the Austin film scene in order to produce a great Stateside Genre festival, along the lines of Sitges, which is going on right now (wish I was there).
We have horror festivals stateside, like Screamfest and Shriekfest and the New York Horror Film Festival, but this is our first big Genre festival in the south. The first year had some minor glitches, but on the whole they played a ton of great stuff. The below reviews are from my favorite flicks of the festival.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DORKS
This is Germany's answer to SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Let me get this out of the way right up front... NIGHT OF THE LIVING DORKS isn't as good as SHAUN OF THE DEAD, just as SHAUN OF THE DEAD isn't as good as EVIL DEAD 2. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DORKS is a great success at making a horror comedy, a genre that is really tough to crack. Most people who attempt it fail miserably... like DEAD AND BREAKFAST for me... didn't work as either a horror movie or a comedy let alone an amalgam of both. But those previous two listed films did and a few others, like BRAINDEAD (aka DEAD ALIVE).
You know what the movie reminded me of the most? It really is the first movie in a long time to capture the spirit and tone of one of my all time favorite '80s movies, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS. The film has its tongue firmly in cheek, but is also full of really likable people in extremely horrific, yet cartoony, circumstances.
The film starts off with a voodoo zombie breaking into a little village cabin. This sequence plays a lot like Peter Jackson's BRAINDEAD with lots of camera movement and zooms. The zombie make-up was great, too. This big black zombie was much creepier looking than Big Daddy from LAND OF THE DEAD. Looked more zombified, too.
The family is huddled together in the corner when a voodoo priestess woman shows up all badass and sets the zombie on fire. It's this zombie's ashes that are stolen from the burial ceremony and put on an online auction site (no shit) and are bought by a group of high school goth kids in Germany.
The core of the film is the friendship between the three leads. These are the titular "dorks." They die in the first reel, but not before getting covered in the ashes of that zombie from the opening of the film, courtesy of the Goth clique and an automobile accident.
The movie is more comedy than horror, sharing probably more in common with MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK than EVIL DEAD as there is very little horror. It actually has pretty standard storylines, like the lead geek's childhood friend is a hottie who totally digs him, but he's got his sights set on the bitchy popular girl... except with zombies.
The film flies and there wasn't one part I didn't like. There's a scene with a stapler and someone's... well, sensitive area, that is brilliant. The hottie goth chick/best friend (Collien Fernandes) is really steaming hot and you just want to smack the lead geek for not falling into her arms in frame one. The gore is cartoony and fun as all hell.
I can't recommend this movie enough if you're lucky enough to be near a festival playing it. As of right now it doesn't have US distribution, but hopefully that'll change as word begins spreading on this flick.
On a side note: the short that played before this flick, FORKLIFT DRIVER KLAUS, was awesome. Imagine a black and white German instructional film about how to operate a forklift in a work environment that goes terribly, terribly wrong. Hilarious.
MALEFIQUE
The short film that played before MALEFIQUE, called DOMOI, however, was complete and utter crap. I like the scope of it, but the story of a warrior returning home, which is a deserted, haunted castle seemed to go on forever and ever and ever and ever. It was the longest short film I've ever seen and it didn't help that visually it was a complete LORD OF THE RINGS rip-off.
However, MALEFIQUE was worth wading through the crappy "short" to get to. This is a French flick that has been around a little bit, but I hadn't seen it. It happens. Sometimes films will play festivals and then just kinda drop off the radar. I heard MALEFIQUE is getting remade, so they'll probably give it THE RING treatment (release it on DVD and limited theatrical around the time the remake comes out).
The flick is set in a jail cell and centers around a white collar crime dude who is in jail, awaiting bail that might never come through. He's in a cell with a transexual transvestite (Clovis Cornillac), a childlike semi-retarded character who eats any and everything he can (including his 6 month year old sister, which is why he's in jail) and an old man who seems kindly enough, but has a darkness hiding just underneath the surface.
This foursome is a sort of dysfunctional family and we come to really care for each of them, so by the time a creepy old Necronomicon-like book is discovered behind a brick of their cell you really don't want them to mess with it. It can't possibly lead to anything good. This book is full of dark magic, written by a previous prisoner who was famous for studying the dark arts. It's his notebook and diary, full of dark spells. The book itself also seems to be alive, protecting itself when it needs to.
This movie more than any other I saw at FANTASTIC FEST had the creepiest imagery. Moving dolls, levitated people being literally crunched into a ball, burnt corpses... all represented. The visual style of the film is very cinematic as well and much credit goes to director Eric Valette and cinematographer Jean-Marc Bouzou. It's a small story told almost completely in one room, but it never feels small and only feels claustrophobic when it wants to. Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier deserve a lot of credit as well for scripting it so well and creating characters that not only hold your interest, but make you pull for them through the horrific moments, not root for them to get offed in creative ways.
My only complaint with the film is that the ending doesn't have much Umph to it. It's a cool ending, but doesn't have a punch. The story builds and builds to a certain point and then the ending plays like more of an aside, not a pay-off.
If you can get your hands on this one, I highly recommend it.
WOLF CREEK
This one has gotten a lot of press as being one of the big festival finds for Dimension (ie the Weinsteins) and has reviews all over the board. Some love it, some hate it. I'm in the former category.
The low-budget flick is set in the deserted outback of Australia and follows a group of young kids as they road trip it from party to party to beach to party to camping area to landmark, etc. There's no horror in the movie until about halfway through, instead you follow this group, two girls and one guy. The lead chick is a brunette that totally stole my heart. She's mega-cute and not in a traditionally beautiful way... I'm sure she's gorgeous regularly, but in the film she wears very little make-up and we see her at most normal. For some reason that made me fall for her right away, which really helped later in the film when I didn't want to see her come into any danger.
These kids end up going to a place in Australia called Wolf Creek, which is a big crater where a huge meteor hit millions of years ago. They check it out, hike, come back to the car and find it's dead. Luckily for them, a backwoods dude drives by and gives them a tow.
Of course this dude isn't as much of a nice guy as he seems.
The villain of the movie is played with psychotic glee by John Jarratt, he of Australian '80s movie Godliness. Tarantino introduced us to the rules of Australian filmmaking at the last QT Fest, including one of my favorite movies of the fest, DARK AGES, a giant killer croc flick (strangely enough director of Wolf Creek Greg McLean's next film is a giant croc movie). He mentioned that the Australians can not make a movie with out a car chase. Well, this is a low budget psychotic killer movie and it has 2 car chases, so I guess the rule is still standard.
Anyway, John Jarratt is the star of this movie without a doubt. He's a bit pudgy, a bit grisly, but full of charm at the beginning... then the charm wears away and you're left with what's underneath. Creepy, vile, cruel, sadistic... This is one bad dude.
The movie's not perfect. They decide to make that pretty brunette I was talking about earlier into one of the stupidest girls in a horror movie history since Jamie Lee kept dropping her knife in HALLOWEEN. She does some incredibly stupid things in the movie (involving dropping weapons, not taking out the killer when she has a chance, stopping to watch a few home movies in a later scene where time is of the essence, etc) and your patience with her is really tested.
But other than that, I love the flick. There's a big switcheroo in the way they pace the film and how they show the eventual surviver and how they got to survive. The movie takes some surprising turns and keeps you on toes. At about the 3/4 mark you realize nothing is to be taken for granted.
I want my John Jarratt movie maniac now. Just saying.
The short that played before the flick was a claymation short called WARD 13 and it also kicked a lot of ass. It's about a dude that's trying to escape a hospital where crazy experiments are happening. There are Lovecraftian monsters, evil doctors and even a wheel chair race. Great stuff. The audience loved it.
Well, there you go. Three great movies. Now I'm gonna go keel over and have me some pleasant... um, I mean unpleasant dreams of John Jarratt tying me up. Good night!
-Quint
