Hey folks, Harry here - today's Fantastic Fest went by very oddly for me. I was mainly occupied with APOCALYPTO - was able to catch a little bit of SHINOBI, but frankly - Festival demands kept drawing me out of the screening to take care of things. So I can't really write about SHINOBI - it looked like THE COVENANT with so-called magic ninjas. Only beautiful and maybe great - I'll try to see it on a less hectic day. Here's Darla with her very full day of filmgoing!
Darla Hood back from day three of Fantastic Fest with a bit of a mixed bag of reviews from the day. I ended up catching four films: FROSTBITE, A QUIET LOVE, SEVERANCE, and APOCALYPTO. So let's get to it. FROSTBITE First up was FROSTBITE. I was so looking forward to this film. I love the comedy-horror genre and kinda have a fondness for the vampire legend, so I just knew that this would be right up my alley. Yeah, well, can't win 'em all. The story itself could have been interesting. Set in Finland during the polar night (little to no sun), a vampire tries to create the ultimate vampiric virus that will be spreadable via pills containing infected blood. Polar night + easily spreadable ultimate vampiric virus = good idea. However, this film misses the mark so amazingly well that I was pissed off by the waste of the idea. The acting is poor. The writing is poor. The liberties they take with the vampire legend are too far fetching. Yes, I know that vampires are not real, but there are general agreements that are made when one writes vampires into stories. One leap, that I would have been willing to follow had the follow through been any good, is the fact that the virus can be spreadable via pills. But the way the explanation is treated is quite secondary to the "wild college party" the filmmakers found more important. The editing of this film also suffered. At certain points, there are several stories going on at once...and they feel like they're all going on at once the way that the editing shifts so quickly between the characters. It seemed as if they were hell bent on getting away from any interesting action that was about to happen by shifting to a different story line just as the action was about to occur. This film frustrated me. It felt like an average movie that one might catch on television, but without all of the interesting commercials. Heh. After getting angry at the first film of the day, I was really wanting to choose an excellent second film or panel to make me feel better. I had been planning on going to the panel that was to be this afternoon, but someone convinced me to see a film instead. A QUIET LOVE So we saw A QUIET LOVE. And I got even more pissed off. This film is startlingly bad, and I have no idea why it is at this festival because there are no real fantastical elements to it. I guess if you count crazy "foreshadowy" dreams true fantasy, then that's all it had. But even so, there were only one or two in the entire film. Or maybe it was the dead father's hearing aid that the son wore for some reason. Or perhaps it's just the idea of a loser, overweight guy getting a pretty girl? It was odd, odd, odd. Having a bad story is one thing, but twice they also included the worst English sung songs that I have ever heard. The songs were ridiculous and out of place and made me realize even more how much I was disliking the movie. I know I haven't really explained this film to you all, but I'm not even sure if I could. It feels so long that, by the end, I was sure that things that happened at the beginning were from a movie I saw yesterday. Seriously. To sum this up...at one point near the end, one character is taking another into a wooded area to show him something. The male says, "What is this all about?" Then my husband leaned over to me and said, "Really!" Alright, so there were two strikes. I wanted to punch a wall after A QUIET LOVE, so I needed a sure thing. We were going to see one movie that's gotten mixed reviews from a previous audience, but I decided I couldn't risk that. SEVERANCE We opted for SEVERANCE instead. Holy shit am I ever happy we did! It's about a group of employees from a UK defense contractor, Palisade, out in the woods on a team building weekend. When their bus driver can't make it down the (apparently) only road he's willing to drive down to the lodge, he leaves them and their bags in the middle of the dirt road to find their own way to the cabin. Map in hand, they head off in search of the only lodge they know of in those woods. They do stumble upon a lodge of sorts, but it's definitely not the five star quality they were expecting. And when a man appears outside of one of the women's windows, they decide that it might be best to find a way out of there. However, while trying to get back to their city hotel, someone begins killing off the employees one by one. Sure this sounds serious the way I've described it, but I laughed through the entire film. Think SHAUN OF THE DEAD style of horror. Hell, even when someone gets decapitated we were all laughing our asses off. This is really a total package kind of film. The acting is great. The writing is fabulous. The bad guys are scary. And the humor is hilarious. It even has chicks with guns. Search it out when it gets its stateside release in March. And if you're in the UK and haven't seen it, what the hell are you waiting for? If dark comedy/horror is for you, you won't be disappointed. APOCALYPTO Of course the next film of the night was the super secret, super exciting AICN screening. The rumor mill had been buzzing all day about what it might be, and one of the front-runners was APOCALYPTO...and that it was. This is basically a warrior's tale, one that would be told around Mayan campfires. It's a man beating all odds of survival to get back to his wife and children after he's been kidnapped along with the rest of the adults in his village. But he is the one who still has a true drive to return, as he hid his family when the village was overtaken. The film is stunningly gorgeous, even in its unfinished state. In December it should be a true spectacle to behold. And even though no one in the film had any acting experience, they were all amazing. By that I seriously mean that each and every actor was wonderful. And for a complete non-actor to carry this story is saying something. I was quite impressed. One problem I had with the film was that the main character, Jaguar Paw, does nothing to forward his story along until the third act. He survives on sheer luck and coincidence, and that kinda drives me nuts. Now, when he does start to take control it's amazing, but waiting for the end of the film for that to happen gets a bit much for me. Another issue I had with the film is the quotation at the beginning which says something to the effect that a civilization cannot be destroyed from the outside until it starts to destroy itself from within. This had absolutely NOTHING to do with Jaguar Paw's story. To me it just feels like it's saying that the people in the ships (arriving at the end of the film) had nothing to do with the downfall of the Mayan Empire. It was all the Mayans' fault for getting "too big for their britches." While I do feel that there is indeed merit to the quotation, I don't think it was appropriate for this tale. And then when it's factored in that "apocalypto" means "a new beginning" in Greek, I kinda get an uneasy feeling. I'm just not sure that we can point the finger at the Mayan's for being responsible for their complete downfall, especially since there have been other nations who have been "knocked down to size" and survived their enormous egos. It's a touchy subject. But then Mel said he really wanted to mostly entertain. I think people will be entertained by this, so he succeeded there. To be honest, all I could think during most of the Q&A was that Martin Riggs was sitting right there in front of me. Even the way he tried to "entertain" the crowd by being goofy screamed Riggs to me. And that made ME happy enough. Go see APOCALYPTO in December when it hits theaters. It is indeed a beautiful piece of entertainment. And I'll be hoping that at least new actor Rudy Youngblood gets an Oscar nod. It should be interesting.
