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AICN & Twitch Present International Eye Candy! Johnnie To and Soi Cheang's ACCIDENT! ROBOGEISHA! SUCK! & more!
Yes, this is Todd from Twitch and the time has come once again for our regular trawl through the best and brightest that the world has to offer. We’ve got rock and roll vampires! Hit men tracking serial killers! More robotic geisha! Leatherface on a boat! It’s another edition of International Eye Candy and here we go!
Let’s start with Leatherface, shall we? Regular readers of this space should already be familiar with the REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE – Iceland’s first attempt at blood-and-gore horror – but for the uninitiated, here are the basics. The original Leatherface – Gunnar Hansen – is a native Icelander and he fills a key role here in the story of a group of international tourists being hunted and killed on a whale-watching pleasure cruise by a group of “fishbillies”. Lots of splatter, lots of blood, more than a few dismemberments. An early teaser turned up a while back but the proper trailer has now followed and this one is much more full-blooded than the first.
And now for something completely different, this in the form of the first trailer for Michael Haneke’s THE WHITE RIBBON. Best known for FUNNY GAMES, the Austrian auteur returns here with a period-set thriller all based on repression and retribution and shot in gorgeous black and white. Good? Well, it won the Palme D’Or in Cannes – the biggest prize offered by the biggest fest in the world – so it’s got a point or two in its favor, yeah.
Let’s do another Cannes-winner, shall we? This one is UK flick FISH TANK, drom director Andrea Arnold, which took home the jury prize in Cannes this past year. Though she’s only got two features to her name, Arnold is already considered by many to be one the true greats working today. Her stuff is gritty and intense and FISH TANK should push her out to even higher levels of acclaim. And, like THE WHITE RIBBON, it’s about to get a theatrical release at home so the first proper trailer has just arrived.
We’ll be making a few stops in my home and native land – that’d be Canada – today and our first stop there gives us Winnipeg-based animator Leslie Supnet and her short film FAIR TRADE. How to even begin describing this? It’s like stoner nostalgia, a feedback laced bit of work built around deceptively simple line drawings and a surreal story line about a girl just trying to get rid of all the shit she carries around inside herself. It’s like BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD except high art and actually really emotionally affecting. A friend introduced my to Supnet’s work just recently and she’s become a new favorite ...
From central Canada we jump to turn-of-the-century Hong Kong where we find – finally! – the first real, proper trailer for Teddy Chen’s martial arts picture BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS. Ignore the bad metal guitar soundtrack on this one – it’s ludicrously out of place given the subject matter – and focus on the screen. Everybody who matters is in this one – the cast is anchored by Donnie Yen – they built a massive standing set, the action looks tense. I’ve been wavering back and forth on this one but this trailer gives me renewed hope.
Hungry for a scifi fix? Well, it may come as a surprise but perhaps you should be looking to Switzerland and Ivan Engler’s CARGO. Not a big producer of any sort of film – much less of genre film – Switzerland has been done proud here as Engler looks to have taken a limited budget and built something pretty damn solid out of it. The basic story – the crew of a long haul vessel awake to discover there is something living in the cargo hold – is a little overly familiar but the execution looks to be pretty dead solid.
I may know next to nothing about Bollywood film – there’s no ‘may’ about it, actually – but I know what I like and I love how film makers there will throw absolutely anything in the mix to entertain their audience. And there’s an awful lot stuffed into Boney Kapoor’s WANTED. Flying axes, big explosions, rampant gunplay and – of course- a bit of song and dance. Say it with me now: that’s entertainment! And, no, it’s not a remake of any sort.
At this stage of things fans of crime fiction should need no introduction to Stieg Larsson’s Milennium trilogy of novels. Published posthumously the books have become a huge international sensation with the first two titles – THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE – already available in North American shops and the third coming soon. And they’re also taking the film world by storm with film versions of all three films already commissioned, the first a big hit and the second about to release. The director on THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE also happens to be the brother of the man responsible for the film version of stunning Swedish vampire film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and they definitely share a family gift for smart atmosphere and stylish violence.
From a big budget international sensation to something much smaller but no less impressive, we head no to Ireland for Nick Ryan’s THE GERMAN. Produced independently with an effects budget of zero, Ryan’s film casts ROCK N ROLLA’s Toby Kebbell as a WWII flying ace engaged in a dogfight with a German counterpart. And yes, you read that right. Ryan has made an aerial dogfight movie without spending any money on special effects. And it looks amazing, a huge testament to Ryan’s skills.
I’m actually a little reluctant to post the new theatrical trailer for Jan Henrik Stahlberg’s SHORT CUT TO HOLLYWOOD because the German satirist’s best work – with which this definitely ranks – is not the sort of stuff that really trailerizes well. You’ve got to live with it a bit for it to really sink in, but that said, the man’s brilliant and I can’t just ignore it.
Stahlberg’s latest tracks a middle ages German man obsessed with celebrity, the leader of a horrible boy-pop band, who packs his belongings and re-christens himself John Salinger before taking his band mates to America to find celebrity. It won’t be easy he knows but he’s got a sure fire gimmick: He will publicly dismember himself for his art. Hilarity ensues?
Our second trip to Canada involves a grown man pissing out of the window of a moving car. We’re a sophisticated lot, us Canadians. For the uninitiated, TRAILER PARK BOYS was a huge cult hit here in Canada that traveled some on international cable, albeit in censored form. Shot in moc-doc style, the show ran for seven short seasons, tracking the lives of petty – and incompetent - criminals who living ina trailer park outside of Halifax, they’re goal being to make enough money selling pot to retire by the age of 35. The television series already wrapped up and one unsatisfactory feature film already in the books, the boys are back to end things right – with a new film, subtitled COUNTDOWN TO LIQUOR DAY, to wraps things up in true Trailer Park Boys style.
For something a little classier – though no less culty – may I suggest the brand new trailer for LAND OF THE HEADS, an animated short co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada? It’s stop motion death and dismemberment with a smile; a cheery, classic horror influenced bit of work sure to put a smile on the faces of Jack Skellington and co.
What’s that? All this EXPENDABLES madness has got you caught up in a fit of nostalgia for a quality – albeit stupid – 80’s style action film? Then may I suggest UK effort THE TOURNAMENT to scratch that particular itch. Set in a town hosting a to-the-death tournament between the world’s greatest assassins the film stars Robert Carlyle as a washed-out priest caught up in the middle of things while Ving Rhames, Kelly Hu and martial artist Scott Adkins do their very best to kill each other and a whole lot of other people. A long and very detailed trailer for this one appeared briefly this week before being yanked back and replaced by a much shorter – but still very fun – teaser. Be warned, though: Trying to make logical sense of the premise will cause your brain to explode.
If you’re at all a fan of international horror film then you probably don’t need me to tell you that all the best stuff in Asia has been coming out of Thailand in recent years. And pretty much all the best Thai horror directors work for one production house: GMM Tai Hub. They made SHUTTER, ALONE, DORM, BODY #19 and more. And now the directors of all of those films are contributing to PHOBIA 2, the second installment of a horror anthology project. The first PHOBIA was great fun and loaded up with shocks and this looks to be more of the same. A fully English friendly version of the trailer has just arrived and it looks absolutely fantastic.
We’ve got some fans of Johnnie To out there? How about Soi Cheang, director of the gritty crime action flick DOG BITE DOG? How would you feel about the two of them working together? Because that’s what they’re doing with ACCIDENT, the Soi Cheang directed, Johnnie To produced crime thriller. The story follows a hitman who stages his kills as elaborate accidents, the film has just been announced to debut at the big festivals in Venice and Toronto, and the trailer looks like vintage Johnnie To / Milkyway Image stuff.
Because a single trailer just couldn’t contain all the madness of Noboru (MACHINE GIRL) Iguchi’s ROBOGEISHA we’ve got another one! And a music video! Ass swords! Armpit swords! Bleeding buildings! Geisha tanks! Mouth saws! Nipple acid! It’s all in there!
For my final foray into Canada we look to SUCK, Rob Stefaniuk’s rock and roll vampire comedy with a ludicrous cast of guest stars. How ludicrous? How about Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Carol Pope, Henry Rollins and Moby? Not crazy enough? How about we take the militant vegan in that group - that’d be Moby – and make him the lead singer of a punk band that gets pelted with raw meat at every live show? And also we throw in Dave Foley and Malcolm McDowell.
And finally, we end back in Thailand with what is now the third collaboration between film makers Wisit Sasanatieng (TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER) and Kongkiat Komesiri (ART OF THE DEVIL 2). The film is titled SLICE, Komesiri directs from a script by Sasanatieng. The story? The police are unable to bring in a serial killer preying upon the city – he has a fondness for genital mutilation – and so, in desperation, they turn to a former hitman turned informant to do the job for them. With the talent involved expect this one to be smart, gory and impeccably well made.
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