Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Greta Gerwig, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov
There are three theories about how Ti West made House of the Devil evoke the 1980s so successfully. One, time machine. Two, deal with the horned one. Three, astonishing horror director. Considering what a masterful retro supernatural chiller it is, option two seems reasonable.
This isn’t just an homage to early 80s creeping horror: It’s a reproduction so exquisite that some members of the audience were convinced that they must have rented this on VHS in 1986. West has channeled that Satanic cult scare that Geraldo Rivera whipped up and the whole cinematic genre of unease that it summoned. As West told the audience attending Monday night’s Fantastic Fest screening, there’s a lot more to recreating a decade than “some douchebag flipping a Rubik’s Cube.”
Starring: Dylan Moran, Mark Doherty, Keith Allen, Amy Huberman
One death is an accident. Two are a coincidence. Three and a dead dog, well, that’s just bad DIY. In this coal-black farce, set among the elegant but crumbling Victorian apartments of Dublin, the luck of the Irish is all dreadful. Indolent actor Mark (Doherty) and his neighbor, failed film writer and failed recovering alcoholic Pierce (Moran), are wastrels with no lives. But they quickly become the only characters left alive as a series of avoidable deaths in the ill-repaired house they share claims everyone they would have a motive for killing. Continue reading Review: A Film With Me In It (2009)→
Starring: Talia Zucker, Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe
As Blair Witch is to The Shining and Cloverfield is to Godzilla, so Lake Mungo is to Picnic at Hanging Rock. In that Australian gothic classic, four schoolgirls went into the Outback; only one came back. This time, the four members of the Palmer family go for a swim, but only daughter Alice (Zucker) never makes it back to shore.
What makes a man want to build the world’s biggest lava lamp? From the 40-foot metal stalks of wheat in Williston, N.D., to the bull-sized fiberglass killer bee of Hidalgo, America’s heartland has long been a home to giants. Continue reading Review: World’s Largest (2010)→
A few Texas hearts got broken when it was announced that Whip It, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut set in Austin’s Roller Derby community, was filming around Detroit. But whatever the location, scriptwriter and derby player Shauna Cross said, “It’s a total love letter to Austin” – and to its derby girls.
Austin and its derby scene are as much the film’s stars as Juno‘s Ellen Page. She plays reluctant pageant queen Bliss Cavendar from Bodeen, Texas, who straps on her skates to become Babe Ruthless, the ass-kicking jammer for the Hurl Scouts banked-track Roller Derby team. Before signing on as producer and then director, Barrymore’s derby experience was restricted to a montage/homage sequence in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. She explained, “I knew that the sport had different evolutions of being real and being staged, but I didn’t know about the new revolution of these leagues cropping up across the nation until I met Shauna.”
That would be former Austinite Shauna Cross, aka Maggie Mayhem of the L.A. Derby Dolls and a part of that modern derby revolution. Quick recap: In 2001, a group of Austin women joined together to revamp the lost sport of Roller Derby, a mash-up of speed skating and rugby. After a major internal rift in 2003 (well recorded in Bob Ray’s rink-rash-and-all documentary Hell on Wheels), they split into the banked-track TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls and the flat-track Texas Rollergirls. Both leagues have remained the godmothers of women’s Roller Derby, now at roughly 400 skater-run and skater-owned leagues internationally and counting. Although Whip It concentrates on a semifictionalized version of TXRD, Cross said: “I was really scared about the whole flat-track/banked-track thing. There are more girls that skate flat track, and I hoped that they would be supportive or at least see that it’s still great both ways and not feel left out.”
Martin is a nonentity, a failed radio engineer who dreamed of being a deejay. As played by Healy, he hangs onto a shadow of his dream of being “something” in music. With Holliday’s gregarious Clarence, he’s dispatched by a record firm as a talent scout. At least, that’s what they think they are. Really, they’ve been duped into scamming wannabe musicians. They are “song sharks,” getting hopeful nobodies to hand over cash for a record that will never be released. Continue reading Review: Great World of Sound (2007)→
What’s that old saying about a prophet being despised in his homeland? Until his death in 1994, Bill Hicks was a cultural exile in the United States, a stand-up comedian both cerebral and visceral who poured fiery scorn on corruption and apathy, Reagan Republicans, and corporate whores like Jay Leno. For his effort, he was a cult performer, notoriously censored from The Late Show With David Letterman. But in Great Britain in the early 1990s, when the culturally literate stared in despair at the nation that gave the world the First Gulf War and Carrot Top, he was the best evidence for the defense. Hicks was the angry American whose fury was driven not by greed but by disappointment that things weren’t just better.
Matt Harlock, half of the team behind new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story, explained, “I was one of the guys who was at university in the UK in the late Eighties, early Nineties, who was handed a sweaty and much-coveted bootleg” of Hicks’ work. For co-director/producer Paul Thomas, the interest was much more professional. Harlock explained, “His job for [Welsh TV broadcasters] HTV and the BBC was to find and bring on new comedians, so he came upon [Hicks] that way.”
Everywhere has its myth to scare kids away from the bad places. Along the border, it’s La Lloronanear water. In England, it’s the boggart on the moors. On Staten Island, it’s Cropsey at the abandoned asylum. But this unnerving documentary asks: What if Cropsey is real?
The starting point here is the trial of Andre Rand, charged with the 1987 abduction and murder of 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger on the sleepy island. But just as the community started to connect him to more missing children, and this puny outsider filled the mythical role of Cropsey for the local kids, filmmakers Brancaccio and Zeman aim broader. Their Staten Island isn’t a leafy suburb off Manhattan, but a polluted dumping ground and a secret burial ground for mob corpses.
Bestiality. An act many people can scarcely comprehend how, never mind why, it’s done. But when a man died in 2003 after having sex with a horse, the quiet rural town of Enumclaw, Wash., was confronted with the trans-species taboo. In an elegiac and perturbing exploration of the events, documentary-maker Devor mixes re-enactment and audio interviews with two communities: the zoophiles, who cannot understand why they are shunned, and the families and friends that struggled to understand them.
Starring Sergej Trifunovi´c, Srdjan Todorovi´c, Ana Saki´c
There is a good reason why this is called A Serbian Film: Only the Balkan nation of Serbia could produce this landmark of transgressive cinema. With the nation’s terrible decadelong civil war a constant and unspoken subtext, former porn star Milosh (Todorovi´c) is lured back into the industry by enigmatic producer Vukmir (Trifunovi´c). Short of cash and intrigued by the suggestion of porn as art, he finds himself duped into a hell of depravity that would make Hieronymus Bosch blanch.
Directed byTi West
