Category Archives: Fantastic Fest

Review: Tetsuo, the Iron Man (2010)

You never forget your first Tetsuo. Director Shinya Tsukamoto‘s 1989 industrial classic The Iron Man was a cold, hard slap across the face of film and music. Nearly two decades after the sequel, Body Hammer, he returns to his searing indictment of modernity and destructive capitalism.

The tetsuo – the iron man whose body is in rebellion as the organic transforms into metal – is different in every film. Photographer-turned-actor Eric Bossick takes the lead this time as Anthony, an American salaryman and familyman living in Tokyo with his Japanese wife and their child.

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Review: The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2010)

Part of the remit of Fantastic Fest is to shock: And it’s hard to imagine that anything this year will push more buttons than Serbia’s The Life and Death of A Porno Gang.

Porno Gang treads very similar ground to A Serbian Film, the extreme shocker that stretched even the hardest of genre fans to breaking point at this year’s SXSW. Both deal with the traumatic melding of sex and death in the post-civil war Balkans, as a bunch of sexual libertines get themselves caught up in the strange and fetid world of snuff cinema. That said, Porno Gang is far less gruesome than Serbian Film. That also being said, that’s rather like describing a blast furnace as cooler than the surface of the sun.

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Review: Summer Wars (2010)

summerwars The funny thing about modern technology is that it’s everywhere: Even in rural Japan, it seems like everyone has email, two blogs and a Tumblr account. The remarkable Summer Wars may be one of the first movies to really approach that ubiquity, and not come off as bad cyberpunk.

Along with nitro-speedster Redline, Summer Wars is the second film from Madhouse Studios at FF 2010, but it’s a virtual world removed. Categorizing it is a near-impossibility: Sort of slice-of-life, sort of techno thriller, sort of action flick, not solely anything.

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Review: Nevermore (2010)

nevermoreTechnically, Fantastic Fest ended on Thursday: But the final curtain did not fall until Saturday and the last Austin performance of Nevermore, horror icon Jeffrey Combs‘ one-man stage show about the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Set in 1848, it presents a pivotal moment in Poe’s life: A year after the death of his wife and muse Virgina, the West Point graduate-turned-poet and author was engaged to essayist Sarah Helen Whitman and seemingly turning a corner in his career and personal life. But what looms over the performance is the dark knowledge for the audience that Poe himself will be dead within two years.

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Interview: Simon Barrett

There aren’t many famous scriptwriters in the horror community, but Simon Barrett is undoubtedly one. Starting with the (in)famous Frankenfish, Barrett’s character-centric approach to the genre (especially with his long-time collaborator Adam Wingard) have become critical faves, with You’re Next and The Guest making many best-of and end-of-year lists. The first time I interviewed him for the Austin Chronicle was at Fantastic Fest in  2010, when he had just won the best script award  for his radical new take on the serial killer genre, A Horrible Way to Die. The impromptu interview took place in the hallway at the Alamo South Lamar.

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Richard Whittaker: It’s a pretty unique take on serial killers: Where did the story come from?

Simon Barrett: We got a couple of false starts of trying get projects financed that [Adam] would direct and I would write and produce, and he was getting kinda frustrated. He’d say, ‘Serial killer movies always get made,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t want to write a serial killer movie.’ I don’t like most of them, and between Se7en and Zodiac, David Fincher‘s said all there is to say on that subject. They’re all either procedurals or ‘inside the mind of a psychopath,’ which I don’t enjoy and I don’t think it’s possible to do effectively.

But he started talking about Ted Bundy, and how he escaped from prison and was thought to be hunting for his ex-girlfriend. That got me thinking about something that excited me, which is the idea of addictive love, and that serial killers are real people with parents and ex-girlfriends. If your kid grows up to be a serial killer, how do you trust a decision you’re going to make ever again? And if your ex-boyfriend turns out to be a serial killer, what’s it going to be like if you ever start dating again? Can you trust another human being?

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Review: Redline (2010)

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Looking to start your engines? Kick it into gear with Redline, the deranged turbocharged anime from Madhouse Studio. If Jack Kirby had been the artistic director for F-Zero GX, you’d get this a nitro-boosted sci-fi speedster that proves that hand-drawn animation can still burn off CGI.

The cursory plot sets a weird cadre of drivers and their souped-up machines against each other in the ultimate intergalactic road race. The only thing cooler than rockabilly antihero JP (voiced by Tadanobu Asano) is his gravity-defying hairdo. But he’s caught between on-track rival/unrequited love Sonoshee (Yū Aoi), killer robot warlords, and gangster race fixers: Can even his turbo-charged hotrod save him now? Continue reading Review: Redline (2010)