Directed by Lee Demarbre
Starring: David Hess, Sasha Grey
Somewhere on his car, Lee Demarbre probably has a sticker that says “WWHGLD” – What would Herschell Gordon Lewis Do?
The man behind zero-budget schlocker Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter has placed the man that turned a cow tongue into a star up on a pedestal in one of Fantastic Fest’s quirkier outings (and that’s saying something).
Directed by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman
Everywhere has its myth to scare kids away from the bad places. Along the border, it’s La Llorona near 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.
Directed by Thanakorn Pongsuwan
Starring: Preeti Barameeanat
Extreme basketball doesn’t sound like the basis of a great action movie. But just for a moment, imagine Yao Ming going for three points when he’s taking an elbow slash to the face.
Fireball may be a bybrid martial arts/sports movie, but this is no Shaolin Soccer. Instead, it’s a gritty and stunt-heavy actioneer set in the wild world of fireball, a no-holds-barred street basketball game run by the local mob bosses. Forget dribbling fouls: This is five-on-five meets muay thai, and if players die in the game, that’s just fewer team members to split the winnings.
Continue reading Review: Fireball (2009)
Directed by Ernesto Diaz Espinoza
Starring: Marko Zaror
For anyone that yearns for the days when heroes were cool and lantern-jawed, heroines wore cocktail dresses, and every punch sounded like a baseball bat smacking beef, fear not. Mandrill is here to kick some ass and wear a big fat tie while he’s doing it.
Mandrill (Zaror) is a hit man, the best in the business in all of Chile: But he’s also a man on a mission, seeking the one-eyed killer that slew his parents. Forget any Fugitive chest-beating: Inspired by his lascivious uncle Cheno and the cheesy Johnny Colt detective movies of his youth, he’s become a red-blooded pastiche of unflinching masculinity.
Directed by Esther Gronenborn
Starring: Benno Fürmann, Henry Strange, Alexandra Maria Lara
Ah, the countryside, so serene and peaceful. Yeah, right, unless it’s the remote Bavarian village of Kaifeck. Like Tom Waits sang, there’s always some killing you gotta do around the farm.
Photographer Marc Barenberg (Fürmann) and his son Tyll (Strange) are on a tour of the Bavarian hinterlands. They’re looking for the last traces of rural culture and folklore, and they find that in spades in the mist-shrouded Kaifeck. There they still celebrate the old ways, like the annual Epiphany festival, where the locals dress as wild spirits or percheta to chase away the devil.
Continue reading Review: Kaifeck Murders (2009)
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
Part of the appeal of Japanese cinema to the occidental audience is that it is a little more likely to catch a viewer jaded by Western conventions off guard. And then there’s House.
The last film to see the inside of a US cinema that made this little sense was probably Transformers 2. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 oddity has previously never escaped Japan, and there are probably good reasons for that: Not least that it’s completely insane, borderline incoherent, and shot with so much visual panache and mid-70s excess that it comes off like Ringu on a Pixy Stix-fueled hug-a-thon.
It’s in many ways a fairly conventional Japanese supernatural horror film. Seven schoolgirls travel to visit an infirm old aunt and start getting picked off, one-by-one, by the occult forces that lurk in her home. But Obayashi abandons any pretense of horror, instead shooting in a neon palate and day-glo mindset that may have inspired such more recent oddities as Happiness of the Katakuris or Big Man Japan.
In September 2015, I sat down with writer-director S. Craig Zahler in the bar at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas. His debut feature, horror-tinged Western Bone Tomahawk, was scheduled to play as the closing film at Fantastic Fest that night. We talked about the influences of the film, his approach to shooting its more gruesome moment, and his refusal to compromise on making the film the way he wanted to make it (parts of this interview have previously appeared in the Austin Chronicle).
Richard Whittaker: Was there ever a point where you thought, “I’ll do the soundtrack as well,” because you did everything else on this?
S. Craig Zahler: Well, I did! I did it with a friend of mine, Jeff Herriot. He and I have an epic metal, slightly doom metal band together named Realmbuilder. We’ve been working together forever, and he’s a music PhD, and I knew he knew all the orchestral stuff, and I said, well, I can come up with some melodies, and he can orchestrate it, and we worked on it, and he came up with some melodies and I orchestrated some stuff.
I don’t want to give away any surprises in the piece, but there are certain things connected to the troglodytes that came from me knowing, as I was writing it, there was going to be very little music. I wanted it to be very, very natural , and if it’s not going to be emotional for you, I don’t want to tell you it’s emotional with a bunch of music to pout frosting on it. If it doesn’t work for you, it’d doesn’t work for you, and that’s OK.
Continue reading Interview: S. Craig Zahler on Bone Tomahawk