MJ's Yakulis shares what she watched at FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL
by Allison Yakulis, Staff Writer
Check out her thoughts and add some of new movies to your watch list.
STRAWBERRY MANSION is a recommendation without reservation
by Hunter Bush Podcast Czar & Staff Writer
The story that unfolds feels like Philip K. Dick by way of The Princess Bride, combining surrealistic interpretations of fairytale-adjacent imagery…
Fantasia 2021: Festival Preview
by Hunter Bush and Allison Yakulis, Staff Writers
This year Fantasia is adopting a blended strategy, with most of its films available for screening virtually as well as providing in-person screenings to Quebecois cinephiles and visiting film buffs.
Alone
Written by Mattias Olson
Directed by John Hyams
Starring Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca and Anthony Heald
Running time: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Unrated-contains violence and language
by Audrey Callerstrom
In 2020, there are multiple releases under the same title, Alone. Perhaps most famously is the survivalist show on History Channel, but there are also three horror movies: one is a thriller about a secluded writer, another is about a zombie outbreak. The third one is this one, a thriller about a woman, Jessica (Jules Willcox, Bloodline), who makes an abrupt move away from home with a small U-haul trailer in tow. And she does it… By herself. Alone.
Read MoreThe Five Rules of Success
Written and directed by Orson Oblowitz
Starring Santiago Segura, Jon Sklaroff, Isidora Goreshter, Jonathan Howard and Roger Guenveur Smith
Running time: 1 hour and 23 minutes
Unrated-contains strobing lights, violence, sex, nudity, language and depictions of rape
by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy
The synopsis of this one had me kinda interested, but then my schedule was getting jammed up and I was gonna pass...until I saw that this was written and directed by Orson Oblowitz. He’d written and directed The Queen of Hollywood Blvd a couple years back, which I enjoyed, and I covered it in my wrap up for the Philadelphia Unnamed Film Fest here. It had a good look and an interesting concept. So, I figured I should probably check this one out too.
Read MoreMinor Premise
Directed by Eric Schultz
Written by Eric Schultz, Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey
Starring Sathya Sridharan, Paton Ashbrook and Dana Ashbrook
Running time: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Unrated- contains violence and language
by Audrey Callerstrom
Minor Premise is a calculated, cerebral sci-fi drama that continues to be engaging thanks to a nuanced performance from its lead, Sathya Sridharan. Sridharan plays Ethan Kochar, a reclusive, alcoholic scientist who has been edged out of the research work on cognition and memory that he did with his late father, Paul (played in flashbacks by Nikolas Kontomanolis). Due to his unreliable and unpredictable behavior, Ethan’s work has since been taken over by his ex, Alli (Paton Ashbrook) and his late father’s colleague, Malcolm (Dana Ashbrook). I never doubted Sridharan as Kochar, or was ever taken out of the moment, even when he talks about the science behind capturing and altering memory. He makes it look effortless.
Read MoreThe Oak Room
Written by Peter Genoway
Directed by Cody Calahan
Starring RJ Mitte, Peter Outerbridge and Ari Millen
Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Unrated-contains salty language, violence both explicit and implied and emotionally upsetting formative childhood recollections
by Hunter Bush
There’s a lot happening in the margins of Cody Calahan’s nested-narrative thriller The Oak Room. For a film with a story tucked inside a story inside a story, a lot goes unstated but while some details never quite coalesce, enough becomes clear for us to infer the shape of things. Adapted by Peter Genoway from his own stage play, on its face The Oak Room is the story of two men in a bar talking about two other men in a different bar, but what it’s really talking about is the power and nature of stories.
Read MoreHentai Kamen
Hentai Kamen: The Forbidden Hero (2013)
Hentai Kamen 2: The Abnormal Crisis (2016)
Written and Directed by Yûichi Fukuda
Based on the manga by Keishû Andô
Starring Ryôhei Suzuki, Fumika Shimizu and Tsuyoshi Muro
Running times: 1 hour and 46 minutes (HK) and 1 hour and 59 minutes (HK2)
Unrated- contain Cartoon Violence, Repeated Instances of Teabagging, Panties as a Plot Device, Light Kinkshaming and Near-Constant Use of the Word Pervert As Both a Positive and a Negative
by Hunter Bush
I requested the screeners for both Hentai Kamen films completely accepting of the potential for there to be nothing about them worth writing about. And then the trailer for the new Batman dropped. Now gang, I’m not gonna crap all over the trailer for The Batman, though I am not wildly enthused by it for a variety of reasons because it isn’t The Batman’s fault - and in fact, what I have *heard* about the film is much more enticing than what I’ve now *seen* of it - it’s almost all superhero films. Even the Marvel movies - unarguably more colorful, fun, and just plain lively than most of DC’s output - have a tendency to get high on their own supply to a degree that I started to get seriously fatigued leading up to that final Avengers. A fatigue that persists, but has grown to encompass most superhero films.
Read MoreA Mermaid in Paris (Une sirène à Paris)
Written by Mathias Malzieu and Stéphane Landowski
Directed by Mathias Malzieu
Starring Nicolas Duvauchelle, Marilyn Lima and Romane Bohringer
Language: French
Running time: 1 hour and 42 minutes
Unrated-contains mild smoking and drinking and some brief violence
by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport
“What if something extraordinary happened but you couldn’t tell no one.”
It is not everyday after punching out from a long day at work that someone finds an injured mermaid washed ashore in need of assistance. In Mathias Malzieu’s fantastical narrative feature debut, A Mermaid In Paris, Gaspard (Nicolas Duvauchelle) a quirky cocktail lounge crooner finds himself in this exact phenomenal predicament.
Read MoreLabyrinth of Cinema
Written and directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi
Starring Tadanobu Asano, Takuro Atsuki, Yoshihiko Hosoda and Takahito Hosoyamada
Language: Japanese
Running time: 2 hours and 59 minutes
Unrated-contains some love scenes and suggested nudity and some war scenes with some light violence
by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy
I’ll admit my ignorance going into this one. I was pouring over the big ole list of films being offered at Fantasia International Film Fest this year and something about this one just called out to me. The brief synopsis that it was the history of Japanese wars as told through the movies had me intrigued. Seeing that it was three hours long had me a bit concerned, but a super fast IMDb check told me that Nobuhiko Ôbayashi had been making films for 60 years
Read MoreBleed with Me
Written and directed by Amelia Moses
Starring Lee Marshall, Lauren Beatty and Aris Tyros
Running time: 1 hour and 19 minutes
MPAA rating: R for violence, sexual situations
by Audrey Callerstrom
Early on in Bleed With Me, Rowan (Lee Marshall, who also produced) cracks a smile. Looking at her made me think of the moments in Carrie when Tommy is nice to Carrie and she smiles. Marshall bears a striking resemblance to Sissy Spacek. As Rowan, Marshall is impressionable, malleable, a loner. A lost, gentle soul in need of care. Rowan is surprised, but pleased, to be invited to a cabin weekend in the dead of winter with her co-worker Emily (Lauren Beatty) and Emily’s boyfriend Brandon (Aris Tyros). Marshall’s performance is the stand out of the film, but it can’t save a lazy script, simple dialogue and wooden acting from Marshall’s counterpart, Beatty.
Read MoreYou Cannot Kill David Arquette
Directed by David Darg and Price James
Featuring Courtney Cox, Lotsa Arquettes and Wrestlers
Running time: 1 hour and 31 Minutes
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some bloody images and nudity
by Ian Hrabe
There were few better times to be a wrestling fan than the late 90s. From 1996 to 2001, WWF and WCW were locked in a ratings battle to determine brand supremacy. Dubbed the Monday Night Wars, every Monday the two promotions would try to put on the more entertaining programming, and fans reaped the benefits of two wild and crazy (and at times deeply problematic) wrestling shows.
Read MoreKriya
Written and directed by Sidharth Srinivasan
Starring Avantika Akerkar, Noble Luke and Sudhanva Deshpande
Running time: 1 hour and 36 minutes
Currently unrated but depicts funerary rites, cannibalism and a healthy dose of male and female nudity
Language: English and Hindi (about 50/50)
by Allison Yakulis
You’re out at a club, and you meet someone very hot who makes out with you in a parking lot and appears very much a - as the kids say - “certified freak seven days a week”. But she insists you’ll have to go back to her place first. And when you get there her mom is home, her sister is home, there’s a priest they’ve invited over. Oh, and her dad is chained up, muzzled and clearly dying right in front of you of some mysterious long term illness.
Read MoreTime of Moulting
Written and directed by Sabrina Mertens
Starring Zelda Espenschied, Miriam Schiweck, Freya Kreutzkam and Bernd Wolf
Language: German
Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Unrated-contains some nudity, disturbing images and light body horror
by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy
IMDb lists Time of Moulting’s genres as “drama, history and horror” and the brief synopsis makes it seem like it’s more of an art film than a straight narrative. Further investigation showed that this is Sabrina Mertens’s feature debut and was made at the Baden-Württemberg Filmakademie. So I was prepared, going in, for this to be a lot more subtle than many of the other things I’ve watched for Fantasia Film Festival.
Read MoreThe Mortuary Collection
Written and Directed by Ryan Spindell
Starring Clancy Brown, Caitlin Custer and Christine Kilmer
Running time: 1 hour and 48 minutes
by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport
“Tell me a story… something dark, something twisted, something awesome.”
I’ve always had a morbid curiosity. As a young child, I was fascinated with graveyards, coffin amenities and the afterlife. Scary stories, despite them often leading to night terrors, were devoured. Like most children of the early nineties, I obsessively read the R.L. Stine Fear Street and Goosebumps series. I recall a specific Goosebumps book entitled, Say Cheese and Die about a young kid that finds when taking a picture of someone with their camera they wind up dead. It sent shivers down my spine. I was reminded of these terrifyingly marvelous tales (and now have obsessively started searching eBay to acquire my entire Fear Street collection back) in watching Ryan Spindell’s spectacularly spooky filled anthology, The Mortuary Collection.
Read MoreFried Barry
Written and directed by Ryan Kruger
Starring Gary Green, Chanelle de Jager, Brett Williams and Joey Cramer
Running time: 1 hour and 39 minutes
Currently unrated, but it contains copious drug use, sexual content, violence, adult themes and the birth of an alien/human hybrid
by Hunter Bush
Director Ryan Kruger’s Fried Barry is A LOT. The story of a burned-out, deadbeat dad who’d rather spend his time in bars or shooting up than at home with his family. One afternoon he’s just up and abducted by aliens who possess his body and take it on a whirlwind tour of the city and its seedy underbelly. It’s entertaining and surprisingly well-acted, but ultimately really exhausting.
Read MoreFree Country (Freies Land)
Written by Siegfried Kammi and Christian Alvart (adapted from Alberto Rodríguez’s and Rafael Cobo’s script for 2014’s Marshland)
Directed by Christian Alvart
Starring Trystan Pütter, Felix Kramer and Nurit Hirschfeld
Running time: 2 hours and 9 minutes
Language: German (and some French)
Unrated-Contains nudity, language, sex, violence, sexual violence, smoking and drinking
by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy
This is another one where, going in, I knew very little about it. There’s missing teens, dead bodies, gritty detectives all set in a newly reunified East German small town. The trailer is in German with no subtitles. So there’s very little to be gathered there other than the overall aesthetic which, honestly, was almost good enough for me. The thing that pushed it over the edge to make me want to watch it was that it’s a recent remake of the Spanish film Marshland by Alberto Rodríguez. Now, I’d never seen that either, but a new language remake within 6 years is often a sign of a compelling story. From there, it’s all what the director (Christian Alvart) does with it. And, like I’d said, the look of the thing was to my tastes.
Read MoreCosmic Candy
Directed by Rinio Dragasaki
Written by Rinio Dragasaki and Katerina Kaklamani
Starring Maria Kitsou, Dimitris Drosos and Pipera Maya
Running time 1 hour and 40 minutes
Language: Greek
by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport
“If you found a kid, what would you do?”
Something I have been rather certain of for the majority of my life is that I did not want children. I may not be able to make decisions when it comes to pizza toppings, ice cream flavors or what type of noodle variety to use for my macaroni and cheese dinner… but when it comes to kids, the answer is always a definitive “NO” (said in Klopek voice).
Read MoreSheep Without a Shepherd
Written by Joseph Jeethu (Drishyam), Kaihua Fan, Sheng Lei, Peng Li, Yuqian Qin, Weiwei Yang and Pei Zhai
Directed by Sam Quah
Starring Xiao Yang, Tan Zhuo and Joan Chen
Running time: 1 hour and 52 minutes
Currently unrated, but depicts violence and sexual assault
Language: Mandarin
by Allison Yakulis
This was my first Fantasia Film Festival screener and guys, I feel a little like I’ve had my dessert before dinner. Sheep Without a Shepherd is one of those movies that is so lovingly crafted that anything I’d say against it feels like I’m splitting hairs. With confident and competent shooting, solid performances, and a plot that’s entertaining without being overly complex, it’s just a really enjoyable film overall.
Read MoreFantasia Festival 2020 Preview
Compliments of your friendly cinematic pals at Moviejawn
Heading into its 24th year, the Fantasia Festival is known for the celebration of up and coming filmmakers within genre cinema. The Moviejawn crew is ecstatic to be covering this diverse and eclectic fest. With such a wide range of flick options, Fantasia is the type of event that has something for any movie lover.
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