Anti-Review: "Blood Trails"

I really thought this movie would be awesome, since it combines two things that are near to my heart: EXTREME mountain biking, and killing. Put together, you'd have a hell of an Olympic event. Actually, I hate biking and everything it stands for. If God had meant for us to bike, He wouldn't have invented cars.

Anyway, I was gonna see this movie, but four different people told me it sucked with the power of a thousand evil Hoovermatics. And zero people told me it was good. Therefore I avoided it and instead did nothing at all, skipping all festival offerings on Wednesday night entirely just to show the movie who was boss. It's a lesson it'll not soon forget.

Commendations: Festival Reviewers

Additionally, I am extending my thanks to all of those who took the time to post their thoughts about the assorted movies. Sadly, most of you were DEAD WRONG, but at least you took the time to offer some opinions and analyses. Reading the reviews was actually a significant part of the fun of the festival for me. The particularly noteworthy reviewers were: Jenab, SickLiaisons, AceBannon, Kraken, PsychoFromTexas, Karrie, TeleRaven, Hornstar, and Kevrock. Good work, folks!

Commendations: Fantastic Fest Staff

Before we draw to a close, I wish to thank Mr. and Mrs. League for their backing of the festival, my fifth-ranked arch-nemesis Harry "Berserker" Knowles for his giddy enthusiasm, and also that guy that looks like Elvis Costello, and that other guy, and I think there was also some kind of chick. They done good. A round of applause as well for the volunteers who had to endure insufferable hours of nerd chatter, and, of course, kudos to the ever-gracious servers. Thanks to you one and all! Except for that one person. You know who you are.

Blog Link

Hmm, I just now noticed that my unfettered verbosity is blowing WAY past my allotted space on the Fantastic Fest site. I *know* that my legions of fans hang on my every word and are eager to enjoy the full-bodied richness of these truncated reviews. And you can find them at:

http://purukivel.blogspot.com/

Review: "Severance"

As I descend ever deeper into embittered old age, I find that I quite resent the wasting of my time, of which I no longer have so great a store. Consequently, in a lot of movies at this year's Fantastic Fest I've had no choice but to fidget and squirm impatiently at the sedate and self-indulgent pacing of some of the offerings, until at last I can do naught but bolt to my feet and shout "Get the HELL on with it already!" At which point I am usually removed from the theater and administered a sound thrashing by the waitstaff. They don't play games, man.

So one of the remarkable things about "Severance" is that not once did I grow slack-jawed with dull boredom or start thinking about how it would benefit from some judicious editing. The plot moves along snappily without very much at all in the way of wasted motion, and the director doesn't show off with any unseemly "Look at me, Ma!" trickery but instead buckles down and keeps everything marching forward.

The story is your typical city slickers versus forest dwellers kind of thing. The way horror movies tell it, to enter anything other than a small stand of larches is to ensure your complete doom, because evidently any chunk of Nature more wild than the shrubbery alongside your garage is infested with either inbred hillbillies, psycho bushmen, or super-soldiers gone mad, and sometimes all three, vying for attention and killing time.

Now, that's all well and good, but this movie not only dispenses bloody death, but it also doles out a load of laughs. A lot of people are comparing this to "Shaun Of The Dead", and those people need to get out more. I say that mainly because I didn't think of the comparison first. And also, I honestly don't think they really are film mates. I mean, let's say that one of Benny Hill's sketches had featured grisly cannibalistic slaughter AND jokes. (Historically, of course, none of them ever had either.) Would we then say "Oh, this movie is totally like Benny Hill, you know, with the guffaws and the axes to the head"? I think not. But I digress. Also, I'm quite worried that I even am thinking of Benny Hill. Looks like I picked a bad day to quit crystal meth.

Anyway, comedy hijinks there are aplenty, and no small measure of murderizing, with the city folk going down pretty much in the order you'd predict. The last quarter or so of the film is particularly excellent as we speed along to our conclusion with bodies falling to the left and right. Also: there are some bare-breasted chicks, so you know Joe Bob Briggs would approve.

Our noteworthy performances come from Danny Dyer as a heavily medicated slacker and from Laura Harris, late of TV's "24" and "Dead Like Me". And one of them gets partly naked. The remainder of the cast also has fun with their roles and accept their horrifying deaths more or less gamely.

"Severance" was written and directed by Christopher Smith, who also pulled down the same duties for one of last year's highlights, "Creep", an altogether different affair with roughly 98% fewer laughs. We need to keep an eye on this guy, because he's got some mad skillz. If nothing else, he can script some creative deaths. And in the end, isn't that what it's all about?

Review: "Unrest"

If we've learned anything from TV's "CSI", it's that Marg Helgenberger is really desperate to be acclaimed as a super-sexy beauty. And also that carving into corpses is a lot of fun. If we learn anything from THIS movie, it's that slicing up cadavers is NOT, in fact, such a laugh riot and generally involves far fewer special effects.

Corri English plays a noob at a medical school who has well mastered the art of keeping her lips ever glossy but finds hacking into deceased human bodies and (separately) explaining her agnostic creed in an attempt to seem deep and mysterious somewhat challenging. Far easier for her is shucking out of her clothes at every random opportunity, which raises the film's score considerably. Ms. English excels at exuding a certain nubile and perky naughtiness, but does less well in convincing us of her spiritual turmoil. This is forgiven in direct proportion to the frequency with which she whips off her top.

Her three fellow body-dicers are comprised of interchangeable and buff young alpha males that look exactly alike, except one has some wispy facial hair. The quartet of students have the bad luck in their gross anatomy class to be assigned a cursed carcass that is seeking its unholy vengeance from beyond the veil of death itself, as so often happens. Why is Lara Flynn Boyle's dessicated stiff so angry? How can the students track down the clues to this mystery when Google proves SINGULARLY POWERLESS? When will anyone at the hospital evince a bit of concern over the mounting toll of slaughter and the rivers of blood? And why does their professor look like a septuagenarian chimpanzee?

The movie really does succeed in creating at least scattered moments of creepy dread, and the cadaver lab setting is quite ingenious, especially the bit with the body tank. (In these respects it is far superior to the vaguely related Ewan McGregor thriller "Nightwatch", which was set in a morgue.) The cast generally acquits itself well, but the plot fails at a couple of points, most notably in a scene where the writer had some lazy failure of the imagination and basically just magically provides the heroes with all of the answers they need in an extremely improbable fashion. Also, he seems convinced that the ancient Aztecs where running rampant throughout Brazil. I can only decry the deficiencies of the modern education system.

Spatially displaced Aztecs notwithstanding, this is a very solid effort which is better than it had to be. Ms. English is definitely welcome to undertake another genre turn in the future, provided the role calls for her to disrobe just as frequently.

Review: "Zhest"

When the Sicilians warned us to never fight a land war in Asia, they might also have told us to avoid watching Russian movies. Napoleon AND Hitler met their respective dooms on their marches into the depths of Russia, and many brave souls have found naught but despair and madness in the world of Russian cinema. Unless they took in "Nightwatch". I'm told that's pretty awesome.

"Zhest" is a movie about...well, honestly, I don't have the foggiest notion. A crazy man declaims to a reporter about the ephemeral nature of love and then gets a round drilled through his head. This leaves the reporter with no choice but to drop out of society. But then she gets pulled back into the game to interview a psychotic butchering killing-machine of a school teacher at a nearby asylum. He immediately escapes, and our heroine is in hot pursuit with a Russian stand-in for Antonio Banderas. The intrepid duo follow the criminal into an "abandoned" "village" that's about the size of Manhattan and packed full of criminal scum, sociopaths, and idiots. It's like "Hell Comes To Frogtown" but with 100% less Roddy Piper.

At this point, the director loses interest in his original story and begins making up several new ones on the fly, possibly because he was drunk at the time and was letting his nerdy 12-year-old nephew take the helm, which would explain why a faceless horseman starts wandering about. Later, there's massive panic on the set when everyone realizes that no car chase has been filmed, so they set about rectifying that in short order, using the finest two-cylinder Volgas that the Russian automotive industry can muster. From that point, everyone involved decided to start doing their own thing, leading to total chaos and some unfortunate jazz improv and an interpretative dance, the whole soaked in fatalistic pseudo-philosophy and nowhere near enough nudity.

Look, the Russians do several things well. They have mad vodka drinking skillz. They have a halfway decent space program. They supply the world with comely underwear models. But movies? That's best left to Bollywood. So, hurray for Captain Spaulding, and on with the show.

Review: "Tideland"

Watching this movie is like seeing some totally slammin' chick from across the room at a party, where you're all, "Daaaamn, she's hot!" And then she whips out a cigarette and lights up. Hey, maybe that floats your boat, bucky, but from where I'm sitting that's just a huge turnoff. My body is a temple. One that is bloated and decrepit, but the rent is good and I'm tax-free. Anyway, to say that my expectations were cruelly dashed is an understatement, one that merits a metaphor that's beyond my ability to craft.

"Tideland" is based on a novel by Mitch Cullin that must not translate well to the screen. I can see why it attracted Terry Gilliam--he has a fascination with precocious kids who create or find complex fantasy worlds and whose real lives feature adults that range from the oblivious to the outright malevolent. Regardless of the merits of the source material, though, in Gilliam's hands it is transformed into a shapeless blob of not altogether compelling images that have no evident storyline whatsoever.

What we get is basically a tone poem, and if I wanted to take in that kind of Artistic Vision for Deep Thoughts, I woulda gone to "Koyaanisqatsi". It's enormously frustrating to see Gilliam viciously beat back any attempts for a plot to emerge to drive our characters forward. More or less all we have is a series of vignettes that lack the usual barrage of richly layered and evocative imagery for which Gilliam is so well known. It's ironic that he seems to have dialed back his usual eccentricities and indulgences in response to the critics' complaints, and the result is this wan and formless mess that nevertheless manages to creep along for two endless hours before sputtering to a pointless ending, pausing along the way to toy creepily with pedophilia.

Jeff Bridges and Janet McTeer have quite evident fun in their roles, and Jennifer Tilly plays against type as a blowsy idiot. The revelation here, though, is the young (eleven years old at the time!) Jodelle Ferland in the demanding role of Jeliza-Rose. Her performance is magnificent and fearless. If you have a high tolerance for ennui and nonsensical meandering, this movie is highly recommended just for her star turn alone. Otherwise, pop in the DVD of "Time Bandits" and remember the good old days.

Review: "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning"

Not since "Alien Vs. Predator" has a three-word movie title delivered so completely what it has promised. Texas? Check. Chainsaw? Oh, mais oui. Massacre? You betcha. This prequel to the splatterhouse original comes at you with all the subtlety of a concussion grenade. But hey, it's not like you were misled--you can't complain that you were expecting something like "Snow Falling On Cedars".

TCM:TB opens the 2006 incarnation of Austin's Fanastic Fest, but first! There was a word from our sponsor, Ain't It Cool's own Harry Knowles. Now, of course my differences with Mr. Knowles are legendary. He's tried to have me killed on numerous occasions, and that whole incident in Marrakech is best not spoken of. So I was not altogether pleased to see him in attendance. Tonight, he seized the microphone and decided to declaim Keats' "Ode To A Grecian Urn" whilst affecting a Peter Lorre accent. Then he condescended to discuss the movie in a foul-mouthed outburst that pitched upwards into hysteria and culminated with him furiously pleasuring himself with a microphone. But perhaps I've said too much.

So, onwards to the movie. The filmmakers were possessed of three chief weapons: a soundboard that went to 11, the hammy scenery-chomping of R. Lee Ermey, a cheap cast, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Given the opportunity to craft a work of startling insight and true terror, they decided instead to predictably kill off the characters in the exact order that you would suspect and to drum up cheap scares by cranking up the speakers to the max whenever someone "unexpectedly" slammed a door or stomped a boot or zipped a zipper. Bad guys are constantly leaping into the foreground and abruptly popping into the frame like jacks-in-the-box. I mean, the director did everything but include the ever-popular "Aiiee! Oh, it was only a cat!" gambit. Possibly because they couldn't afford a cat wrangler.

The movie features Jordana Brewster ("The Fast And The Furious"), Diora Baird ("Accepted"), some negligible dudes, and, of course, Mr. Ermey. It was directed with massive incompetence by Jonathan Liebesman ("Darkness Falls"). Hollywood bigwigs Toby Emmerich and Michael Bay, schockster Mike Fleiss ("Hostel II"), and venerated horror guru Tobe Hooper (of the original TCM) all receive producer credits. They'll wish they hadn't.