Fantastic Fest 2008 Wrap-Up

I don't know what it says about my sad life that this film festival has become one of the major annual events that I eagerly anticipate each year, but I am quite happily addicted. I've been to all four iterations so far: once as a random off-the-street person buying singleton tickets, then as a full-festival badge holder, and these last two as a VIP. I was lucky enough to bag a VIP pass for next year as well, so I've got 2009 covered.

In addition to watching as many of these great (and, in some cases, far from great) films (for which I took four days of vacation!), I get a great deal of enjoyment out of writing capsule reviews on the various showings and reading those produced by others. So, in no particular order, I'd really like to thank the following for the online contributions they made in sharing their thoughts on assorted festival flicks:

VCSquirrel, SickLiaisons, Concussion, Hornstar, TeleRaven, filmcans, jenab, bnl771, georgialyle, slayer, Oh Steph, Noahphex, and NickRob. It's a true pleasure to see people who were engaged enough in the festival to offer up their opinions. Even though when they were contrary to mine, they were sadly wrong.

Films I planned on seeing, but then was dissuaded by bad ratings and reviews: Wicked Lake and Seventh Moon.

Films I wanted to see but couldn't due to scheduling conflicts or sheer exhaustion: Surveillance, Santos, Secret Screening C (Appaloosa), and Chocolate.

Films that I chose not to see and then regretted the omission in retrospect: The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.

Films that I actually did see and then was sorry: Pulse 2, Vinyan.

And my Top Five films of the festival: Deadgirl (this one was the biggest surprise this year for me, in that I couldn't believe that I so thoroughly enjoyed a movie that is essentially about necrophilia), The Burrowers, Sauna, The Substitute, and Alien Raiders (the movie which I felt most exceeded its budgetary and genre limitations). Honorable mention to Terra, Just Another Love Story, The Brothers Bloom, Zach and Miri Make a Porno and Role Models.

As always, my thanks to the Fantastic Fest crew and to the staff of the Alamo Drafthouse, and even to my arch-enemy Harry Knowles. This is really a labor of love on their part to provide such a spectacular event to our particular movie community, and they deserve tremendous credit for putting together what is fast becoming one of the premiere cinematic events in the U.S. Job well done! And much love to my fellow film fans.

Review: "Sauna"

This is a year of heavy Scandinavian representation at Fantastic Fest, and while the Danes have made a very strong showing, the Finns are not to be left out. Offered for our consideration is "Sauna", directed by Annti-Jussi Annila, who previously helmed "Jadesoturi", described as Finland's first and only foray into wuxia.

"Sauna" is not a title to instill confidence in American audiences, since it tends to conjure up images of a bunch of sweaty guys hanging out in a steam bath at the gym. That may be frightening to some, but it's probably not an image from which to build a classic horror movie. Nevertheless, the movie is indeed about a sauna...an EVIL sauna.

It's the late 1500s, and Sweden and Russia have just concluded a lengthy war. (Back in that time, Sweden was a great and fairly aggressive power and was not infrequently boiling over its borders into Russia and Eastern Europe. Finland was a province of Sweden in those days.) A joint Russian-Swedish mapping commission is tracing out the official new boundaries. On the Finno-Swedish side are the Spore brothers. The elder, Eerik, is a long-time cavalry officer who has grown up knowing only war and who harbors both an open hatred for Russians and a somewhat more concealed lust for killing. The younger, Knut, has led a more sheltered existence and is looking forward to a university posting in Stockholm at the conclusion of this mission.

Early on, Eerik kills a peasant who he has labeled a Russian sympathizer and who he claims was about to attack him with an axe, which is a bold-faced lie. Knut, meanwhile, shuts the peasant's daughter into a root cellar, allegedly to protect her from Eerik. But might it also be to lock away an object of temptation? It may be that Knut had been on the verge of his own crime, a violent sin of lust, right as Eerik came looking for him.

Before the murder can be discovered, the brothers insist that the commission push forward, and Eerik demands that they go straight into a giant swamp in order to map the new border right down the middle, but more conveniently to lose any pursuit. They leave the girl trapped in the cellar, and together with three Russians they push into forbidding and mysterious territory.

It is not long before they are encountering ominous signs, and Knut becomes convinced that he is seeing disturbing visions of the girl. Is she a ghost? Is she a figment of a guilty conscience? Knut weakly argues that they should turn back and free her, but Eerik pushes the group onwards.

They eventually reach a strange village in the dead center of the swamp, and here all that has been festering within begins to leach to the surface. Right outside the village is an old abandoned sauna, which the local elders say was there before they arrived years ago. In Finnish tradition, saunas can be used to wash away sins. But this sauna does not appear to be a place of cleansing. Moreover, it turns out the before the villagers migrated here, there was a Russian monastery. But the villagers found no signs of the monks besides discarded robes and various Orthodox icons.

Something is very wrong in this place, and *with* this place. And the longer they stay, the more the Russians and Finns seem to unravel, and the more the portents and signs of doom become apparent.

This movie would be justly described as brooding, atmospheric, moving at a deliberate pace to what seems an inevitable fate, laden with symbolism and hidden meanings. It is indeed the sort of thing that many will find slow and pretentious. Others will find it through-provoking. I tend toward the latter camp, although I admit that without a background in Finnish culture I am very likely missing a lot and misinterpreting more. And it is certainly possible that some elements of the story may not really hang together.

The key to the mystery seems to be the sauna, which predates all known human habitation in these parts. It is connected with various forms of lifelessness: it is in the middle of a trackless swamp filled with decay and stagnation. The villagers have not had a single child since they moved there decades ago. Even the local animals have been known to destroy themselves in some kind of frenzy. I would argue as well that we can understand the monks to represent the absence of life as well, given that they were a closed and isolated group of men sworn to celibacy.

I have to posit that the sauna was used for centuries by previous inhabitants--and that it reached the limit of the sins it could wash away. The more that people used it for its ritual cleansing purposes, the more the karmic filth began to accumulate. And eventually it became a sinkhole of darkness, and the swamp formed around it. But other explanations are definitely possible.

Another mysterious matter is that the number of villagers equals the number of Russian enemies Eerik has slain. Clearly this is of some significance, but what?

Ultimately there really is no clear explanation for a multitude of matters, and many viewers may find this frustrating or view this refusal to clearly explain everything to be a cop-out on the part of the story. Certain events at the very end certainly suggest a mystical element and not just growing madness and guilt on the part of the Spore brothers. Regardless, no miracles of redemption and salvation occur, and the conclusion does little to dispel the stereotype of Scandinavian bleakness and fatalism.

The ambiguity of the end--was justice served? and if so, whose justice?--is exactly the sort of thing that often infuriated me in a movie, but here I found it haunting and appropriate. (It reminds me of 1984's "Eyes of Fire".) This is a very well-made film for what I heard was an extremely limited budget. The leads are all cast extremely well. Ville Virtanen as Eerik *looks* madly dangerous, and Viktor Klimenko as Semenski seems completely natural as a Russian boyar. The costumes, by the way, are magnificent.

This is not the movie to see if you want a flat-out gorefest, or a quick-moving detour through terror with a readily explicable resolution. But if you enjoy something a little more enigmatic and foreboding, you may find much to like here.

Review: "Deadgirl"

Some of the movies I've seen thus far at this year's festival begin to drop out of my mind even as I leave the theater. This one, though, has stuck with me. I found it to be intriguing,haunting, and very well-executed, yet the material is very troubling, and it's not by any means the sort of thing you can easily summarize to a non-genre fan unless you want to be labeled a disgusting mutant. Short description: "A couple of disaffected teens find an apparently savage and deathless girl chained up naked in the basement of an abandoned insane asylum--and one thing leads to another." And that "one thing" is rape.

But of course the teen who first embarks on his own downward spiral sees it differently. The girl is undead, and apparently virtually mindless. And no one knows she's down here, and no one is missing her. She's a thing. She reacts, but doesn't interact. There's no mind there. And he can do what he wants to her.

And then he begins to tell his friends.

The other teen finds this abhorrent--but he doesn't stop his best friend. Because at the same time, he just might find these possibilities a little more enticing than he wants to admit.

While the premise is fantastic, in the sense that on the face of it it's out there in Cloud Cuckoo Land, the filmmakers sell it skilfully, and the plot has a strong internal logic of its own that in fact has some grounding in reality. You might want to say that real people wouldn't do such things. But when you're young, angry, poor, have virtually no family of your own and no real prospects for a future of anything other than pumping gas, and everyone looks down on you--how WOULD you react to something like this? The more active of the two teens has an essentially nihilistic world view and no fear of consequences. And through him, we become aware of a strange element of class struggle going on. His ongoing rapes of the dead girl--there's no delicate way of puting it--are not entirely about sexual gratification. They're about feeling powerful at last, of being in control.

I don't want to say that the filmmakers set out to present a Marxist critique here, or that they necessarily intended to load the movie with messages. But you can read a lot into it. "She's just a dead girl." That may not be far from "She's just an illegal alien", "She's just a runaway", "She's just some black chick." There are always reasons and excuses, and the worst actions are often accompanied by the dehumanization of the victims, or even by blaming them for what they have coming.

The performances by all are very good, particularly when the best friend has a monologue describing his first encounter with the dead girl. The latter is played with exceptional bravery, I think, by Jenny Spain is a role that had to be emotionally demanding (she is completely nude throughout, although by no means is this eroticized). The asylum setting is exceptional and the directors succeed in creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.

The movie can easily be accused of misogyny, but I think that's an easy way out. It is definitely disturbing, but not just for the sake of shocking the viewer or messing with his or her mind. It's hard to watch at times, but if you don't dismiss it out of hand as a simplistic old-fashioned rape/revenge flick, you might find it thought-provoking in its own exceedingly odd way.

Recommended, but it is definitely not for everyone.