Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 19, 2006, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
As I near the end of my 2006 Fantasia jaunt (see Part One and Part Two of this report), short films are suddenly everywhere—nearly half a dozen programs between Friday the 14th and Sunday the 16th. The most notable is Small Gauge Trauma, which leads off Friday’s program at the Concordia Hall and serves not only to showcase new works, but as a launch event for the same-titled DVD from Synapse Films, which collects some of the best minimovies from past editions. This year’s Trauma lineup includes return appearances by past contributors, including local comic artist/animator/musician/radio personality Rick Trembles (who I joined earlier in the week, along with FAB Press’ Harvey Fenton, on the Motion Picture Purgatory radio show that can be heard at Fabpress.com) and Aussie filmmaker Dalibor Backovic (Entombed).
Trembles opens the show with Decensortized, a typically raunchy/lively cartoon in the form of a music video for his band The American Devices, and Backovic closes it with The Ancient Rite of Corey McGillis, an effectively EC-ish tale of revenge by the dead. In between is a mix of dark-humored entries and dead-serious stuff in which the former proves most effective; I love Philip Eddolls’ animated stuffed-bunny-gone-bad sketch What Wonderful Day, and Christopher R. Nash’s Day of John (a narrated look at unpleasant doings in suburbia) and John Bryant’s Oh My God (which starts as a jet-black spoof of over-the-top screen violence and reactions to same and ends as a deranged political statement) leave me wondering if I really should be laughing as much as I am. On the other hand, the intended provocation of Sam Walker’s Duck Children just leaves me cold, and the hard-edged reality of Enrique Arroyo’s The Other American Dream, a vérité presentation of the abuse of a young Mexican prostitute, comes off like an Amnesty International PSA that feels out of place in this context.
Friday’s first feature, God’s Left Hand, Devil’s Right Hand, is the fest’s second contribution from director Shusuke Kaneko—and like Azumi 2, sadly, it’s a disappointment coming from the man who did such a magnificent job on his Gamera and Godzilla epics. The movie is based on a manga by the prolific Kazuo Umeza, whose work has previously been adapted in shorter screen form (issued Stateside on Media Blasters’ Horror Theater DVDs), and it’s not hard to see why; at feature length, this adaptation feels obvious and one-dimensional.
With its simplistic plotting and youthful protagonists (a little boy who receives visions of young girls in deadly peril, and his teen sister who sets out to rescue the next would-be victim), the story seems geared toward kids, yet its sporadic bursts of graphic gore make it sometimes seem like God’s left hand doesn’t know what the Devil’s right hand is doing here. These gruesome bits range from an admittedly arresting opening, in which stigmatic blood bursts from the psychic tyke’s throat as he “sees” a victim getting it in the neck, to a finale that contains a ridiculous twist right out of Rock ’N’ Roll Nightmare and borrows a gag from one of the segments in Tales from the Hood. It all adds up to a very minor entry on the résumé of Kaneko, who has apparently done much better with another manga filmization, Death Note, which recently opened to huge box-office returns in Japan.
Things pick up with the North American premiere of Wilderness (pictured above), the second film by British director Michael J. Bassett (Deathwatch). This one’s a straightforward and savage killer-in-the-woods shocker, with the twist in Dario Poloni’s script (with revisions by Bassett) being that the imperiled youths are inmates from a British borstal, sent on a forced character-building excursion to a wooded island after their torment of a fellow prisoner led to the latter’s suicide. These tough boys (and a group of tough girls they encounter shortly after arriving) prove to be no match for a mysterious killer who sets upon them with a crossbow, an array of vicious traps and a pack of hungry attack dogs. The blood flows freely and often frighteningly, and it’s surprising when, during the post-film Q&A;, Bassett reveals that only the softening of some vulgar language was required to land Wilderness a “15” rating from the British censors.
While the narrative runs out of surprises and a bit of steam by the climax, Bassett’s solid, scary craftsmanship and a group of strong young performers hold the attention throughout. Particularly notable are Toby Kebbell (who resembles a macho Alexis Arquette) as a loner with both sensitive and pragmatic sides and Stephen Wight as a nasty skinhead who may be an even greater threat than the unseen villain. The tension builds nicely among the group under the pressure of their external foe, and those dynamics give Wilderness a significant lift over many of its terror-in-the-woods brethren.
The movies start a little after noon on Saturday, and when you’re heading into a theater that early for the start of a long movie day, you don’t want something that makes you think—you want Three Mighty Men! A prime example of genre filmmaking from Turkey, where movies are cheap and copyright-infringement lawsuits apparently don’t exist, this eye-rolling bit of cinematic silliness pits a visiting Captain America (“Your Turkish is excellent!”) and Santo against a nefarious villain called The Spider, whose costume is a thinly veiled copy of Spider-Man’s, only without the webbing.
Can Cap and Santo (who, defying the luchador tradition, appears frequently without his mask) defeat The Spider’s world-threatening plot to…steal priceless antiques, sell them cheap to collectors and then buy them back with millions in fake bills?? Or will everyone be defeated by the rousingly ridiculous dialogue, acting and fight scenes? The answer comes at the end of 80 blissful minutes of big-screen cheese that has the packed house rolling. As opposed to the beautiful big-screen presentation of Fantasia’s other features, Three Mighty Men is presented in what appears to be a projected VHS image that’s cropped to TV dimensions and looks like a third-generation dupe—and none of us who witness it would want it any other way.
There’s no way to follow up an act like that, so I take a break and return to the Concordia Hall a couple of hours later to catch Zombie Movie, a short playing before the Thai feature Hell. New Zealand directors Michael Asquith and Ben Stenbeck are veterans of Peter Jackson’s Weta FX house, and there’s more than a bit of the cheeky humor of Jackson’s early movies in this brief chronicle of three dimwits trapped inside a car during a plague of the undead. A number of amusing details and developments lead to a satisfying and funny conclusion, making one wonder why this short wasn’t made part of the Small Gauge Trauma selection.
Certainly it deserves a better placement than at the head of Hell, one of the weakest of the recent flood of fright flicks from Thailand. I previously saw it at the Philadelphia Film Festival and have no desire to go through that Hell again; it covers ground previously explored by such great Far East genremeisters as Nobuo Nakagawa, but if this is the Jigoku for the 2000s, the Asian horror scene is in serious trouble. The film follows a group of young friends who all get killed in a van accident, and wind up taking a quick trip to the hot place. From what we see of their lives before their descent, none of these kids appear to be especially grievous sinners, but then this inferno operates under odd rules of punishment; if I recall correctly, “hypocrites” get it worse than adulterers and people who abuse animals!
The worst abuse, though, is reserved for viewers who have to sit through the movie’s muddled plotting—in which a couple of the pals have wound up in hell accidentally, and might be able to find their way out, though the rules are never quite clear—and a cheapjack vision of the underworld reminiscent of European or Cannon Films cheapies from a few decades ago. It’s all red-tinted desert locations, sloppy gore, demons with rubber horns and harmonized voices, mini-ghouls referred to in the subtitles (again, if memory serves) as “disgusting infant ghosts” and occasional continuity errors; a girl whose bare feet are tortured in one scene is sprinting about in brand-new running shoes the next. What’s sad is that this dreck was produced by Tanit Jitnukul, who directed the stunning action film (and past Fantasia highlight) Bang Rajan.
And so I skip out on a repeat viewing of this one to catch a few of the shorts in the DIY Quebec Francais collection showing across the street at the J.A. de Sève auditorium. I’m mostly there to see my friend Isabelle Stephen starring in Jef. Grenier’s creepy Sandman, in which the murder of Isabelle’s character leads to retribution at the hands of the title fiend, but there’s an interesting cross-section of approaches, both serious and humorous, in the assorted movies (too bad for me that only some of them are subtitled in English).
In fact, the last two movies I see at Fantasia were also made by pals of mine. Saturday night finds me catching Mike Mendez’s The Gravedancers for the third time, and with the best audience yet; the Concordia crowd screams and laughs all through Mike’s energetic modern ghost story (see my original review here). And before departing Montreal on Sunday, I make sure to check out The iDol, the hour-long directorial debut of Fango’s Japanese correspondent Norman England. It may seem a conflict of interest for me to be reviewing this, but to heck with that—The iDol is remarkably polished and thoughtful for a first movie, and—unlike many of the Asian features screened at Fantasia this year—takes just the right amount of time to tell its story.
While the saga of a young otaku (obsessed fan of pop culture) living out his most joyous fantasy due to the intervention of an alien toy figure bears a certain amount of satire directed at Japanese marketing and celebrity worship, it also has a more lighthearted and romantic spirit than I expected. (Norman even pulls off the corniest of conventions—the young-couple’s-day-out musical montage—thanks in part to the use of a Jane Wiedlin song he first heard in Night of the Creeps!) The sci-fi trappings are well-deployed, and it all leads to a conclusion that nicely brings the tale full circle. On the basis of The iDol, I fear we may lose Norman to a full-time filmmaking career, yet I’m looking forward to seeing his first feature-length work—no doubt at a Fantasia of the future…
