Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 19, 2007, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
One of the many cool things that can happen at Montreal’s Fantasia festival (see the first part of my 2007 report here) is discovering a terrific new movie that you not only haven’t heard of before, but didn’t intend to see until the day of its showing. Such is the case on Sunday morning, when I join Fango scribe Marc Walkow, his fellow New York Asian Film Festival stalwarts Daniel Craft and Paul Kazee and my longtime Montreal friend Owen Creed at a noon showing of Kiltro
at the Hall Theater. I went on a whim, having no idea what the movie was until I read up about it in the Fantasia program just prior to checking it out. As explained by producer Derek Rundell at the showing, Kiltro is a starring vehicle for Marko Zaror, a Chilean martial artist who won a Stuntman of the Year award for doubling The Rock in The Rundown. Here he plays Zamir, a two-fisted street fighter with a soft spot for the beautiful Kim (the very beautiful Caterina Jadresic), whom he once saved from a brutal assault. When Kim’s father, who runs a local tae kwon do school, is confronted by a villain from his past, Zamir vows to protect his beloved and her dad—but must travel to a remote desert for spiritual and physical training by an aged fight master first.
As that synopsis suggests, writer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza’s script is a stew of kung-fu flick conventions, with a cup or two of Sergio Leone thrown into the recipe. Yet it works due to a tongue-in-cheek approach that tweaks the genre’s requirements (the punchline added to a familiar romantic moment brings down the house), and the charisma and abilities of Zaror. Though he looks about 10 years too old for the part—especially when romancing Jadresic, who appears almost young enough to be his daughter—he’s got the moves and the chops to become the Next Big Thing in the action-hero field that Rundell and co. are touting him as. The producer further notes that as opposed to the flashy combat of Kiltro (with wire assist on some of Zamir’s opponents), his, Espinoza’s and Zaror’s follow-up feature Mirageman, showing later in the day, boasts a rawer, more down-to-Earth approach. Suddenly, that one becomes freshly added to my must-see list for the day.
First, though, I head across the street to the J.A. de Sève for the second screening of 13 Beloved, which has knocked out audiences in its native Thailand and here at Fantasia alike. Not at all the love story its title suggests, director Chookiat Sakweerakul’s film (which he scripted with Eakasit Thairoot based on the latter’s popular comic book) is an audacious, jet-black satire on both reality TV and the modern culture it both reflects and exploits. Popular Thai singer Krissada Sukasol stars as Phuchit, a down-on-his-luck young man who receives a cell-phone call telling him that he has been selected to take part in a clandestinely filmed game show; if he can perform 13 tasks sequentially, he’ll end up with a fortune in his bank account. First, he has to simply kill a fly. Then he has to swallow that fly. A couple of challenges later, he has to eat something else in a scene that makes me queasy just recalling it.
Phuchit winds up taking a one-way trip to the dark side as the tasks continue, but this is no mere saga of a man doing anything for money. 13 Beloved becomes an exploration of morality and responsibility, all the while delivering a string of moments that dare you to laugh if you’re not gasping at the same time. The explanation behind Phuchit’s plight doesn’t quite live up to the hour and a half that has come before it—but considering how startling and uncompromising the setup and development are, perhaps there’s no way it could. The Weinstein Company has picked up the U.S. release and remake rights, but you can bet that the movie’s more ruthless setpieces (including the ending) will be way watered down for the American redux.
Before going down to the D.B. Clarke auditorium for Mirageman, I hang around the de Sève to see how a 35mm print of Jean Rollin’s Le Frisson de Vampires (The Shiver of the Vampires), accompanied by the man himself, looks on the big screen. Just great, as it happens, though the French film has no English subtitles, so after briefly saying hi to Rollin, I sit down for another dose of Marko Zaror fisticuffs. To my surprise, after the buildup that this is a grittier film than Kiltro, I find that Mirageman is played as much for humor as for thrills. Here, Zaror is Maco, a nightclub bouncer who happens upon a home invasion in progress late one night, dons a mask he takes from one of the crooks and saves the day. The attention his valiant deed receives inspires him to fight crime as the costumed Mirageman—but the road to superheroism is a little bumpy at first. Nonetheless, he gradually wins over the populace, while garnering particular attention from the gorgeous newscaster he saved that first night. But their relationship is not fated to be that of Superman and Lois Lane…
Shot on often handheld hi-def, as opposed to the lusher 35mm Kiltro, Mirageman does indeed deliver the goods when it comes to the punchups. With the previous film’s worth of experience behind them, Zaror and his stunt team took more chances and really busted each other up making this one. But what’s just as notable is the success of its satiric take on the media and Maco’s self-transformation into a costumed crimefighter, balancing laughs with genuine heart. Once again written and directed by Espinoza, Mirageman wraps up after a tight 85 minutes with a perfect final image, and stands as one of this year’s true Fantasia discoveries. Magnolia Pictures is handling both Zaror features in the U.S., and while each is worth checking out, Mirageman is the one that has new midnight-movie classic written all over it.
The day ends with a return to genre fare: Koldo Serra’s The Backwoods, though this survival-in-the-forest saga owes more to the likes of Deliverance and Straw Dogs than to its more explicitly horrific forebears. Gary Oldman, giving one of his least eccentric and most powerful performances, plays an Englishman who’s first seen driving his wife (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) and another couple (Paddy Considine and Virginie Ledoyen) into the Spanish mountains for a stay at a remote vacation house. First, they make a stop at a nearby pub, where the inhabitants regard them with disdain and potential menace. Things don’t really become threatening, however, until the two men set off on a hunting excursion and come upon an apparently abandoned house, where they find a terrified young girl with deformed hands locked in a back room. Their decision to bring the child back to their place spurs a series of increasingly intense confrontations as the townsmen, armed with shotguns, come looking for her.
Serra, who scripted with Jon Sagala, wrings plenty of drama out of the couples’ attempts to determine what to do next before their decisions result in brutal violence. The four leads are all terrific, and while their characters have flaws of their own, they maintain consistent sympathy as they try to survive in hostile foreign terrain. Their outsider-ness is reinforced at this screening by the fact that Filmax has sent over a print with no subtitles for the Spanish-speaking characters’ dialogue, but the story and emotions are comprehensible—and nerve-wracking—throughout.
More foreign-lensed thrills start the day on Monday with the Austrian hit Dead in 3 Days at the Hall. This one’s a slasher in the I Know What You Did Last Summer vein, focusing on a quintet of high-school friends who, on the eve of their graduation, receive simultaneous cell-phone messages promising the titular fate. Of course, they don’t take it too seriously at first—until one of the group disappears from a party and soon turns up dead. Realizing that someone bears a deadly grudge against them, the remaining four try to figure out who has targeted them while avoiding becoming the next victims.
The screenplay by director Andreas Prochaska and Thomas Baum (presumably the same one who wrote The Sender and episodes of Night Visions and Nightmare Café) retraces familiar territory, with the usual tropes (consistently absent parents, etc.) and even a killer who dresses in fisherman’s gear just like the I Know… villain. What sets this film apart from many of its teen-stalker brethren is its emphasis on maintaining sympathy for its youthful targets, as they react to the deaths and terrorization of their friends with convincing anguish and determination to survive. The narrative may be familiar, but it’s the details of Prochaska’s naturalistic approach that make this one a cut above the usual cut-’em-up fare, along with such aesthetic flourishes as a water motif that ties in with the killer’s ultimately revealed motivation. The feature is preceded by Rodrigo Gudiño’s short The Eyes of Edward James, a tense exercise in subjective camerawork that recounts a woman’s murder from the point of view of her husband, who is recalling the incident during a hypnotherapy session with a psychiatrist.
Rollin returns at the D.B. Clarke for the world premiere of La Nuit des Horloges (The Night of the Clocks), which, like Frisson, is being shown sans subtitles. But I don’t want to pass up the likely rare chance to see the veteran director’s latest on a big screen, and while the French-language dialogue isn’t comprehensible, his images speak for themselves. Following a woman (adult-cinema star Ovidie) through the settings of the filmmaker’s past work and interspersing the story with numerous excerpts from those past movies, Horloges draws an aesthetic line through the imagery and events of Rollin’s oeuvre. It’s great to see those memorable scenes projected, and there are several marvelously moody setpieces among Rollin’s new material, chief among them a lengthy sequence set in a preserved-body exhibit. Here’s hoping that Horloges is picked up by a U.S. distributor and given the subtitled release it deserves.
The day wraps up with Larry Fessenden’s terrific The Last Winter at the Hall (see the full review here), and I spend the bulk of Tuesday visiting the set of Martyrs, the grisly new shocker by House of Voices director Pascal Laugier, with filmmakers/former Fantasia folk Karim Hussain and Julien Fonfrede. There I get to witness the filming of some prosthetic FX and mayhem that are painful to watch even in this context, as well as an edited shotgun-massacre sequence that’s pretty damn scary, and spend a little time chatting with Laugier and co., who couldn’t be more welcoming. Among those I get to meet are Benoit Lestang, the makeup artist whose long résumé includes films by Rollin and Frank Henenlotter among many others, and executive producer Richard Grandpierre, to whom I rave about his recent hit Them (Ils), which is coming to the States in August.
I arrive back at the Hall later in the afternoon to check out Trapped Ashes, the anthology chiller with quite the eclectic lineup of directors on its four stories and wraparound: Ken Russell, Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman, digital FX wizard turned helmer John Gaeta and Joe Dante, all working from a script by producer Dennis Bartok. The tales told by a movie-studio tour group who become trapped on a haunted-house set all focus on sexual obsession and/or body horror, dealing with: an actress who undergoes a very unusual breast-enlargement surgery; a couple on a Japanese vacation who come upon the body of a hanged man, whose ghost begins erotically haunting the wife; a 1950s screenwriter who becomes best friends with a young Stanley Kubrick and begins an ill-advised affair with the director’s girlfriend; and a young woman who, during her mother’s pregnancy, shared the latter’s innards with a rapidly growing tapeworm.
The bizarre tales give each of the filmmakers a chance to indulge their signature styles, from Russell’s off-kilter approach and colored lighting to the film-noir shadings of Hellman. The movie doesn’t lack for variety, but the decision (for narrative reasons that won’t be revealed here) to end each segment before it reaches its punchline robs them of their individual impact. The kickers are always the most fun part of omnibus features like this, from Creepshow back to the Amicus flicks that Trapped Ashes homages, and the resulting experience is more satisfying in parts than it is as a whole.
Then it’s time to pay The Ferryman (pictured above) a visit at the de Sève. This New Zealand production gives itself a tough act to follow by opening with a vivid and intense confrontation on a boat buffeted by a nighttime storm, and doesn’t follow up promisingly as it centers on yet another group of friends heading off on yet another pop-song-accompanied trip destined to go horribly awry—in this case a six-day sail from NZ to Fiji. Like Dead in 3 Days, however, this film succeeds by paying more attention to character, and the ways in which its protagonists’ dark sides come out when they become prey to a body-hopping spirit after coming across the survivor (John Rhys-Davies) of that opening fight. There are already tensions simmering amongst the three couples, and they explode to the surface as the presence takes hold of them.
One of the neatest touches in Nick Ward’s script is that when the possessor takes over a fresh body, the old one doesn’t die, but becomes infused with the soul of the new victim. The resulting switching of identities adds to the horrific fun, and the movie is uncompromising in its psychological and physical cruelty (animal lovers may want to give this one a pass). Director Chris Graham, diving into horror after making his feature debut with the romantic comedy Samoan Wedding, doesn’t hold anything back, and at times the filmmaking and acting become overwrought—the most perversely disturbing scene might be even more effective had the two actors involved toned things down a bit. Nonetheless, The Ferryman is a trip worth taking, and given the high-quality production values, it’s a shame the film has been consigned to direct-to-DVD release (by First Look) in the States.
Another ill-fated excursion is showcased in The Redsin Tower, the first in a trio I take in at the Hall on Wednesday. The first traditional narrative feature by Fred Vogel and his cohorts at Toetag Pictures (creators of the August Underground mock-snuff movies), it’s set largely at the titular, supposedly haunted structure, the destination of a bunch of college and high-school pals after a party they plan to attend gets raided by the cops. One of the group is Kim (Bethany Newell), who has just broken up with longtime boyfriend Mitch (Perry Tiberio), who isn’t taking it well; in fact, he has grabbed a gun and set out to reclaim her by any means necessary. The stage is set for serious bloodshed once Mitch catches up with Kim and the gang at the Tower—but he may not be the only thing they have to worry about.
The early scenes involving Kim and Mitch’s breakup and the latter’s quick descent into obsessive madness are the best in The Redsin Tower, well-played and effectively filmed. Vogel and his team have also come up with a nicely creepy locale for all the gore-spilling, lensing on a single set that they turn into a labyrinth so expansive, someone can die a horrible screaming death without anyone else hearing—and of course, the visceral FX are topnotch. What’s missing is any real engagement with the characters, other than Kim; the rest of the victims-to-be range from generic partier types to downright hateful boors, and it’s hard to care about whether they live or die, no matter how grotesque their fates might be. That may have been part of the filmmakers’ design, setting up the story’s ironically cynical ending, but it leaves The Redsin Tower on the level of a gross-out gut punch rather than becoming under-your-skin frightening.
TO BE CONTINUED
