Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 10, 2008, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The folks behind Montreal’s Fantasia festival certainly know how to start things off with a bang. This year’s event showcases one hell of a lineup in its first weekend, including several films previously reviewed on this site. Among them are Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (see review here) and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [REC] (reviewed here), easily the two best horror films of at least the last year. Having previously viewed Right One only on a DVD screener and forgone opportunities to do the same with [REC], it’s a thrill to experience them with packed, highly responsive audiences at the Concordia Hall Theatre.
I arrive on Saturday just in time to catch another movie I’d only seen before on a preview disc, Jon Knautz’s Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer (see review here). From the moment I viewed it in the comfort of home, I couldn’t wait to see this energetic creaturefest with a crowd, and the Hall screening (a slightly tighter cut than on that DVD, trimmed of a couple of scenes to accelerate the pace) doesn’t disappoint. The audience whoops it up as Jack (Trevor Matthews, who’s here representing the movie along with Knautz and producer Patrick White) kicks demon butt, and the Ottawa-based filmmakers seem pretty excited themselves when I show them the cool cover and article on their movie that’ll grace the upcoming Fango #276 (plug, plug…).
Preceding the feature, and introduced by Fantasia programmer Mitch Davis as another shining example of Canadian-lensed fright fare, is the 15-minute Treevenge by Jason Eisener and Rob Cotterill, whose Hobo With a Shotgun won last year’s on-line Grindhouse trailer contest (and will be turned into a feature by the duo, who are on hand to introduce their new effort). It’s an Ontario Chainsaw Massacre with helpless pine trees (whose terror is conveyed via very funny subtitles) as the victims…but that’s only part of the story, as the title suggests. The subsequent outrageous gore gets a huge response from the fans; tonight is the world premiere of the short, which is guaranteed to have quite a healthy life at subsequent festivals. Wrapping up the night is Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, also accompanied by a very appropriate short, The Dirt, directed by frequent Argento scorer Claudio Simonetti with his sister Simona, with FX by Italian veteran Sergio Stivaletti and toplining the lovely and charming Tears co-star Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni. She’s here to introduce the movie, a brooding mood piece that serves as an effective counterpoint to the way-over-the-top Mother.
Sunday is a beautiful, sunny day, which makes it all the more unnerving and disorienting to be plunged into the frenetic darkness of [REC] in the middle of the afternoon at the Hall. My nerves have barely recovered before the unspooling of the next Hall attraction, Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge, whose title alone is enough to pique curiosity. The directorial debut of Takuji Kitamura (anyone know if he’s any relation to Midnight Meat Train’s Ryuhei?), it starts off with an attention-grabbing nighttime setpiece in which a hooded, chainsaw-wielding giant seemingly descends from the moon to do battle with a knife-wielding schoolgirl, as a teenaged boy watches from the sidelines. The story (scripted by Hirotoshi Kobayashi from Tatsuhiko Takimoto’s novel) then flashes back to reveal how young slacker Yosuke (Hayato Ichihara) first met the beautiful Eri (Megumi Seki) and embarked on a campaign to win her heart, and perhaps assist her in her running battle with the murderous demon.
The battle scenes deliver the goods, employing flashy CGI that thankfully doesn’t venture into overkill territory, but Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge is at its core a youthful love story that’s rather disarming—in the emotional, not physical, sense. Ichihara is a likable and funny hero, Seki holds her own during the action and reveals more dramatic depth as the story goes on and the two have real chemistry, which helps the movie over occasional slow spots in the narrative. You may not have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre, but perhaps only Japan could have produced a movie spotlighting that weapon whose concerns are more romantic than they are horrific.
Monday’s first two movies, over at the J.A. De Seve auditorium across the street from the Hall, join [REC] in exemplifying the ongoing resurgence in Spanish genre cinema. Before the Fall (a.k.a. 3 Dias, pictured above), the feature debut of award-winning shorts director F. Javier Gutierrez, mixes the serial-killer subgenre with what could be called a preapocalyptic drama. Set in the small village of Laguna, it begins with the announcement that a meteorite, bigger than the one that exterminated the dinosaurs, is on a crash course with Earth; unreported efforts to destroy it have failed, and the world is fated to end within 72 hours. Faced with this calamity, Laguna descends into chaos, and Ale (Victor Clavijo) flees with his mother to the isolated rural home of his brother—who once helped capture a vicious child murderer. Unfortunately for Ale and his nieces and nephews—who have already apparently been abandoned by their parents—a nearby prison riot has allowed the villain to escape, and he’s got a score to settle with Ale’s family…
It’s easy to see what Gutierrez and co-scripter Juan Velarde were going for here: an examination of how, even as certain doom approaches, the human urge to fight for one’s life and the lives of loved ones remains paramount. Yet the movie’s two storylines never quite mesh dramatically, leaving the feeling that the serial-slayer story could have functioned just fine on its own without the catastrophic backdrop. Nonetheless, Gutierrez generates real tension at numerous points and creates plentiful unsettling images, with the help of harsh cinematography by Miguel A. Mora. He’s not averse to pushing the envelope when it comes to the villain’s activities, and there are moments toward the end when Before the Fall achieves a Saw-esque level of torturous intensity.
Even better is Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes, which has been knocking out audiences at fests across the world and has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Magnolia Pictures. Proof of what a clever filmmaker can do with locations and cast that can each be counted on one hand, it stars Karra Elejalde (The Nameless) as Hector, a middle-aged man with a happy but uneventful life who’s given to sitting on his lawn and checking out the local woods with binoculars. One afternoon, he spots something unexpected: a beautiful young woman doffing her top. Needless to say, he’s intrigued, but when he heads into the trees for a closer look, he winds up on the receiving end of a pair of scissors wielded by a threatening figure with a bandaged face. Hector flees to a large, apparently abandoned nearby house seeking help—and that’s when the plot starts twisting.
It’s obvious from the title that Hector will wind up getting involved in jumps through time, and at first, that side of the story seems fairly simple. But Vigalondo, directing from his own pretzel of a script, keeps upping the ante, doubling and double-doubling the plot back onto itself until both Hector and the audience are wondering how, or if, normality can ever be restored. The filmmaker, who also co-stars as the young scientist responsible for all the temporal shifts, maintains remarkable control over the narrative, keeping things clear, tense and enormously entertaining throughout. A true mind-teaser, Timecrimes—like Let the Right One In and [REC]—is headed for an American remake (word is that George A. Romero will be taking it on), and like those films, it cries out to be experienced in its original foreign-language incarnation.
A European feature that already feels like it has been oriented for U.S. consumption is Danish director Ole Bornedal’s The Substitute (though this one too has been nabbed for Stateside reduxing, in this case by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures), my third Euro feature today at the de Seve. An uneasy mix of youth comedy and sci-fi thriller, this film stars the wonderfully named Paprika Steen as Ulla, the new substitute teacher at a school attended by troubled young Carl (Jonas Wandschneider). Like troubled kids in many films before him, Carl is the first to notice that something’s rotten in Denmark (literally in this case), though the audience already knows that Ulla is possessed by an alien that has unearthly designs on him and his classmates. He’s eventually able to convince a group of his pals that Ulla is not of this world, but will Carl and co. be able to persuade his dad Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen, a Danish star who’s turned up in major actioners like The World Is Not Enough and Hitman) and other adults before it’s too late?
There are nifty moments of black humor scattered throughout The Substitute, and Bornedal (who previously helmed both versions of the morgue-murder melodrama Nightwatch) receives significant assist from cinematographer Dan Laustsen (Silent Hill) and composer Marco Beltrami (Hellboy). But the script the director wrote with Henrik Prip, who also appears in the film as weirdo school psychiatrist Claus, is a bit schizophrenic in its overall premise: It’s established that the being possessing Ulla comes from a race that knows only war and wants to understand what love is, but her malevolent activities suggest that affection is the farthest thing from its mind. The scenario is also a bit cluttered with subplots and side characters, at the expense of a compelling pace. Thus, the movie is more successful in parts than as a whole, and it does have more edge than many of its contemporaries on the youth-genre scene, but it ends up being no substitute for a truly satisfying feature.
TO BE CONTINUED
