Posted by Ardvark at 5:08pm.
...AND IT ROCKS!!!
I’ve been dreadfully neglecting the latest news concerning this year’s Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, but thanks go to Peter Cornelissen who shook me awake in our forum. Because man… this festival brings the goods this year.
Not only have they secured most of the premieres and hits from the Brussels festival, they also have Tim Burton showing up in person to receive a lifetime achievement award.
I’d love to be able to cover Brussels and Amsterdam in the same way as I did Rotterdam, but time constraints thwart me. I’ll sure as hell try to see a couple of titles in Amsterdam though!
The complete program can be found at the AFFF website, but look at this for example:
5 Centimeters Per Second
Sword of the Stranger
Dante’s Inferno
Film Noir
Vexille
Appleseed: Ex Machina
Fears of the Dark
That’s only their animation line-up!
And the rest of the list reads like a veritable summary of what we cover (and like) here at Twitch: Wolfhound, Sukiyaki Western Django, The Machine Girl, King of the Hill, Timecrimes, Doomsday, [*Rec], The Cottage…
The list goes on.
The AFFF starts on the 9th of April and ends at the 20th. There are certainly worse reasons to visit Amsterdam!
Posted by Todd Brown at 3:00pm.
We’ve been greatly looking forward to the sophomore feature film from young Finnish director AJ Annila for some time now. After the international success of his debut, Jade Warrior, Annila began work on a hard edged horror picture titled Sauna. Principal photography on the film just wrapped in Prague and a pair of fresh stills from the film have just been released. This pair aren’t nearly as graphic or disturbing as the first still released during the initial round of shooting but they give a good look at the principal characters from the film as well as Annila’s shooting style. It’s safe to say this guy knows his way around the camera.
A cruel horror film bathing in the Finnish sauna culture, in the no-zone between Christianity and paganism. A story of two brothers, who leave a young girl to die and become haunted by her, as she follows them in supernatural form, her face pouring with endless filth. The brothers escape with a commission marking the border between Russia and Finland to a Russian-Orthodox village. In there they find a sauna - The sauna where all sins are washed away. Seeking for forgiveness, the brothers step into the sauna…
Sauna is a horror film about sins, repentance and forgiveness. The story leads us into the core of darkness, where there is no forgiveness, no hope, no salvation.
You’ll find the film’s teaser in the Twitch Player below the break and you can hit the link below for the stills.
Continue Reading "Fresh Stills From AJ Annila’s Finnish Horror Film SAUNA!"...
At the time when I spoke with director/screenwriter Sean Abley, congratulations were due because Socket had just been picked up by TLA Releasing, which launched the film’s DVD release on March 25th (here’s the trailer).
Abley spent the better part of the 90’s in Chicago writing, directing and producing theater for his company, The Factory Theater. He then moved to Los Angeles where he spent time writing and producing more reality TV than he’d care to admit. “No names,” he jokes, “to protect the not-so-innocent from slanderous accusations and libelous intimations.” Thankfully, children’s television rescued him and helped him develop a handsome resume of writing gigs for the Disney Channel, ABC, and Fox Family. In the “Where Does This Belong?” category, he wrote video segments for the “Men In Black—Alien Attack” theme park attraction at Universal Studios Florida starring Rip Torn. He’s likewise rendered several queer readings of the horror genre for The Advocate.
Along the way he started producing films. After aiding and abetting the slaughter of young teens in Butcher House for FatKidFilms/Idolik Entertainment, and writing the screenplay for the horror flick Rope Burn for Moving In Pictures (soon to be released on DVD), he graduated to directing his own feature horror script, Socket, for Dark Blue Films and Velvet Candy, LLC.
TLA describes Socket as “an erotic sci-fi fantasy like no other” where “a pair of gay lovers literally get a jolt as they plug in for pleasure.” They synopsize: “After being struck by lightning, Dr. Bill Matthews (Derek Long) receives extra special care from a mysterious, sexy hospital intern Craig (Matthew Montgomery). Having survived the same natural accident, Craig introduces his new recruit to an underground group that uses electricity to reach ecstasy. Soon the two develop an insatiable appetite for wall sockets and each other, but it’s not enough for Bill. Using his gifted talents as a surgeon, this doctor will stop at nothing to find the ultimate charge!”
Continue Reading "SOCKET—Interview With Sean Abley"...
Posted by Todd Brown at 10:32am.
We’re outspoken fans of Chinese martial artist Wu Jing around here. Having been hugely impressed by his roles in SPL, Drunken Monkey and Fatal Contact - not to mention the drive to succeed he showed when I had the chance to meet him in person - I’ve become convinced that Wu will soon establish himself as the next great Chinese screen fighter. He’s certainly got the physical skills and the screen charisma is coming along nicely, all he needs now is the right role to vault him to the front of the line. Will Legendary Assassin be it? If not he’ll have nobody to blame but himself. The police thriller is Wu’s first turn behind the camera - he’s codirecting with Nicky Li - and the early images to leak online have been looking good.
Well, now we’ve got something a little bit more formal: the official sales flyer for the film. This thing gives a good look at the style Wu’s aiming for visually and the rear shot gives a detailed synopsis. Hit the link below to check ‘em out.
Posted by Al Young at 9:56am.
Bikini. Samurai. Girls. Versus. Zombies. Nuff said! The first teaser appeared online a few days ago and now the full trailer has arrived, chock full of bikini clad, bloody goodness. You’ll find the trailer and teaser embedded below after the break.
Continue Reading "Bikini Samurai Girls vs Zombies! Trailer for ONECHANBARA"...
Posted by Stefan at 6:56am.
This year’s Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), into its 21st edition, runs from 4th to 14th April, and features an unprecedented 13 local feature films and documentaries in a Singapore Panorama section.
ENG Yee Peng had made a documentary about her village hometown, Lim Chu Kang, that had to make way for progress and development in the area. Her first documentary, Diminishing Memories, charts a lifestyle in Singapore no more, and collates fond memories of a life bygone. The follow up to that documentary will now make its World Premiere at the SIFF, and I take the opportunity to talk to Yee Peng about her new film.
Continue Reading "SIFF 2008 - An Interview with ENG Yee Peng, Director of Diminishing Memories II"...
Someone has been digging around in the Norwegian film archives to unearth this little Archeological doc from 1999. I have my suspicions, as only one part 1 of 3 of The Goblin Man of Norway seems to be available at the Norsk Film Komite site (the other two are dead links), but it is gorgeously shot and scored, so have a look. It plays like Errol Morris meets John Carpenter and that is pretty darn sweet. The first 6 minuteas are embedded in the Twitch Player after the jump, or downloadable or streamable in the links below.
Continue Reading "What is The Goblin Man of Norway?"...
Remember the cautionary adage that too much of a good thing might be bad for you? Would it follow through inversely that too much of a bad thing might be good for you? Recent documentaries on the atrocities at Abu Ghraib—Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and, most recently, Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure—seem to suggest so, as if revealing in gruesome detail what went down at Iraq’s notorious interrogation center will somehow provide the remedy I noted lacking in Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor, presumably by shocking audiences into awareness and out of complacency into action. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that effect can be expected at this late date in our country as the republic (clearly, we’re no longer a democracy) slouches towards Bethlehem to be born an empire (if not at least a corporate oligarchy), and as from the sidelines the Republicans slyly observe the Democrats eating their own. I even wonder if such explicit depiction and—in the case of Standard Operating Procedure—gory reenactment worthy of pop culture’s best horror flicks will not induce fatigued avoidance and a mistrust of investigative journalism guised as entertainment?
Continue Reading "REVIEW of STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE"...
Posted by Todd Brown at 10:38pm.
Well, I do, for one. But hey ... a trip over to Cinematical this evening pointed out the new trailer from The Asylum’s blatant Indiana Jones knock off, Allan Quatermain And The Temple of Skulls. Now, The Asylum are the company that specializes in nothing but straight to video low budget knock offs of major Hollywood blockbusters, which would normally not place them real high up on my list of companies to watch but they’re just so damn gleeful about what they do, so content to tap into b-movie pulp that it’s hard to resist entirely and they do actually turn out a good film from time to time. Not that I think this will be one of them, but it does look bad in an entertaining way.
Looking even more entertaining? Their upcoming War of the Worlds 2, which has no direct connection to anything about to hit theaters - a rare break from normal Asylum marketing practices - but which may well be timed to cash in on the upcoming final season of Battlestar Galactica. You’ll find trailers for both of these below the break in the Twitch Player.
Continue Reading "Who Needs INDIANA JONES When You’ve Got ALLAN QUATERMAIN?"...
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution has kickstarted the Pacific Film Archive’s homage to “The Clash of ‘68”, moderated by curator Steve Seid who—in his introductory notes—specifies: “Soon to be forty years old, May ‘68 is demonstrating creaky joints, age-related depression, and memory loss. Definitely memory loss. So ‘The Clash of ‘68’ is dedicated to the memory of that most remarkable month.”
The series provides a fascinating and eclectic dedication, presented in conjunction with the Berkeley Art Museum’s exhibition “Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg” and supplemented before each program by “pithy montages” aptly named “Revolution Rewind”, compiled by the Pacifica Radio Archives who “have captured vital audio of some of the most incendiary events of 1968, as originally heard on [the Bay Area’s] KPFA 94.1 FM and elsewhere.” (For starters, I smiled to myself hearing Joan Baez attest that she didn’t think a woman should go to bed with a man who has a draft card; an apt entré into the evening’s heady mix of sex and politics.)
As Seid synopsizes the series’ opener: “It’s always just ‘before the revolution’ if you give in to the stasis of bourgeois life. But this is also a paradoxical state for the exuberant youth, Fabrizio, of Bertolucci’s paean to unhinged passion—a state of kept innocence vying with radical impulse. And Bertolucci should know, having been a mere twenty-two years old when he created this brilliant New Wave amalgam that references Stendhal, Godard, Marx, Talleyrand, Rossellini, Chekhov, and others. A young man of haut-bourgeois origin, Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) nonetheless fancies himself a bearer of progressive thinking. His is a shaky idealism, enflamed by the committed words of his Marxist mentor. Then Fabrizio begins an affair with his seductive and unsettled aunt Gina (played with torrid assurance by Adriana Asti). Neither of the conflicting poles of Bertolucci’s audacious narrative—the complicated emotions of the amorous aunt, or the exhilaration of proletarian resistance—can offer Fabrizio the safety he requires. A ‘nostalgia for the present’ afflicts this timorous youth, while all around him, things change.”
Continue Reading "PFA: THE CLASH OF ‘68—Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964)"...
Posted by Ardvark at 5:35pm.
Ard Vijn here with what I assume to be the last article concerning this year’s IFFR, and it’s an interview.
While its world premiere was at the International Film Festival Rotterdam last January, Jeff Pickett’s “The Skyjacker” will soon be shown on US soil: the North American premiere is set to take place in less than three weeks at the Atlanta Film Festival.
“The Skyjacker” is a movie loosely based on an incident which happened in the early seventies: a man aboard a passenger airliner claimed to have a bomb in his hand luggage. He demanded a parachute and 200.000 dollars. After receiving both at an inbetween stop he jumped from the plane in mid-flight (of course with parachute and the money), never to be heard from again. His name is assumed to be D. B. Cooper and he has become a bit of a legend.
Funnily enough Jeff Pickett told me this incident is currently back in the news, because the FBI is researching the recently found remains of a parachute which might be the one Cooper used during the crime.
In my review I was anything but kind about his movie, but Jeff was very nice about that.
So what do you ask a director whose first movie you just roasted?
Read on...
Continue Reading "IFFR 2008: Interview with “The Skyjacker” actor / writer / director JEFF PICKETT"...
Posted by Todd Brown at 3:02pm.
I don’t normally post links to cam-job versions of trailers here on Twitch, not so much for ethical reasons as because they generally look like ass. But, as any regular reader of the site should know we’ve got a major thing for Taste of Tea and Funky Forest director Katsuhito Ishii around these parts and anything that he’s involved with immediately gets our attention.
While Ishii works mostly in the live action world these days he’s also quite prolific in the animation world, directing his own animated works and also writing for others. One Ishii-scripted project we’ve been tracking for a while now is the Takeshi Koike-directed racing film Red Line, which we first wrote about way back in 2006. Well, the film is finally nearing completion and a lengthy scene was screened for the crowds at the Tokyo Anime Fair and that scene has turned up online. es, it’s a cam job which means the video quality aint great and the sound is horrible but it gives quite a good look at the madness that is in store. Hopefully this turns up in a higher quality version soon ...
You’ll find the clip embedded below the break.
Continue Reading "Fresh Footage From Ishii-Scripted Anime Feature RED LINE!"...
Posted by Todd Brown at 2:11pm.
After the grind that was the production of his atmospheric horror film Dead Daughters, Russian director Pavel Ruminov wanted to do something a little different. Okay, he wanted to do something a LOT different and what he settled on was a single set, dialog driven, slapstick comedy Work shopped and rehearsed for weeks with a troupe of theater actors Ruminov recently finished shooting the picture on a tight schedule and has just released the first key art from the film. The presentation of these images is still something of a work in progress but what he’s given us now gives us our first look at actual images from the film and they look like a good time, though I wouldn’t much want to be the guy with the fish.
Expect more details and, hopefully, some footage soon and in the meantime hit the link below to check the images.
Posted by Todd Brown at 1:57pm.
That Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien is preparing his first ever wuxia picture is fairly old new at this point. The English title of the film is rumored to be Assassin - which hopefully will change before release as there are multiple similarly titled films either coming down the line or recently released - and Shu Qi and Chang Chen have been tapped to star. Hou doing wuxia at all is certainly big news, Hou doing wuxia with a cast like that is even bigger news but it just got a whole lot larger with MonkeyPeaches reporting that the director has also approached Tadanobu Asano and Takeshi Kaneshiro to join the cast. Yes, please.
Posted by Mack at 5:20am.
To say we’re a little tickled about the possibilities of Fon Davis’ project MORAV would be saying it lightly. We’re pulling for you Fon!
MORAV is an action/sci-fi story that features amazing technology and massive armored robots embroiled in a corporate war for control of the country of Tangri Island. A non-stop action adventure story, MORAV centers on its characters as they struggle for personal and political freedom. morav.net
Robo Japan had the opportunity to sit down with the man who has dipped his big toe in all sorts of special effects pools [Star Wars to Coraline] and talk to him about MORAV, production methods, and the project’s future among other things. Follow the link after the jump.
