On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, the Jeonju International Film Festival has released a handsomely packaged compilation of 27 shorts by filmmakers from Asia, Africa and Europe. For the past decade, JIFF has been commissioning films from three directors a year, awarding them each 50 million won (USD 38,000) to produce a digital film of around thirty minutes in length. Bong Joon-ho, Zhang Yuan, Sogo Ishii, Shinya Tsukamoto and Pen-ek Ratanaruang are just a few of the recipients who have contributed to the project. Spread out over nine discs, and running from just 12 to 42 minutes in length, the films cover a broad range of genres, encompassing experimental, horror, drama, science-fiction and documentary. The latter address issues as diverse as the hardship of the homeless in Portugal and the plight of Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore; a sobering look at a transit camp for deportees to the gas chambers during WWII; and a decidedly unconventional portrait of a transsexual dancer. Six of the entries in the anthology are by Korean directors. No fewer than four of the films in the collection were later expanded, and one of them, Song-il Gon’s Magician(s), was made into a feature-length film. The Jeonju Digital Project offers the possibility of seeing short films by some of the world’s most acclaimed directors, works generally relegated to the film festival ghetto.
Continue Reading "DVD Review (Part One): Jeonju Digital Project 2000-2008"...
Just over two years back I fell completely and madly in love with the work of animator Run Wrake, specifically his surreal and stream of consciousness piece Rabbit, which was then screening as part of the Worldwide Short Film Festival. And so, it was with much chagrin that earlier today I realized that Wrake had since completed an entirely new piece and released it for free online viewing in 2008 and I’d missed it entirely. Well, thank god for the Fantasia Festival in Montreal for setting me right on this one. It’s called The Control Master and I’m including the trailer below the break. It is typically brilliant.
Continue Reading "Run Wrake Falls Under The Spell Of THE CONTROL MASTER!"...
[Our thanks to Ben Umstead for the following review.]
Sold out show. Standby line. Director Sion Sono in person. A crowd from 18-80: men, women, White, Asian, Black, Latino, everybody, anybody with a taste for the real, weird, wacky. I don’t want to over hype the fest screening nor the film itself (which won the Fipresci prize at this year’s Berlinale and played to sold out shows in Japan for three months) but when one feels the energy popping like I did on Friday night, one can’t help but know exactly why cinema does the wonderful things it does. And Love Exposure contains many wonderful things – Catholicism, cults, up-skirt photography, kung fu, cross-dressing – and over its epic (lean) 4 hour running time it explores all this and more like no other film. Yet when it gets down to it, Love Exposure translates to three
words: susceptibility, devotion and yes, love (in all its quaint and twisted forms). So yeah, get ready, I’m going to ask the question, some of you have been wanting to know… is it Sono’s masterpiece? You bet. I’ll take it one further now… best film of the year? So far… And one more… Will people be expressing their joy for this with physical feats such as reenacting its bonkers street fighting scenes, while others do their geek dances, exclaiming it to be an instant classic? Why yes, how could they not?
Continue Reading "NYAFF 09 Review: LOVE EXPOSURE"...
Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) and I met up at the Duboce Park Café the Monday after Pride Weekend. As Peaches, Joshua had survived his Pilsner pork pull; an event he agreed to in support of his beloved BLT community. “Every year,” Joshua admitted, “Peaches seems to do less and less [at Pride] in an attempt to reserve energy for the next eight weeks [of Midnight Mass].” Being that it’s now official that this is the last year of Midnight Mass at the Bridge Theatre (“Peaches Christ: R.I.P.”), I felt it compulsory to find out what’s up. Although our conversation was primarily to serve my upcoming Fangoria article on Joshua’s recently completed first feature All About Evil (I’ll let you know when that hits the newsstands), I took time to probe about the summer swan song of the 12th season of Midnight Mass.
Continue Reading "MIDNIGHT MASS 2009—Interview With Joshua Grannell (aka “Peaches Christ”)"...
It is obvious to any Twitchfilm reader who has been around long enough that we are big fans of English director Shane Meadows and his films A Room For Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England. His latest film Le Donk & Scoz-ayz-ee just premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival but he gave Empire the skinny on his next big film, a horror film, and one we’ve known about for a while now, Beware the Devil...
“It’s based on a book of the same name, based on the life of a guy who, by getting involved with Ouija boards and the occult by trying to disprove it, trying to take the piss out of it, got possessed, had to be exorcised, and later became an exorcist himself. The guy it happened to has died, but his son’s a novelist, and he helped him turn it into a book before he passed away, and now I’m working with him to turn it into a film.” Empire also said Meadows described Beware the Devil to us as “making Dead Man’s Shoes look like Play School”
The man with 30 films somewhere in the production ether has just added another project to his list. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of the Transformers films and the upcoming G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra feature has dipped his grubby hands once again into the 80s properties pool and won a bidding war- A BIDDING WAR!!! for the rights to make an Asteroids movie. Yes, yes, the game where you, a small triangle, shoot and destroy asteroids of varying shapes and sizes until you are mercilessly crushed by one of them yourself. Insert another quarter and go again!
Now, given that Asteroids was around in the days where back story and characters didn’t matter, we were too caught up in the actual state of the art video game action back then, this gives the script writer Matthew Lopez [Bedtime Stories and Race to Witch Mountain... I know] pretty much free reign to do what he wants and create an exciting world around the simple concept of blowing up Asteroids.
So let’s theorize and make up our own script shall we? Here’s what I can make up off the top of my head. Aliens have redirected asteroids from the belt in orbit around the Sun, that one between Mars and Jupiter, and they are launching them at Earth, hoping to wipe out the human race from a distance. It’s up to the Asteroid Defense Human Defenders [ADHD - get it?], a collection of young, hot, thrill seeking space pilots to intercept these Asteroids before they become Meteorites and plunge into the soft recesses of our fragile Earth. They’ll be doing some plunging into some soft recesses of their own because they are so young and hot and thrill seeking. Either an Asteroid will get through their defenses, kill millions, and one of the pilots will have this big emotional moment where they torture themselves in grief only get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. Or, one of their pilots will die, planting themselves on the front side of a massive Asteroid, and everyone will have a joined emotional moment then everyone can get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. There will be lots of special effects and lots of explosions [which you must have even though there is no sound in the vacuum of space] and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is done in Real 3D. After all, it’s Asteroids damnit!
What say you?
We all know how much man love Swarez has for Fred Dekker and his film Night of the Creeps but I think this little contest that Amazon is putting on to choose the cover for the upcoming DVD release might be enough to put him over the edge and send him on a drunken rampage throughout Iceland, drunk on whatever the Icelandic people get toasted on. And given that Swarez has himself designed some really good posters and DVD covers himself I don’t think the nation of Iceland will sleep well tonight. You’re going to have to see for yourselves.
Here’s the deal. Go to the link below and choose one of the three options at the bottom of the page. The cover with the most votes will be the winner and you’ll know what to look for when you go to buy this DVD when it hits store shelves. I think all three are ugly as sin but it looks like it is a matter of choosing the lesser of three evils. Option # 1, the one I think is the least hideous is the one on the left.
And you will buy it because it is an awesome cult film and you don’t want a drunken Swarez showing up at your door in the middle of the night. Do you? DO YOU!?!
Once again, Michael Hawley privileges the Twitch readership with his preview of YBCA’s upcoming calendar. Thanks, Michael!
Norwegian Black Metal, Graphic Sexual Horror and a Headless Woman. Jeez, is it Halloween already? No, it’s just this summer’s insouciant film/video line-up at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. But before we dig into what curator Joel Shepard has in store through September, here’s exciting news for YBCA filmgoers. Starting July 6, ticket holders will be allowed FREE admittance into YBCA’s exhibition galleries, whose days and hours of operation have been adjusted to align with evening film and video screenings.
Continue Reading "Michael Hawley Previews YBCA’s Summer 2009 Lineup"...
[Our thanks to Captain Awesome for pointing out a series of fresh stills for this one. More bio. More slime. You know the drill. Hit the link below to check ‘em out.]
I’ve always had a sweet spot for 1950’s b-grade science fiction and a particular weakness for The Blob and apparently low budget film maker John Lechago feels exactly the same way. His latest effort, Bio Slime is an obvious nod to the blobby days of yore, albeit a nod filtered through the much more explicit filters of films such as Evil Dead and Braindead. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing then the plot line shouldn’t matter very much but if you’re curious it revolves around a strange mass of slime released from a mysterious brief case during a drug deal gone bad.
[Our thanks to Pat Dahn for the following review.]
QUICK GUN MURUGAN is a blast. Based on a series of shorts made for MTV India in the early 90s, it successfully expands that colorful ‘attitude’ into a feature-length movie. Now, I never watched MTV India and my recollection of the US version is fuzzy at best, but I do remember those strange little animations and station spots were always the most interesting things they programmed.
Quick Gun Murugan is a vegetarian cowboy - a sweet, gentle man of values who shoots many people in the head. An outlandish figure, colorful beyond convention, he seems as out of place in 1982 as he does in modern Mumbai.
Continue Reading "NYAFF 09 Review: QUICK GUN MURUGAN"...
The simple thing to do here would be to declare Out Of Our Minds a spiritual successor to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks - at least to the more surreal and music infused parts of Peaks - and be done with it but to do so would be to do a dis-service to the singularity of vision presented here by creators Melissa Auf Der Maur (Hole, The Smashing Pumpkins) and Tony Stone (Severed Ways).
The film component of the multi-media project envisioned by Auf Der Maur – a CD will follow soon – premiered at Sundance, where it won a good deal of praise for its potent fusion of image and music. And having finally just seen the film myself I can say that praise was entirely deserved. Less a narrative than an immersive experience, Out Of Our Minds travels through its entire thirty minute run time without a single word of dialog, the story traveling from a modern day woman, back to Viking settlers, to a pioneer era logging camp and back again. The segments are linked thematically by blood, blood and death, with Auf Der Maur’s hypnotic, droning music providing a consistency of tone throughout. The fusion of images with music is potent, the breadth of imagination on display even moreso, the seeming ease with which it is executed more impressive still. This is just spectacular stuff.
Find the trailer below the break.
Continue Reading "OUT OF OUR MINDS Review"...
Though he’s been brewing his particular brand of madness for a good long while now it wasn’t until the arrival of Machine Girl that writer-director Noboru Iguchi really made an impression here in North America. But when he did, it was a big one - his fetishized story of a high school girl whose arm is replaced by a giant machine gun becoming a genuine viral phenomenon as it raced through the web. And how has Iguchi followed up the success of Machine Girl? With robotic geishas. Lots of them.
RoboGeisha is the latest collaboration between Iguchi and special effects man Yoshihiro Nishimura - himself the director of Tokyo Gore Police - and it bears all of the now-classic hallmarks of the duo: outrageous special effects, grotesquely hilarious gore and weapons where weapons just should not go. Machine Girl had the mechanized arm. Iguchi’s earlier Sukeban Boy had leg and breast cannons. Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police has the infamous penis cannon. RoboGeisha? This one boasts what the trailer graciously describes as hip-katanas, though the swords are actually placed considerably lower and more to the rear. Yes, Iguchi’s latest has ass-swords and women who aren’t afraid to use them. And that’s not even mentioning the giant robot-building, the transforming geisha-tank or the fried shrimp rammed into eye sockets.
The trailer for RoboGeisha is a virtual compendium of the bizarre and hilarious world of Iguchi, all of it narrated in bizarrely dry style. We’re very proud to have been given the world exclusive of the trailer here at Twitch, passed to us directly from production company TO Entertainment, and you can find it below the break!
Continue Reading "Noboru Iguchi Says ‘Geisha Is Beautiful! Geisha is Robot!’ It’s the ROBOGEISHA Trailer!"...
Smash Cut is the dizzying portrayal of ABLE WHITMAN, a trouble filmmaker losing his mind in an extraordinary way.
After his latest “serious” film is met with gales of laughter, Able decides to drown his sorrows at a local strip club—where he meets dancer GIGI SPOT. Minutes later, he’s convinced the honey dripping sex-pot to star in his next project. Minutes after that, he’s killed her in a drunk driving accident. Needing to dispose of the body, Able stumbles upon the one place nobody would notice a corpse…spread around the set of his new horror film. When the response to this new footage is praised for its realism, the guilt ridden Able has a complete mental breakdown. Believing he has finally discovered the key to making a great horror film, the director quickly discovers that one human body doesn’t yield a lot of parts, and if he wants to finish, he’s going to have to keep on killing.
Meanwhile, Gigi’s sister APRIL hires the city’s most celebrated private detective, ISAAC BEAUMONDE, to investigate Gigi’s disappearance. But when the simple missing person investigation turns into a string of stomach turning murders, Isaac realizes he’s found the case of a lifetime.
With Beaumonde hot on his heels, his sanity unspooling and his collaborators dropping like flies, will Able have the time, focus and resources to complete his magnum opus, or will he simply fade to black?
Yes, kids, we return now to the strange world of Lee Demarbre’s Smash Cut - an intentionally camp tribute to the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis starring David Hess, Michael Berryman and Sasha Grey - with the fifth of a series of six behind the scenes reels from the film. Reel five brings the money shot, which in this case means Sasha Grey being doused with liberal quantities of blood. Find it below the break along with the previous behind the scenes reels.
Smash Cut will have its world premiere as part of the Fantasia Festival in July with Demarbre, Hess and Grey all in attendance.
Continue Reading "A Fifth Trip Behind The Scenes Of Lee Demarbre’s SMASH CUT"...
You can do little wrong when you decide to go to Montreal for the Fantasia International Film Festival and this year’s lineup proves to be no exception. Want a taste? David Morley’s MUTANTS, Adam Mason’s BLOOD RIVER, José Mojica Marins’ EMBODIMENT OF EVIL, Tom Shankland’s THE CHILDREN, Park Chan-wook’s THIRST and Satoshi Miki’s INSTANT SWAMP are just some of the titles at this year’s festival.
There is a lengthy announcement after the break. Take your time and we are sure you’ll find some must-sees. Then we’ll see you in Montreal between July 9th and 27th.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA 2009 announces lineup. She be a doozy!!!"...
[Missed this one while out of town last week but am making up for it now!]
What do you do if you’re the producer of a venerable scifi franchise and you have to follow up an entry that featured not one and not two but a whopping EIGHT variations on your hero? If you’re the folks behind Japan’sUltraman franchise - about to hit its thirty eighth installment! - you trigger a mega monster battle, of course! And also recruit a whole lot more Ultramen.
The evil Ultraman Belial was imprisoned by the Ultraman King tens of thousands of years ago. When he finally escapes, he attempts to use the Giga-Battlenizer to control 100 giant monsters and conquer the galaxy. On the Ultraman homeworld, where there is no 3-minute time restriction, a team of 50 Ultramen including Ultraman, Ultra Seven, and Ultraman Mebius among many others mobilize to put a stop to Ultraman Belial’s plans and face off against his monsters.
Bad Ultraman plus one hundred giant monsters versus a team of fifty good Ultramen? Madness, I say. Madness. And the first glimpse of the madness can be seen in the teaser below the break.
Continue Reading "ULTRAMAN Returns For A MEGA MONSTER BATTLE!"...
