Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, the moment we’ve all been waiting for… will arrive on the 10th of March in the US of A.
Tomas Alfredson’s “Let The Right One In” has been very much lauded on these pages,
like here…
or here…
or here…
or here…
or here…
or here…
So you can bet we are glad to get a confirmed release date for both the DVD and BluRay.
Thanks go to forumer Majorforce for pointing this out!

Continue Reading "LET THE RIGHT ONE IN up for preorder in the US, on both DVD and BluRay!"...

The mammoth Fantasia Festival has come to an end and you know what that means:  prizes!  Who’s getting the hardware this year?  Ahem ...

Swedish vampire picture Let The Right One In was the clear winner, taking home the jury award for Best Picture while also netting nods for Best Director and Best Photography.  A surprising - and VERY gratifying - choice was Miki Satoshi winning best script for Adrift In Tokyo while Rule of Three and Shadows in the Palace took home Best Actor and Actress, respectively, and the jury awarded a special prize to Adrift In Tokyo‘s duo of Jô Odagiri and Tomokazu Miura.  In the First Features category Koen Mortier’s Ex Drummer edged out Nacho Vigalondo’s Time Crimes and John Bergin’s From Inside, all three of which I truly adore. 

Check out all the rest of the winners in the official announcement below the break!

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For 90 unbridled minutes Dance of the Dead, director Gregg Bishop’s lovingly over-the-top riff on the ever-malleable zombie genre, had the Alamo Drafthouse crowd in a persistent, giddy state of beer-fueled uproar (the first round of drinks having been provided by the savvy filmmakers themselves).  The film is a pulpy, blood-drenched gas from beginning to end, hitting the ground running and never looking back or kowtowing to common sense.

Loaded with a slew of standout, genuinely electric sequences (including one graveyard assault with spry zombies exploding up from their graves wire-fu style) the film also features a host of game performances by, wonder of wonders, teenager actors actually playing teenagers.  Sometimes the best innovations are the most obvious, you know?

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That Japanese college students donning wrestling masks and tights to try their hand at flamboyant professional style wrestling would prove entertaining came as no surprise.  That it could be as touching, heartfelt and emotionally satisfying as it is in Gachi Boy - a very deserving winner of the Audience Award at the Udine Far East Film Festival 2008 – came as a shock of the highest order.  Sure to be a huge crowd pleaser as it rolls out on the festival circuit Gachi Boy is a remarkably piece of work that fully exploits its sublimely ridiculous premise for comic effect while also finding a deeply human heart to the proceedings.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA: GACHI BOY Review"...

Joe Ma’s Sasori is a film that comes with all sorts of expectations and baggage attached being, as it is, not only a restart but also something of a re-envisioning of the classic 1970’s Japanese exploitation series Female Convict Scorpion 701.  It should come as no surprise then that reactions to the film have been sharply polarized, that this is a film that people either love or hate, but what is a bit surprising is why.  It’s not that the film has in any way toned down the exploitation elements, those are there in spades.  It’s not the fusion of Hong Kong and Japanese influences, that was expected with the film coming out of the ongoing partnership between Hong Kong’s Sameway and Japan’s Art Port and it falls in nicely with the bleak, hard edged 1980’s aesthetic already established in Shamo and Dog Bite Dog. No, the dividing factor is that Ma tells his story in a very abstract, almost impressionistic style that you expect from an arthouse picture rather than an exploitation grinder.  In many ways the criticisms against this film are the same as those leveled against recent films such as Susie Au’s Ming Ming and Phillip Yankovsky’s Sword Bearer, criticisms stemming from the same basic issue.  Well, I am a big admirer and supporter of both of those other films so it should come as no surprise that I am also very much on the love side for Sasori as well.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA:  SASORI Review"...

It’s gutter tourism for famed author Dries in Koen Mortier’s adaptation of the cult novel by Herman Brusselmans.  Transgressive, vulgar, violent, and sexually sexually explicit, Mortier’s debut also showcases a supremely raw sense of style while preserving and oddly tragic and poetic heart.  Trainspotting comparisons are inevitable - and apt enough, as far as that goes - but Mortier’s film functions on an entirely different level than Boyle’s.  Yes, boys and girls, we have just been introduced to a fierce and uncompromising new talent.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA:  EX DRUMMER Review"...

A brief summary of my response to the trailer for Jason Noto and Rory Kindersley’s Butcher’s Hill.  “Not bad, nicely shot.  Nice design work.  Oh, there are the sketches for the feature version.  Uh, oh, getting a bit cutesy.  OH MY GOD, I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY JUST DID THAT!”

Heh.  Yeah, it ends well.

A chance encounter with the directorial duo at Fantasia left a very good impression, as did the simple fact that they had the good taste to have their poster art done by the same crew that handled Pan’s Labyrinth  and that impression was more than borne out by the trailer for their newest short.  It’s meant as a pitch device for a feature version based on the same concept and it’s certainly going to get people talking.  Check out the trailer below the break.

** UPDATE **

The original trailer we had up was meant as a sales reel for industry insiders only and we’ve beena sked to swap it out with the public version. Not nearly as shocking but still good.

Continue Reading "Things Get Shocking On BUTCHER’S HILL"...

Though it is a bit haphazard in its construction and very nearly crosses some ethical lines in the way it handles its subjects Tiffany-stalker documentary I Think We’re Alone Now stands as absolute proof positive that the truth is often stranger by far than fiction could ever hope to be.  Think celebrity obsession is a strange phenomenon to begin with?  Can’t understand why anyone would fixate on a faded 1980’s pop singer?  Well, life is about to get a whole lot stranger for you when you meet the subjects of this film ...

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Long time Twitch readers may well remember us talking about Filipino horror film Sigaw a couple years back.  Written and directed by Yam Laranas it came late enough in the run of Asian horror films – and in some ways played to the standard conventions of the genre enough - that many overlooked it but Sigaw was such a well crafted little gem of a film that introduced some subtle changes to the genre that I truly believe it is one of the last truly important films to come out of that initial Asian horror boom.

And so I have been tracking with great interest the development of the English language version of the film.  Titled The Echo it again puts Laranas at the controls shooting a script adapted from his own by the writing duo of Eric Bernt and Shintaro Shimosawa.  The result feels more like a riff on the themes that drove the original film than a straight up remake and it is arguably the most art house oriented picture to come out of Roy Lee’s very commercially minded – in a good way – Vertigo Entertainment.

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Yes, the fear is here.  Dark Floors - the Finnish horror film conceived and created as a starring vehicle for Finnish metal act Lordi - just hit screens in its native country and is making its market debut here in Berlin.  The early teasers were surprisingly effective, making it very clear that Lordi weren’t aiming for a campy cheese fest with this but were rather trying their hand and putting together a legitimate horror film, while also showcasing the sure hand of director Pete Riski behind the camera, and those teasers have been borne out in the finished film.  Not a gore fest by any means - it would likely get a PG-13 rating in the US - the film is a tightly plotted, exceptionally well shot thrill ride that sets the rules of its world very early on, lets the audience know what to expect and then executes flawlessly.  They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but they knew exactly what sort of film they wanted Dark Floors to be and made a very good one.  And, surprisingly, a good amount of the film’s success has to come from the fact that Lordi opted to let others be the stars of their own personal vanity project while stepping back into support roles themselves.

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There is an adage about looking at a car crash and as horrific as it is you just cannot turn your head away. What if I told you that I saw I car crash last night and I didn’t want to turn my head away, that I leaned forward in my seat, that I was horrified but I also laughed uproariously at the carnage in front of me. You would think that I was a sick freak. And while it may be years before that is proved in a court of law follow me for a minute here.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA: Stuart Gordon’s ‘Stuck’"...

[Once again pulling forward an earlier review for a film that played here in Udine yesterday.  Having the chance to see Our Town on the big screen only reinforced my opinions below ... this is one very good film ...]

If you sit down and think about it calmly and rationally, Jung Gil Young’s dueling serial killer thriller Our Town is a film that very likely shouldn’t work.  The premise stretches believability and as the film progresses Young piles on emotional traumas and character connections by the boatload in the name of ramping up the tension and melodramatic catharsis.  But it does work, and it works very well indeed, thanks to hugely charismatic and believable performances from the film’s three leads and stylish, energetic direction from Young that keeps you so caught up in this bizarre, twisted world that you happily forget that it operates on a set of rules and principals that you’d simply never find at play in reality.  Can it be that between this film, The Chaser and Epitaph Korea is finally producing some legitimate young talent and showing signs of shaking off its extended slump?  Damn straight.

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When you create a film that manages the difficult feat of winning the hearts of both critics and the public alike, pulling in serious box office coin while also managing a near-sweep of the local equivalent to the Oscars, there’s only one thing to do:  make a sequel.  Luckily for us, Takashi Yamazaki’s original Always: Sunset On Third Street was so full of rich characters that any excuse to pay a fresh visit to Third Street is more than welcome.  All of the ingredients that made the first film such a rousing success are also in full effect here and while the sequel might lose a little something simply due to the audience now knowing the formula and what to expect it more than makes that up in the pleasure of seeing our favorite characters continue to develop and grow.  There is, after all, something to be said for a director that knows what his audience wants and then proceeds to give them exactly that.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA:  ALWAYS, SUNSET ON THIRD STREET 2 Review"...

[The Udine Far East Film Festival celebrates its tenth edition this year.  The lady friend and I rolled in to town last night and while we missed yesterday’s screenings one of the late pictures was Muay Thai Chaiya, a film I’ve seen and greatly enjoyed previously, so I’m pulling my previous review forward here.]

Kongkiat Khomsiri’s debut as a solo director after being part of the gang behind ultra-gorey Art of the Devil 2 will strike many as familiar on more than one level.  Drawing on the tried and true story of three poor friends from the country drawn to the big city by the promise of fame and fortune only to be forced apart by forces outside their control, Muay Thai Chaiya follows one of the most popular structures in Asian action films - one drawn on earlier this year in Alexi Tan’s Blood Brothers and prominent in kung fu and action films from the golden age onwards.  Now, if Khmosiri has failed to do the story justice you could reasonably criticize the man for simply repeating what had come before but there’s a very good reason why this particular structure keeps coming back - in good hands it produces remarkable results and Khomsiri’s hands are sure enough and his story laced with just enough novel elements to keep things feeling fresh and vital throughout.

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Free! Free at last! Free from the shackles of employment I braved a surprisingly chilly night to catch my first screening of TIFF. I met up with the boys as we settled down for the third Midnight Madness screening of the year, a wonderful teen movie featuring your common teen staples; drugs, booze, guns, breasts, sex, and lots and lots of blood. Is it any surprise that All The Boys Love Mandy Lane?

Mandy Lane is the object of every young man’s desire at her school. A desirable creature made all the more desirable by her inclination to lead a pure lifestyle and abstain from common teenage vices. You want what you can’t have and it drives the male teenage population around her mad. A weekend away at a classmates’ Texas ranch appears to be the perfect opportunity to crack that nut and be the first to get with Mandy. Jostling for position begins and the game is on. Unfortunately another game is being played and someone lurks in the shadows, quickly eliminating the competition. Is someone taking their affection for the lovely Mandy Lane too far?

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