Rashomon
A week ago Todd reported a Stormbreaker teaser that was leaked on to the net but shortly later, it was taken down. For those who didn’t get the chance to see it can now find the teaser at the official site.
Stormbreaker website (flash trailer embedded within)
The first proper teaser for teen spy thriller Stormbreaker has his online and it’s looking good. Now, why would Twitch readers care about a teen spyt thriller? Ewan MacGregor, Mickey Rourke, Bill Nighy, Stephen Fry, Robbie Coltrane, Sophie Okonedo, and Andy Serkis, that’s why. Oh, and action choreography by Donnie Yen, and yes the Yen influence is very obvious in a couple moments of the trailer. Nice.
Now, this is very clearly labelled as not being for exhibition or distribution so I imagine it’s just a matter of time before the Russian site that got it is going to be forced to take it down, so act fast.
Stormbreaker Teaser (downloadable MP4)
There’s a downloadable English-subtitled trailer for Harry Cleven’s Duplicity (Trouble) on the page for the movie on the website of international sales agent TF1 International. On the official website for Duplicity, there’s a different downloadable trailer in French for - and three downloadable clips in French from - the movie.
Duplicity stars Benoît Magimel, Natacha Régnier, Olivier Gourmet, Hanna Novak, et al..
Michael Lasry reviewed Duplicity for Twitch back on July 22nd.
Duplicity trailer (English subtitled; downloadable 4.3 MB WMV file)
TF1 International: Duplicity page
Duplicity trailer (in French; downloadable 4 MB SWF video)
Duplicity clip #1 (in French; downloadable 6.4 MB SWF video)
Duplicity clip #2 (in French; downloadable 2.7 MB SWF video)
Duplicity clip #3 (in French; downloadable 2 MB SWF video)
Duplicity official website (in French)
Twitch review: Duplicity
Our last few Fantasia reviews are still trickling in ... here’s Zane Spurvey on the shot-on-a-shoestring Canadian cyberpunk thriller Sigma.
A clear demonstration of his promise and abilities, writer/director Jesse Heffring has crafted an impressive piece of cyberpunk suspense with Sigma.
Set in a not-too-distant future, the film chronicles thirty six frantic hours in the life of a young doctor named Adam Lemay (played by Colin Walsh). The film begins with a strange, babbling stranger approaches Adam and, just before offing himself, handing Adam a video monitor depicting Adam’s wife, trapped and helpless in a small chamber. A nearby phone rings, and a strange demonic voice directs Adam to do its bidding if he desires to save the life of his wife.
With his final words from Fantasia, here is Philippe Gohier on Shadow: Dead Riot ...
Hated it. Absolutely, unequivocally hated it.
With gratuitous sex and violence, set in a women’s prison of all places, the movie delivers on its promise of unapologetic sleaze. Still, despite the tits and the zombies, Shadow: Dead Riot leaves me wanting more. Not more sex. And certainly not more violence. But more of anything that can not be reduced to a teenage wet dream.
Continue Reading "Fantasia Festival Report: Shadow Dead Riot"...
Once again here is Philippe Gohier reporting in from Montreal’s Fantasia Festival ...
A stench as villain? The vile, putrid smell of death as fright-inducing bad guy? The premise of Reeker sounded, at best, intriguing. But surprisingly, director David Payne makes it work.
Despite its odd premise, Reeker is actually an exercise in horror film conventions. The broken down car in a dusty desert town is there. So are the slow, spooky pan shots across a freshly abandoned diner. There’s even some romance thrown in for good measure.
What separates Reeker from its obvious influences is the self-awareness Payne infuses it with.
We’re down to our last few Fantasia reviews and here’s Philippe Gohier with his thoughts on a film we’ve talked about a bit here in the past: Three Extremes.
Working with the theme of artistic egoism and the ravages it causes, directors Fruit Chan of Hong Kong, Park Chan-Wook of Korea, and Takashi Miike of Japan each contributed a short film to Three…Extremes. Although each director’s segment showcases their considerable artistic vision and ability, the film ultimately fails to become something more than the sum of its unfortunately disparate parts.
Continue Reading "Fantasia Festival Report: Three Extremes"...
The Fantasia Festival has come to an end - not to worry, we’ve still got a few more reviews coming in - which means that it’s time to give out the awards and the big winner was Yuasa Masaaki’s Mind Game, a film we’ve been talking up here for quite a while now. Mind Game took the Fantasia awards for best film, best director (shared with Survive Style 5), best script and a special award for visual accomplishment. Best cinematography went to The Taste of Tea, best actor to Choi Min Shik for Crying Fist, and best actress to Kate Greenhouse for The Dark Hours. The Dark Hours, incidentally, just received the best film award at PiFan ... I’m told there will be a new trailer for that one within a matter of days and you’ll see it here as soon as it surfaces.
Read on for the complete list of winners in all the Fantasia awards categories ...
Continue Reading "Fantasia Wraps Up and Mind Game Cleans Up."...
The advance buzz on Ti West’s debut film The Roost has been simply deafening, with people lining up to proclaim West the next Sam Raimi. Does he have the goods to back that up? According to Philippe Gohier he does ...
Of course, the movie is set on Halloween night. Of course, the four attractive teenagers driving to a friend’s wedding get their car stuck in a ditch. Of course, they set out on foot and find an abandoned country house, with an adjacent vampire-bat-infested barn. Of course, none of them seem to have any idea what will follow. Of course, we do.
Riding confidently on a crest of clichés, Ti West’s feature film debut succeeds not in spite of its hokey horror-pastiche premise, but rather because of it. From its opening sequence, with a midnight-movie styled intro and crypt-keeper host, to the campy gore that follows, West shows us that there is nothing wrong with the horror-movie archetype as long it’s crafted right.
Intrepid Fantasia reporter Michael Lasry was a little bit iffy on the first two films he covered for us - Sharks and Atomik Circus - but Harry Cleven’s identicle Twin thriller seems to have fared much better. Read on for the goods.
Identity is the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another. That being said, imagine having a monozygotic twin; a sibling that is your almost exact replica. As we discover in Harry Cleven’s “Trouble”, identity is a fickle thing in the disturbing state of twinhood.
Matyas is living comfortably with his pregnant wife and son until he finds out his mother has passed away. That doesn’t seem enough drive a man completely nuts, as it does to Matyas, except that he’s been in an orphanage since he can remember and has always believed his parents to have died in an accident. Furthermore, at the Notary’s office, he is bamboozled at the sight of his clone. Thomas is his twin brother, and to Matyas’ dismay, Thomas received his mother’s love while Matyas was without family for no apparent reason. Matyas realizes that he has no memories of his time at home and goes on a quest to discover why his parents would’ve abandoned him. Things get more complicated when Thomas enters Matyas’ family and proves to be a far more competent father and husband than Matyas. In a moment of absolute distress, Matyas tells his wife “He’s everything you want me to be!” She replies, “No, but YOU can be like that”.
I first stumbled across Atomik Circus several months back when it played at a US film market and found the whole concept so incredibly odd that I immediately parked it at the upper end of priority films for one of our boys in Montreal to check out when I spotted it on the Fantasia schedule. I mean, you’ve got a French film starring Mrs. Johnny Depp - that’d be Vanessa Paradis - and one of Guy Ritchie’s boys in Jason Flemyng revolving around a wannabe rock singer and an alien invasion. How can you not at least be curious? Trailers look fun, too. This one fell to Michael Lasry who found a lot to like but was left wanting more ...
What is it about French girls with a gap in their two front teeth? Well, actually, I can only think of two. Beatrice Dalle as cracked sexpot Betty in “Betty Blue” whose director’s cut I highly recommend and Vanessa Paradis as Concia in “Atomik Circus”. Who needs orthodontists when you’re that charming?
The film sets off with the enticing narration of a radio host. We know it’s going to be a love story and that it’ll be fantastic. What we don’t expect is behemoths from another dimension which look like over-evolved flies landing in the hillbilly dump of Skotlett during its annual Beef Pie festival only to cause carnage with the intention of… you guessed it! Mating and opening those gates to hell! There are many typical elements in this film (the guy that looks crazy but who’s in fact been waiting for the aliens to come; the undying love; the evil aliens and the off-kilter secondary characters) but we’re treated to a Punch-and-Judy version of those clichés. The film was so straightforward about how it embraced the stereotypes that the audience applauded its candor when we found out why the aliens were invading Skotlett.
Continue Reading "Fantasia Festival Report: Atomik Circus"...
Fantasia is into its final week but there are still plenty of good films to come and plenty more reviews rolling in ... here’s Michael Lasry with his thoughts on Ghost House.
Ghost House, by Korean director Kim Sang-Jin (Jail Breakers, Kick the Moon, Attack the Gas Station!) has a promising opening. Pil-gi (Cha Seung-wan) is being sweet talked by a real estate salesman to buy a beautiful house by the sea. The salesman is very convincing - “Jesus Christ couldn’t build a better house”, he tells Pil-gi – and we can tell from the look on Pil-gi’s eyes that he will buy the obviously haunted house. You can always tell they’re haunted when they’re dirt cheap and that you see a ghostly reflection on a doorknob when you first see the house.
Again, here’s Mark Mann with a scathing review of Thai true crime serial killer flick Zee Oui. Did he like it? Errr ... no.
The film Zee Oui by Thai directors Nida Sudasna and Buranee Rachjaibun was the first film of the Fantasia Film Festival that actually offended me, and not for its depictions of disemboweled children or cannibalism. This film is not offensive because it portrays a serial killer in a sympathetic light; the movie Monster with Charlize Theron did that very compellingly, for example, and without too much oversimplification. Zee Oui is offensive because of the manipulative manner in which it tries to foist its absurd, heavy-handed morality of victimhood on the viewer. What was supposed to be ethically controversial turned out to be ethically barbarous, and in a very modern and self-righteous sense.
Once again here is Mark Mann reporting in from Fantasia. This time around he’s reporting on Juon 2. For those keeping track of Takashi Shimizu’s wildly overcomplicated filmography THIS Juon 2 is the second Juon film theatrically released in Japan and not to be confused with the second installment of the direct to video Juon’s that predated the theatrical releases or with the upcoming sequel to Shimizu’s American remake. Got it? Good.
If you liked the first Juon, what you can expect from the sequel is to be almost as pleased, though not quite. Nothing is that different in terms of the mood and movement of the film; it is still arranged according to chapters and vignettes about loosely connected characters, the ghosts do basically the same things and continue to appear in weird places, the little boy Toshio is still blue and creepy as ever, etc. However, some of the more simple horror tactics Takashi Shimizu uses in the first film become over-the-top and almost slapstick in the second, which is perfectly in accordance with the laws of escalation, but actually serves to diminish the fright factor (imagine: tv studio dressing room with a row of wigs…). In fact, at the Fantasia screening the audience was laughing more than anything else, though it wasn’t clear whether they were giggling as a giddy response to fear or just at Shimizu’s various excesses – probably a bit of both.
Continue Reading "Fantasia Festival Report: Juon: The Grudge 2"...
Today marked the end of my too-brief stay in Montreal and for my sole screening before hitting the road back to Toronto I opted for an animated film I knew nothing whatsoever about going in - Phantom Master: Dark Hero From Ruined Empire.
The film has garnered some notice as it is the first ever collaboration on an animated feature film between Korean and Japanese film makers. Korean animation is on a major upswing at the moment and may be poised to burst on to the international scene over the next few years just as their live action films have recently and the Japanese, at least, are taken notice and getting on board early.
Continue Reading "Fantasia Festival Report: Phantom Master Review"...
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