Last night the complete list of Sitges award winners was announced, and while a combination of alcohol and air travel has prevented me from posting the news until now, here are my personal highlights.  There are several juries on hand and several awards categories at Sitges, so hit the links below to get the complete list of winners from all juries. 

There were a few big surprises on the night, the first being that major festival fave Let The Right One In - previously announced as the European Federation of Fantastic Films Festival’s Golden Melies Award as the year’s best European genre film - was completely shut out of the Sitges awards.  Instead, Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance to home the best film prize while Kim Ji Woon took best director for The Good The Bad And The Weird, Brian Cox took best actor for Red and - another surprise, this one a very welcome one - Semra Turan took best actress for Fighter.

I served on a jury responsible for giving three awards at the festival and those three went to The Chaser in the Orient Express category for best Asian film, John Bergin’s From Inside as best animated feature and Rodrigo Gudino’s The Facts In The Case of Mr Hollow as best animated short.

Other notable awards went to the new Coffin Joe film, The Embodiment of Evil, Mamoru Oshii’s Sky Crawlers, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs and Albert Arriza’s Ramirez.  Hit the links below for all the winners in all categories.

Shinji Higuchi’s Hidden Fortress: The Last Princess is a prime example of what I have begun to refer to as the Dororo Syndrome.  That is to say that - like far too many recent Japanese blockbusters - it starts with a lone notable cast member - in this case the always charismatic Hiroshi Abe - surrounds them with a cast of musicians and TV stars and then ramps up the special effects and massive sets hoping that it will distract the audience from the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of script present.  This is the sort of film where - quite literally - one of the major characters is caught precisely in the middle of an explosion strong enough to level a mountain and yet manages to ride away without a scratch.  While also somehow saving one of the other principal characters.  Logical?  Not so much.  But that said, if you’re in the mood for some mindless action and are able to block out any comparisons to the Akira Kurosawa film that this is based upon it is not entirely without its charms.

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It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this site that we are big believers in Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez Gallego.  His film King of the Hill (El Rey De La Montana) is a great favorite and earlier today we had the chance to sit and talk with him about possible release plans for that film - not particularly good news, unfortunately - and what he’s working on now.  And Gallego is a busy man with two productions gearing up in North America and a third in Spain.  Read on for the complete conversation!

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Batten down the hatches!  Hide your women and children!  Cult monster fave Guilala - last (and only previously) seen in 1967’s The X From Outer Space - is back and in cult director Minoru Kawasaki’s hands nobody is safe!  Not even the leaders of the western world!

Let’s be clear here:  Kawasaki, quite proudly, does not make what anybody would generally term ‘good’ films.  He is a master of cheap shlock, gimmicky humor, and rubber monsters.  He is the crazy child of Japanese film, the man who simply refuses to grow up and continues to make precisely the sorts of films he would have loved himself when he was ten, and he is an absolute master of his craft.  Kawasaki is a trash-auteur of a very particular type and while his films may not be ‘good’ they are always good for at least a handful of very solid laughs and, by my count, his Guilala revival flick is his strongest since he first burst into the international scene with The Calamari Wrestler.

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Freshly off a screening of Fumihiko Sori’s Ichi - a partial re-envisioning, partial continuation of the classic Zatoichi saga - I feel quite confident about two things.

First, though he now has only three feature films to his credit Sori is arguably Japan’s most wildly diverse director.  Thus far he has made a charming indie comedy (Ping Pong), an animated scifi spectacle (Vexille), and now a traditional swordplay drama.  All are impeccably crafted and all vary so wildly in style and approach that you’d never guess that the same man directed all three if not for his name in the credits.

Second, if there is any man on the surface of this planet with a fighting chance to out-do Riki Takeuchi in the crazy-face department then that man must surely be Shidou Nakamura.  Yes, both are in this film and, yes, both break out the crazy-face on a regular basis.

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And the acclaim just keeps rolling in for Swedish vampire film Let The Right One In ...

Every year each of the affiliated festivals of the European Federation of Fantastic Film Festivals - there are about twenty in all - award what is known as the Silver Melies Award to the best European genre film to take part in each of their festivals.  Those silver award winning films, in turn, become eligible to win a Golden Melies Award as the Best European Genre Film of the year.  This year’s award ceremony has just wrapped up here in Sitges and out of a very strong field that included the likes of The Orphanage, Frontiere[s], King of the Hill, Inside, The Substitute and more, Let The Right One In has been selected as this year’s winner.  Yes, it really is that good.

The film will be rolling out in US theatres in the very near future, check out the American trailer below the break.

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A.J. Annila’s horror film Sauna has been one of our conversation pieces around these parts. We have been talking about it a long time and a lot of us finally got to see it in September at TIFF and Fantastic Fest. Most of us liked it. Some did not. But that is not as important as the news that IFC Entertainment has picked up the U.S. rights for VOD and DVD sales for this Finnish supernatural thriller.

When more details surface we’ll keep you in the know. 

One very good reason to see Agnes Merlet’s chilling new possession film Dorothy:  young first time actress Jenn Murray in the title role.  To step into a lead role your first time out is a challenge no matter what the role is but to step into a role like this - a role with serious physical, mental and emotional demands - is entirely another.  And Murray, to be blunt, absolutely nails it with a stunningly charismatic performance.  This girl is going to be a serious, serious star and will soon be scooping up the sort of roles that generally go to Samantha Morton these days.  I guarantee it.  The entire cast is very strong, actually, and the film has a beautifully constructed air of menace to it which makes one very badly cliched character and an ultimately unsatisfying ending all that much more disappointing.

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Evidently no longer content with simply being Korea’s Action Kid, director Ryu Seung-Wan has now taken it upon himself to become Asia’s Blake Edwards as well, or perhaps an adopted Zucker Brother, with his new comedy Dachimawa Lee playing like the demented spawn of The Pink Panther and Spies Like Us with pudgy Im Won-Hee filling in for Peter Sellers.  A head-spinning comic riff on just about every action or spy movie Ryu has ever seen Dachimawa Lee arguably gives just a little too much bang for the buck.  There is no joke too obvious, no performance too broad, no gag too - dare I say - salivary for Ryu to include here.  Kitchen sink?  He’s got the cabinets and light fixtures in there, too.  Like all films of the type how much enjoyment you get from it will depend entirely on whether you share Ryu’s particular sense of humor and film reference library - and there were a number of walk outs from those who evidently shared neither - and the gags definitely reach a saturation point before you get all the way through, but man ... when this thing works it positively soars.

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Since seeing the very first stills from acclaimed music video director Albert Arizza’s feature debut Ramirez early this year, we have been struck by obvious sense of style and skill for composition.  Clearly Arizza can shoot quality film.  Anticipation grew as footage appeared - and disappeared - on the web and now Ramirez has finally taken its first step into the public eye, screening as a work-in-progress here in Sitges.

A surprisingly poetic and gently rhythmic film, Ramirez is a study of young Sebastian Ramirez:  aspiring photographer, low level drug dealer, and highly accomplished serial killer.

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While I’ve been asked to withhold any proper reviews of films appearing in the Anima’t or Orient Express sections of this years Sitges Festival so as to avoid any potential conflicts with my role on the jury for those sections, I am planning to highlight a number of the animated shorts that I’ve been seeing.  There are a solid fistful of this that I’m trying to round up materials on - fingers crossed for some truly spectacular stuff - and the one that turned up right away was fantastic French animated short Monsieur COK. 

This one manages the difficult task of playing a strong political satire card while also being light, comedic and very entertaining and it succeeds brilliantly on all levels thanks to the unique character designs and unusual blend of 2D and 3D animation espoused by director Franck Dion.  It kind of ends up being like Lane Smith on acid.  As if Lane Smith needs any acid. 

You can check the trailer below the break and hit the link below for the official site.

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On my first night here in Sitges I had the good fortune to run into Spanish cult film maker Cesar Velasco Broca, he of the much loved - and Cannes-playing - short film Avant Petalos Grillados.  Velasco Broca is one of the most distinctive film makers in the world today and so when he said he had to introduce me to his friend Javier Chillon, I knew I had to pay attention.  And, frankly, even if Velasco Broca hadn’t been the one to introduce us it would have taken less than a minute of Chillon’s film for me to realize that these two must be close.  In fact, while I haven’t confirmed this yet I’m reasonably confident that Chillon must have borrowed Velasco Broca’s vintage camera equipment to achieve the authentically grainy feel of Die Schneider Krankheit.

A mock-propaganda film, Die Schneider Krankheit is a stunningly - and lovingly - accurate reproduction of 1950s film techniques, a purported newsreel detailing the beginnings of a viral outbreak throughout Germany following the crash landing of a Russian space capsule containing an infected monkey.  Shot on grainy film stock in a long-since abandoned ratio, with seamless makeup effects and brilliantly squishy creature effects that could easily be the product of some forgotten 1950’s b-film, Die Schneider Krankheit perfectly captures the ‘We Can Do It’ attitude that marked the 1950s, an era when we still believed that technology would be the solution to all of our problems despite obvious evidence that it was actually a major cause of many.

Chillon has passed us a series of five lobby cards from the film for your perusal and enjoyment.  The images used on these are in color while the finished film is black and white, so they’re not precisely what you get in the film itself but it’s more than close enough to give you a good feel for it.

2008 is the year of the horror-western, apparently, and one that we have been tracking for quite some time here is Swiss director Olivier Beguin’s twenty minute short Dead Bones, which has just premiered at the Sitges Festival.  What do we learn from this film?  There is a reason why people might be inclined to name a town Dead Bones, dammit, and maybe it’d be best if you just went ahead and rode around it.

The film tells the story of a bounty hunter who rides into a remote town in pursuit of a pair of criminals only to discover the town itself is far more dangerous than his quarry.  Shot on location using the still-existing Spanish sets that hosted the large majority of spaghetti westerns through the 1970’s Dead Bones has a remarkably authentic and cinematic quality to it, and full marks go to Beguin for having the good sense to start things off right by going back to the land that made westerns popular in the first place.

As is often the case with a project such as this in which virtually everybody involved is working outside of their first language - it’s shot in English with a multi-ethnic cast and crew - the rhythms of the dialog can feel forced and unnatural in places but Beguin shows his chops in a pair of extended set pieces that crank up the tension nicely:  an underground chase through a series of tunnels with bounty hunter and prey chained together at the wrist and an extended, tightly choreographed outdoor gun battle.  Also very noteworthy are the stellar gore effects, the first gouts of blood splattered on the screen by Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodata, appearing in an extended cameo.

A little side note before I go on to write about Nicolas Lopez’s superhero comedy Santos.  I am often asked why Twitch runs multiple reviews of films on the site rather than adopting some sort of official party line and then sticking to it.  The answer is quite simple:  because the group of us who write here have different tastes and different opinions and we often disagree wildly on the relative merits of certain films.  And Santos is certainly one of those films.  To say that Mack took a dislike to it when it screened at Fantastic Fest would be an understatement.  A rather large understatement in fact - I don’t think I’ve ever seen him react this strongly to anything before.  I, however, just caught it at the Sitges Festival and, though it’s not without it’s little bumps and warts, I was rather taken with its goofy charms.  And with that out of the way, on we go ...

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What a difference context can make.  Several months back I was given the chance to see an early, nearly finished cut of The Embodiment of Evil - the long awaited return of Brazilian cult icon Coffin Joe to the big screen after a decades-long absence - and I eagerly jumped at the opportunity.  In retrospect this was a mistake.  The pacing seemed slightly off, the dvd did no favors to the film’s striking visuals and the carnival-barker approach writer-director-actor Jose Mojica Marins takes to his character is just so much larger than the confines of the television screen that it came off more silly than frightening.  This version of the film, in this format just simply did not work.  But the finished film on the big screen?  That’s an entirely different story.

Functioning both as a conclusion tot he Coffin Joe trilogy begun in 1964 and as an introduction to the character for new audiences - and remarkably successful on both counts - The Embodiment of Evil is a shocking, potent reminder that the creative blood still runs strong in Marins’ veins.  It is powerful, gut wrenching stuff laced through with dark humor and surreal, horrifying imagery.  There is not now nor has there ever been anybody in the film world quite like Marins and at the age of 74 he has done precisely what Dario Argento could not with Mother Of Tears: he has created a film that not only concludes his early work but also expands his legacy.

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