Fantasia Roundup! Small Gauge Trauma! On Evil Grounds

Up first? Small Gauge Trauma, the annual collection of the finest international shorts. As is always the case with this sort of thing mileage will vary from short to short and viewer to viewer with certain films working better for some than others, but there’s no denying that this was a remarkably strong collection. There were, of course, a couple I didn’t much care for and technical problems marred the screening of one I’d been greatly looking forward to—Rodrigo Gudino’s The Demonology of Desire which was inexplicably so dark that you couldn’t make out what was happening for much of the running time—but the good stuff was absolutely devastating, the sort of stuff you’ll carry with you for a good while. My personal top four:

Deadly Tantrum. A ridiculous, over the top, high energy homage to every classic gore film ever made. It’s silly in the extreme, non-stop energy coated with buckets of blood. Very funny and very well made.

Happy Birthday 2 You. David Alcalde’s latest starts off like a social issue PSA before getting all surreal with the dream imagery before then taking a totally unexpected turn and getting just plain nasty. Gorgeous, ruthless and very, very smart, all wrapped up in one beautifully photographed package. He’s working on a feature now and if it’s anything less than a masterpiece I’ll be shocked beyond words.

Protocole 33. The first directorial effort by veteran French FX guru Benoit Lestang—he’s worked on pretty much everything worth working on—is a simply gorgeous piece of artistic body horror featuring one of the most disturbingly sensual body prosthetics I’ve ever seen.

Violeta. A stop motion animated succession of domestic horrors. It’s a parade of the grotesque on a scale that’ll leave your jaw scraping on the floor. A fairy tale that clearly remembers when fairy tales were cautionary tales set ina world gone horribly, ominously wrong. You can find the film’s website here.

The shorts program ran just a touch long, which made for a frantic dash down the hall to introduce Peter Koller’s On Evil Grounds. And here I must make a confession: I find it almost impossible to sit in a theater and watch a movie I’ve programmed with a paying audience. It just destroys my nerves and leaves me a wreck. In the entire run of the Toronto After Dark festival, which I was program director for, last year I watched only one film with the audience. And my plan here was to introduce the film then duck out for an hour or so before coming back to host the Q&A. But I sat down for a moment first to make sure things got rolling and see how it looked projected and the audience was so positive, so early, that my tension just melted away and I ended up staying for the whole thing.

On Evil Grounds is the sort of genre mash up that’s difficult to program because there’s simply so little like it out there to compare it to. You need an audience ready to roll with it and follow where it leads and this audience certainly did that, laughing in all the right places, picking up on all the cues and tone shifts and just generally lapping it up. It went over well enough, in fact, that a sales agent in the room immediately approached the director following the screening to talk shop ...

So. It’s now Day Four, which is also known as “Todd’s Birthday”. I must head to the casino to indulge a bit of birthday gambling ...
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