Fantastic Fest '06 Nightmare

In my opinion, if it looks like a bad film school project, it is about a bad film school project, and it acts like a bad film school project, then... you get the idea. I've read online reviews that love this movie, but everyone I talked to at FantasticFest (including myself) hated it. I don't get it.

(Apparetly none of us did, the script walked away with the jury award in the horror competition.)

It's daring, don't get me wrong, and the plot is fascinating. Guy and girl wake up in bed together after a party and there's a camera set up at the foot of the bed. On the tape is murder. Bloody, violent, and gleeful murder. There's no evidence, they have no memory, they have no leads. In a moment of desperation, the man pitches the scenario to his film class for a project and to his dismayed wonder, they take it. Filming begins and all hell breaks loose. The filmmaker pulls no punches with the sex, the violence, or the paranoia, but it's not enough. Or in some cases too much.

Several reviewers site the lead's acting range as a plus, and I'll admit he does have a range. But they're all to the extreme. He's not afraid- he's VERY afraid. He's not aggressive, he's VERY aggressive. He's not angry, he's VERY angry. There's a lack a subtlety that makes every emotion feel pushed, he's not asking the audience to empathize- he's demanding it. He's trying to channel Christian Bale in American Psycho (suave, powerful, only with paranoia and doubt from the first) and doing it badly.

I know the line between passion and violence is a thin one, and sex and anger are intrinsic to the plot of this piece; but the sheer amount of sex and nudity and sex and nudity (and sex and nudity) were overwhelming. I'm not a prude when it comes to movies, but parts of the piece felt like we were watching soft-core porn.

There are layers and layers to this piece, and each one is more depraved and confused than the last. Reality sheers off the surface very quickly, leaving the audience with little more than an finale montage of violence, confusion, pain and suffering with no regard to what is real or what is imagined.

If this is all a dream, can I wake up now?

Fantastic Fest '06 Isolation (with The Descendant)

Cows.

Why is it always cows?

They're everywhere, in tornadoes, shilling for cheese, being abducted, they're everywhere! (They even have guns! Cows with guns!) And now they're here to kill you- horribly, bloodily, and if they don't kill you, they'll give you their evil virus. And it's scary, folks, scary!

I'm not kidding, really. It's a movie about killer cows. Granted, it's a freakish genetic experiment gone horribly awry (big surprise), and it's technically a killer calf, not a cow, but still.

It's the old story we're all familiar with. Down on his luck man lets driven scientist into his life and doesn't ask too many questions. Financial desperation leads to complacency, and complacency leads to disaster. Science isn't always the answer, and it can't save you from the monster at the door.

The production values are excellent. It's slick, frantically paced, the sound and the effects add to the movie, not detract. Very rarely do you get a monster movie that is able to resist showing the entire monster, and here we're very glad we only get the glimpses. But what we do see, and what our imagination fills in for us, is more than adequate to make even the most jaded movie goer look over his or her shoulder. There are shadows, pools, corners, barns, and labs and the monster can be in any of them. It is a very dark movie. Dark, wet and cold. And while the ending is a cliched as any I've seen, it was still one of the most satisfying films of the festival.

Cows. Go figure.

And I have to say, it's paired excellently with The Descendant, a simple tale of a pair of hitmen on a job. Just a simple job that is anything but. It's a professional production; the actors, stunts and effects are pristine, and while I've seen this general plot before, it felt fresh and still managed to give me the chills.

Fantastic Fest '06 Hatchet (with If I Had a Hammer)

Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

There is nothing redeeming in this movie, it's glorious! It's a slasher flick in the truest sense of the word. There's a thin skin of a plot, a passel of stock characters, a freakish monster of killer, and... was that Robert (Freddy Krueger) Englund, and Tony (Candyman) Todd, in cameos? Why yes, yes it was! And there were plenty more where that came from.

I'd go into some sort of analysis, but there really isn't a point. Folks on vacation go on a tourist-trap of a haunted swamp tour. Big, bad, hard-to-kill, killer guy with a tragic back story starts hacking. Blood, guts, and a trail of bodies later and there you have it.

Famous Last Words: Fun Times!

Hatchet showed with If I Had a Hammer which is an animated look at what would happen if Thor had to replace his hammer at the local hardware store. Funny as hell.