Fantastic Fest '06 Severance

Tongue-in-cheek? Goodness yes, why ever not? What Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie flick, Severance aims to do for the slasher genre. And I do believe they've accomplished their production goals. It's whip-smart, witty and funny. I love it!

The European sales division of Palisade Defence are on a team-building retreat. You know the kind, paintball, motivational lectures, walks in the woods... those things. But a wrong turn leads them to the wrong lodge in the woods, and its residents don't like Palisade Defence.

So they must die.

Chased thru the woods, beaten, alone (sometimes together) the surviving members of the team must survive.

Even if we might not want them to.

Don't even look for novelty here, the standard slasher conventions apply, the novelty is the quality of the comedy. It's a sharp blend of sarcasm, sunny stupidity, and sight gags- which considering the amount of blood involved in some of them, you might gag, too. The death scenes aren't the most original (although the bear trap is pretty darn funny), but they're well filmed and paced perfectly.

Danny Dyer and Laura Harris play Steve and Maggie the (respectively) stoned and good-hearted employees trapped in the woods whist sharp objects are trust in their general direction and bear traps abound in the woods. Both have a grounded approach to their characters, and both entertain and they try (with varying degrees of success) to lead their team to safety. And the killers aren't amateurs, they're seasoned professionals. The cold precision of the murders lends a genuine sense of dread and suspense to what could easily be written off as a light lark through a graveyard, and Harris is an excellent and straightforward heroine to Dyer's bumbling hero.

This was easily one of the audience favorites of the festival as the humor and the gore worked seamlessly to entertain and to educate the audience on the cutthroat business of comedy. Talk about a bad day at the office.

Famous Last Words: This is my kind of comedy. Bloody. Is that so wrong?

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.