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Grimmfest 2012 Review: You'll Be Dozing Off Long BEFORE DAWN

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Grimmfest 2012 Review: You'll Be Dozing Off Long BEFORE DAWN

Grimmfest 2012 Review: You'll Be Dozing Off Long BEFORE DAWN

Posted: 17 Oct 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Very few zombie movies are actually about the zombies. Whatever their scope and scale, these are generally stories about troubled people trying to keep on doing what they do even while the world's coming to an end. And the idea that maybe they'd finally manage okay if it weren't for, you know, the shambling corpses eating everyone in the background. You still have to care about these reluctant heroes, though, and it helps if they actually acknowledge the walking dead - if the zombie apocalypse forces them to confront the idea that things are never going to be the same again no matter how hard they try.Dominic Brunt's Before Dawn never really manages either of these things. It's the kind of début that it hurts...

Review: Wenn Deramas' THIS GUY'S IN LOVE WITH U MARE!

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 09:00 PM PDT

There is this one particular scene in Wenn Deramas' This Guy's in Love with U Mare! That sums up the film's curious and confused take on gender politics. Lester (Vice Ganda) and Gemma (Toni Gonzaga) arrive at a comedy club. True to the culture of local comedy clubs, the trio, composed of two tactless gays and a similarly crude woman, hosting the night's program suddenly take turns in pouncing on the club's new guests with supposedly funny insults. Their specific target is Lester, whose fervent pretensions of being a heterosexual male are not very effective against the hosts' especially keen senses. In unison, the hosts naughtily chant "bakla," (a derogatory term for gays) generating much laughter from the audience at the expense of poor Lester....

Grimmfest 2012 Review: DEVOURED Has Very Little Behind The Curtain

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 06:40 PM PDT

Back in my Creative Writing classes at university the lecturers would explain one way to create a fictional character was to start with one thing - a name, say - and extrapolate from there. Is it a weird name? If so, what kind of parents would call their child something like that? Are they a happy family? Where do they live? And so on, scribbling our answers across the whiteboard like a spider diagram, until they could show us a pretty solid picture of this fictional character that sprang from a single word. It works with movies, too, sort of. Yes, yes, it's not terribly professional to start forming preconceptions when you're trying to decide what films to fit into a festival schedule, but here's...

Singapore's SEX. VIOLENCE. FAMILYVALUES Banned For Racial Content

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 06:30 PM PDT

Despite the individual short films that make up Ken Kwek's Sex. Violence. FamilyValues having already screened in festivals around the globe - where people apparently had no issue with the content - Singapore's Films Consultative Panel and the Media Development Authority have slapped the film with a Not For All Ratings judgement, or, in other words a ban.At issue is not violence or sexual content - though it contains both - but humor based on race, particularly in one part of the three part picture (Porn Masala) in which two characters trade insults based on racial stereotypes. The MDA issued a statement on the decision saying "An overwhelming majority of the panel members have expressed that the film should not be allowed for public exhibition...

Now on DVD: LAST RIDE Desperately Travels Into the Heart

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 06:00 PM PDT

A remarkably combustible mixture of stomach-rippling dread, beautiful empty vistas, and an intimate tale of a father and son, Glendyn Ivin's Last Ride creates a distinctive mood from its first frame. Hugo Weaving stars as the father, Kev, who is always on alert and prone to violent outbursts of anger. Tom Russell plays his son, Chook, with a guarded sense that all is not quite right about the situation. The two are clearly on the run from something bad that happened recently, desperate to travel across the country to Adelaide, where, perhaps, something better awaits. The film played the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, which is when Todd Brown filed his review: Last Ride is a crime movie completely unconcerned with the crime itself,...

Blu-ray Review: Save Us From These DAMSELS IN DISTRESS

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 05:00 PM PDT

Writer-director Whit Stillman creates this perfect, hermetically-sealed world upper and upper middle-class college students with rarefied manners and a high-minded way of speaking straight out of Miss Manners. Greta Gerwig's prim, smell-sensitive Violet wants to enrich the inner emotional lives of her fellow classmates at an upscale Seven Oaks College through dance routines and self-improvement maxims. With Damsels In Distress, Stillman is targeting and poking fun at a very particular type of invasive social busybody, but to what ends? Stillman's first film in 13 years shows us some of its characters' backgrounds, has them expound on their motivations and wishes, and yet by the end of the movie, we're no clearer to understanding them or really even the joke that the filmmaker is trying to...

DVD Review: It's Grim Up North In HELL IS A CITY

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 03:02 PM PDT

The UK doesn't really do noir, do we? Okay, we had a brief flirtation with the idea around the 70s when Donald Cammell was still directing, but those were psycho-thrillers and grimy character studies more than bleak, existential detective stories. Decades later and it's inner city miserablism for the most part or the collected works of Danny Dyer, where for all the hand-wringing over broken Britain and the state of our troubled youth the violence is still framed in the language of comic books and the bass on the soundtrack gonna rattle ya spine, blud, innit.Seen in that light, Val Guest's Hell is a City (1960) is all the more fascinating; a bluff, imperturbable little police procedural with a tortured copper married to the job,...

We Talk Universal Werewolves And Offer 5 Copies Of WEREWOLF: THE BEAST AMONG US On Blu-ray

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 02:30 PM PDT

Universal has supplied Twitch with five Blu-ray copies of their latest action-horror movie Werewolf: The Beast Among Us. Here's the synopsis for the studio's latest lycanthropic film: A monstrous creature terrorizes a 19th Century European village by moonlight and a young man struggles to protect his loved ones from an unspeakable scourge in Werewolf: The Beast Among Us, Universal Studios' all-new addition to its time-honored legacy of classic monsters. During his studies with the local doctor (Stephen Rea), Daniel (Guy Wilson) witnesses the horrific consequences of werewolf attacks. Watching as the beast's fearsome reputation draws bounty hunters, thrill seekers and charlatans to the tiny town, Daniel dreams of destroying the ruthless predator. So when a mysterious stranger (Ed Quinn) and his team of skilled werewolf...

Camera Japan 2012 Review: JAPANESE SALARYMAN NEO

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 02:00 PM PDT

(I'm too sexy for this beer...) This year, the Dutch traveling film festival called Camera Japan had "food" as its main theme. Earlier this month the festival started in Rotterdam and there was Japanese pub food served, there was a sake-tasting event, workshops on how to prepare traditional Japanese foodstuffs yourself, you name it. And of course the theme also was reflected in the selection of movies that were shown. Older food-based classics like Tampopo were screened, but also many of the recent films revolved around food. Take Japanese Salaryman NEO, an office comedy about beer (SEXY beer no less) which had its first screening outside of Japan at this festival. Sadly, my short review would be that seeing it did not make me feel...

MANBORG Hits The Big Screen, Brings New Poster With It

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 01:30 PM PDT

Believe it or not, Steven Kostanski's Manborg is coming to the big screen across Canada and the cult hit has got itself a brand new poster by artist Jason Edmiston to celebrate that fact. A super lofi labor of love by talented VFX artist Kostanski - he has worked on the latest Resident Evil film and Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim since completing his scifi opus - Manborg is a hysterical throwback to the straight to VHS films of the 80s. And, yes, we love this one rather a lot around here. Here are the details:Gearing up for a fall theatrical release of the cult hit film MANBORG, Raven Banner Entertainment has just commissioned a new poster by the incredibly talented Toronto artist, Jason Edmiston....

Blu-ray Review: EXCISION Is Worth Your Time & Money

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 01:00 PM PDT

Excision should be one of the breakout horror films of 2012.Should be.I hadn't heard a whole lot about it leading up to its Blu-ray/DVD release this week, but all of the right people seem to be putting their weight behind it. So, it was with a fair amount of confidence that I took it for a spin last night in preparation for this review. When it comes to checking out any film that has the support of the horror community behind it, there's always the nagging fear that it's just going to be awful and someone just knows the director and is afraid to tell them. However, in the case of Excision, what little hype there is behind the film is earned. This is a...

Review: HELLS ANGELS (HERUZU ENJUERUZU) Is The Greatest Story Ever Told

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 12:00 PM PDT

Fans of Dead Leaves and Redline, rejoice. From out of nowhere Madhouse releases Heruzu Enjueruzu (Hells Angels), a wicked, manic and no-boundaries anime that may feel like a Studio 4°C project but has its roots firmly in the Madhouse foundation. The result is a completely unique and over-the-top, two-hour spanning climax with a surprisingly smart background story (at least, if you take the absurd animifications for granted). Heruzu Enjueruzu was a very troubled project. First introduced in 2005, the film surfaced in its current incarnation in 2008 (festival run) and 2009 (a small theatrical run). After that ... radio silence, a complete void. Until Madhouse realized they were simply losing money by not releasing it, which eventually led to the 2012 Blu-Ray release (English subtitles...

Grimmfest 2012 Review: WAKE UP AND DIE is GROUNDHOG DAY ... With Murder!

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 11:00 AM PDT

Seriously, "Groundhog Day with murder" seems like such an obvious idea it's hard to imagine some low-budget splatter production house hasn't tried it yet (correct me if I'm wrong), but Miguel Urrutia's Wake Up and Die appears to be the first. An anonymous woman (Andrea Montenegro) wakes up in a stranger's bed (Luis Fernando Bohorquez) the morning after the night before, only she can't remember how things got to this point. Her partner seems more amused than anything by her sudden reticence, taking it as his cue to force himself on her - but in the middle of this animal passion he suddenly strangles her. Lights out.Then with no explanation we suddenly rewind back to the start, only Montenegro plainly remembers what just happened. Something...

'I Live on an Island Called Cinema': Leos Carax Talks HOLY MOTORS

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 10:01 AM PDT

Leos Carax, once the wunderkind of French cinema, the heir apparent to the French New Wave, has made only five feature films in his almost 30 year career. He is roaring back to the scene with his fantastical new film Holy Motors. His third feature, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, made some 20 years ago, happens to be my favorite film of all time, so my anticipation for the interview was extremely high, to say the least. I knew the interview wouldn't be easy, considering his bad boy status and reclusive persona. I had to prepare for it: no easy questions such as, the casting of Kylie Minogue and Eva Mendes, and nothing too gossipy about his tumultuous love affair with Juliette Binoche and Yekaterina (Katya)...

Euro Beat: Sitges Wrap, Plus Good News for KLOWN Fans

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 09:20 AM PDT

You notice the difference between Sitges and other festivals immediately. While most genre festivals have midnight screenings, Sitges shows triple features that begin at 1:00 am. Every night. And, depending on the length of the program, you may still get out in time to hit the bars, which stay open until 7:00 am. Films the next day begin around 8:30 am. Thus, every time I went to sleep, or even took a siesta, I felt like I was missing something. It's a feeling which is sometimes liberating in a lassez-faire, go-with-the-flow type way, and other times, incredibly stressful. Fortunately, the program included a number of films already covered on Twitch at Fantastic Fest and TIFF, as well as a handful movies I had already seen....

Upendra's KALPANA Trailer Kicks The Holy-Shit-O-Meter Up A Notch

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 08:44 AM PDT

Last summer I posted the insane trailer for Tamil horror film Kanchana, which was written, directed by, and starred Lawrence Raghava. I thought that was about as crazy as it could get. I was wrong. I should know better than to expect anything less than the unexpected from south Asian horror. What has changed my mind? Well, oddly enough it is the Kannada remake of Kanchana, now titled Kalpana and starring the master of bonkers Sandalwood cinema, Upendra.This is why I love Indian cinema. This is an industry where both high-quality, artfully made films like Agneepath and bonkers high-concept films like Eega can share massive box office success. Kanchana was a huge hit at the Tamil box office, and was so popular, in fact, that...
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