Montreal Fantasia Festival Archives - Page 3 of 4

31 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Monster Seafood Wars’ is an homage to the silliest of Kaiju movies, but it’s not totally silly

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of kaiju films: those that are laden with metaphor, meaning, and subtext like 1954’s Godzilla, and those where giant monsters fight each other for the amusement of the audience like 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. I like both varieties of these movies, but it’s clear to me that Minoru Kawasaki loves the latter.

Monster Seafood Wars is in many ways a perfect homage to the silliest of the classic kaiju movies, complete with men in suits playing the monsters, ridiculously low tech effects, and a ridiculous storyline. The only thing it’s missing is space aliens.

30 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘The Oak Room’ weaves stories within stories to great effect

On a cold winter night during a snowstorm, a man walks into a bar. The bar is deserted, but for the bartender. After a drink and some conversation, he offers to tell the bartender a story that starts like this:

On a cold winters night during a snowstorm, a man walks into a bar. The bar is deserted but for the bartender.

You might be sensing the start of a pattern, and you are not wrong. The Oak Room weaves together several stories, each told between a man and a bartender and appearing separate until they are not, of course.

30 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Hail to the Deadites’ is an opportunity missed

Some B movies go nowhere, and others become cult classics. People love this latter category of film. People go out of their way to see them in special screenings and to collect memorabilia. What makes these films resonate is a question worth examining. Not only do they have to have a certain je ne sais quoi about them, whether that is amazing effects, the cast having a great time, or them being perfectly of their place and time, but something causes them to connect with audiences profoundly.

Sam Raimi’s trilogy of Evil Dead movies are, all three of them, this type of movie. The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness are all definitive cult classics with a wide fanbase. Hail to the Deadites, this new documentary about the fandom surrounding this trilogy, presents an opportunity to answer why and how these movies resonate.

It’s a pity then that it does not do that.

29 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘The Block Island Sound’ is suitably creepy

Sometimes, I wonder if people in movies watch movies because when weird things start happening, like tons of dead fish washing up on the shore of a small, peaceful island, you’d think someone would say, “Wait, I have seen this before.”

Cut to Block Island. A small, peaceful island with a year-round population of less than a thousand and tons of dead fish washing up on the beaches. A marine biologist comes to town to investigate and finds more than she bargained for.

Yes, you have seen this setup before. Yes, this goes to some probably different places.

29 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Sleep’ blurs the lines between dreams and reality

How do you separate our dreams from reality? How much would it take for your dreams to become so real you start to wonder where they come from and if they are real?

28 August 202022 August 2021

Fantasia Interview: Quinn Armstrong on his film ‘Survival Skills’

Survival Skills is a film I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I first watched it. A biting satire of police training, it frames a cold hard look at the way police are trained to interact with the people they’re sworn to protect.

I watched and reviewed the film yesterday and today had the opportunity to sit down with writer and director Quinn Armstrong via Zoom to talk about police training videos, the timeliness of this satire, and what he hopes to expose with his film.

28 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Hunted’ covers some well-worn revenge ground

The rape-revenge story is a well-worn film story. The bad man seems nice. The bad man gets the woman alone. The bad man reveals himself as bad man. Violence ensues. Hunted attempts to take a supernatural twist on this story, following our victim deep into a forest that will eventually become her ally.

Or so the pitch goes. The problem is that the film doesn’t really follow through on the pitch.

28 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘A Mermaid in Paris’ is a fun, heartfelt fantasy

Unlikely couples are the hallmark of romantic comedies. People who hate each other, people from disparate backgrounds, and occasionally, a man and a mermaid.

A Mermaid in Paris is, shockingly, from this last group. A man, Gaspar (Nicolas Duvauchelle), finds the wounded mermaid Lula (Marilyn Lima) on the banks of the Seine one night and proceeds to nurse her back to health. In the process, they fall in love.

It’s not exactly a new setup, but when you filter this story through the mind and aesthetic of Mathias Malzieu, you end up with something that looks like a cross between the classic 80s film Splash and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 classic Amélie.

Let me be clear: this is absolutely not a complaint.

27 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘PVT Chat’ can’t decide whether it’s honest or sleazy

Art is a method for us to explore ourselves and our relationships. There’s bravery required to put yourself 100% out there, make yourself vulnerable, and place your raw feelings in front of an audience to examine. PVT Chat wants you to think that it has this kind of bravery. From the first frames, which see the main character, Jack, furiously masturbating to cam girl Scarlet, the film wants you to know that the film will be about sex, and it isn’t going to hold back.

Where, though, are the lines between bravery and sleaze, between honest portrayal and porn, lie?

27 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Free Country’ is a stark, engaging mystery

Reconciling the past with a new and different present is a difficult task. A radical change in circumstances can upend your entire world and all the rules you live by. This is, in part, the setup for Free Country, director Christian Alvart’s murder mystery thriller.

Set in Eastern Germany, just two years after Germany was no longer two countries, two detectives come to a small town to investigate the disappearance of two teenage girls. Patrick, the detective from the West, is an idealist moulded by the democracy he’s lived under his entire life. Markus, the detective from the East, is a brute with a dark past and cynicism held over from a career under Soviet rule.

These opposing perspectives create conflict between the two men as they try to solve the mystery. As a result, each is forced to examine themselves and question whether they are genuinely the men they believe themselves to be.

26 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Survival Skills’ is way more than just a weird VHS nostalgia trip

There are many ways a film might examine some aspects of our society. Whether drama, comedy, horror, or science fiction, each genre provides a different lens to examine what and who we are. Satire is the most powerful of these lenses if used correctly. By taking some subject and twisting it to an extreme position, we can expose some of the absurdity of our world.

Survival Skills is one of those movies. Taking the form of a lost 1980s police training tape, it follows Jim (Vayu O’Donnell), a childlike rookie police officer going through his first day. Things take a turn, though, when the narrator (Stacy Keach) walks him through a domestic violence call, and he begins to disagree with the proper procedure.

26 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘A Witness Out of the Blue’ is a solid action thriller

When you think about Hong Kong Action, many people automatically think of martial arts. This is a bit of a shame because there is so much more on offer from the cinema of Hong Kong. Case in point, A Witness Out of the Blue, is a cops and robbers story.

Opening with a gang of thieves storming a jewellery store only to be cornered by the police as they finish filling their bags, some quick thinking leads to the thieves escape but arrange in their wake. Then, three months later, a gang member is murdered, and the only witness to the crime is a parrot.

Is that a hell of a setup? Yes! Does it live up to that setup? Mostly!

25 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Climate of the Hunter’ is dark, weird, stylistic throwback

There’s no denying that Climate of the Hunter is a weird movie that won’t be for everyone. Set in a group of remote cabins, it concerns two sisters, Alma and Elizabeth, who are there to reconnect with their old friend Wesley.

Wesley has been travelling the world, is an author and a storyteller. He has fantastic hair, a deep, gravelly voice, and a distinct sense of style. The women are, in a word, obsessed.

As the story goes on things, get weirder and weirder, though. First, the sisters are competing for Wesley, who seems to want them both. Also, Wesley sleeps all day and has a severe allergy to garlic.

24 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘Bleed With Me’ is a slow, but sure, burn set in the Canadian wilderness

There is always an interesting dynamic between new friends. Some people take to one another immediately, but new friendships usually take time and energy to create and strengthen. Time needs to be spent, conversations must be had, and trust needs to be built.

This is where we find the three characters in Bleed With Me: in the no man’s land between having met and having forged a real relationship. Emily (Lauren Beatty) has invited Rowan (Lee Marshall) to her family cabin to spend time with her and her boyfriend Brendan (Aris Tyros). It is at first awkward, as any trip like this between tentative friends might be.

Emily and Rowan have a connection, but that connection is not yet fully defined. After their first night spent drinking, Rowan wakes up feeling the worse for wear, and with mysterious cuts on her forearm, the question becomes how will it be defined?

24 August 202023 September 2023

Fantasia Review: ‘The Columnist’ is a revenge story we’ve all fantasized about

“It’s just the internet; it isn’t real.”

“Never read the comments.”

“It was only a joke.”

If you have ever spent any time on the internet, on social media, forums, or any site where people can leave comments, these phrases should sound familiar. The internet is the great democratizer, rendering everyone’s voice the same volume no matter what they say. The problem is that many people only have awful things to say.

This is the world we inhabit. It’s the same in the world of Femke Boot, a successful columnist for a Dutch website and magazine. She writes, and people comment. Femke doesn’t live in our world, which means that when she has had enough, she has really had enough.

Awesome Friday!

Tag: Montreal Fantasia Festival