I’ve rounded up a few handfuls of the films that really stood out to me during Fantasia Fest’s 2020 outing for Daily Grindhouse’s readers. Due to the nature of everything right now, it’s a great idea to keep tabs on these movies and hope that they get the best and widest distribution possible. Fantasia did an incredible job giving audiences a smooth and fun experience in an unpreceded situation, and it was an honor to be able to see the creatives both behind and in front of the scenes shine.
12 HOUR SHIFT, written and directed by Brea Grant
Angela Bettis fans rejoice: She’s back with a meaty, complex lead role in a powerhouse blood-splattered ride in Brea Grant’s 12 HOUR SHIFT. A fresh approach to the “one really bad night” genre, nurse Mandy (Bettis) is saddled with one of the worst long, long shifts seen since, well, LAST SHIFT. She’s battling addiction, exhaustion, a dangerous side job in an organ harvesting scheme, and soon, a blood bath the likes of which even a hospital has never seen.
It’s nervy and muscular with some dark comedic moments peppered throughout. It’s set in 1999, but it also channels the same kind of kinetic energy young filmmakers were reveling in at the time (i.e., GO) between the gruesome set pieces. David Arquette has a small but pivotal role, as do some beloved wrestlers (even I know Mick Foley!), and wrestling fans who check this one out for that reason alone will be pleased that they stumbled on to a real corker.
My only real complaint is that the chemistry between Mandy and Karen (Nikea Gamby-Turner) is so good that I wish the latter’s role was expanded to give the actresses more screen time together. If there’s a sequel, they could and should be the next legendary genre-comedy duo.
CRAZY SAMURAI MUSASHI, directed by Yuji Shimomura
People tend to be hard on gimmicks, but I always found them to be a charming kind of shabby magic humans create to make selling things to each other a little more palatable. Moreover, when the gimmick turns out to merely be the wrapping around a quality production, the end result is that much more enjoyable. I so badly wanted this to be the case for CRAZY SAMURAI MUSASHI, which is an exhaustive one-take battle with only rare moments of dialogue.
Sadly, beyond the extraordinary stamina of the extraordinary Tak Sakaguchi (VERSUS), who I’m pretty sure stopped aging 20 years ago, MUSASHI quickly shows its stripes as an interesting athletic and filming exercise and not much else. The story (such as it is) is a war of attrition, and its energies are more focused on taking Miyamoto Musashi from being merely a man into becoming a legend.
Because of the subject matter, I think it’s important to note that hundreds of men are killed in this movie. Because a set-up this dependent on volume and time demands it, CGI blood is used, so everyone is left pretty much spotless throughout. Once I noticed it, my brain much preferred watching to see how the extras would swing themselves out of the frame to run around and come back fighting as a new character from a different angle.
I will say that it’s still quite an accomplishment, and I’d recommend it to anyone who finds it easy to value experimentation at the expense of traditional film pleasures.
SURVIVAL SKILLS, directed by Quinn Armstrong
Now, for a gimmick that works, let’s turn to Stacy Keach narrating a 1980s VHS-style police training video! New officer Jim (Vayu O’Donnell, whose performance feels as though he’s channeling Harpo Marx if he were playing a robot, which is absolutely perfect here) is our friendly neighborhood cop, and we’re going to follow his first year on the job.
This cheerful instructional videotape reality quickly erodes, however, as real abuse cases, random violence, and the emotional toll of the former start moving the narrative away from black and white decision-making and toward the legitimate horrors of daily life. This isn’t only displayed in the plot itself and Jim’s constant befuddlement, but the videotape itself starts warping to mimic Jim’s inner turmoil.
While the VHS-style trend in indie and genre moviemaking can often be grating and clearly haphazardly rushed, it’s undeniably charming to those who are of a certain age and prone to nostalgia when it’s done right (VHYES). SURVIVAL SKILLS succeeds mightily because it realizes no one can feast on an aesthetic gimmick alone for too long (those tendencies may have been worked out when this started as a short). It’s genuinely funny, it invests in its characters, and because of that, it’s often moving.
ANYTHING FOR JACKSON, directed by Justin Dyck
Fans of THE CONJURING series have a fresh new creeper to love. If you’re no fan of those films, however, I have some great news: ANYTHING FOR JACKSON eschews self-seriousness and replaces it with dark humor and more blood than you can shake a cursed item at.
Couple Audrey and Henry Walsh (all-stars Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings) are enjoying their twilight years in a beautiful house with a sweet Canadian outlook on things. Or so it seems. While their hearts are in the right place, everything else definitely isn’t, and it isn’t long before we find out that they’ve fallen in with the local Satanists to try to bring their young grandson back from beyond the grave. This includes kidnapping and imprisoning a pregnant woman, played by Konstantina Mantelos.
ANYTHING FOR JACKSON is relentless, with constant gore and violence from attacks from various demons finding their way into bedrooms, backyards, and brains. It often runs on the knife-edge of completely going to the horror-comedy route, but it impressively never commits to either side too heavily. What we get is a satisfying, legitimately scary horror film with a great, grim sense of humor that hits that sweet spot of being original while feeling pleasantly familiar.
MONSTER SEAFOOD WARS, directed by Minoru Kawasaki
A tokusatsu film that revels in every beloved goofy trope that a kaiju adventure can throw at you, MONSTER SEAFOOD WARS finds some fresh excitement by incorporating a bit of an everyday human hobby into the giant monster carnage mix: foodie culture!
Some misplaced seafood soon turns into enormous food monsters. Humans prevail in the first round thanks to the brave Seafood Monster Attack Team, and it turns out that giant monster meat is delicious beyond compare, and it soon becomes the trendy new delicacy. The part of the film that centers around people filming themselves eating the food and reviewing it, YouTube-style, was so charming that I wish the movie stayed in that mode.
While the movie is cheerfully fun enough to satisfy most Kawasaki fans kaiju devotees with a sense of humor (which I suspect is all of them), the repetitive fights can wear a bit thin and the human element was the base standard love triangle, “have to prove myself to anyone” fare that could have easily been skipped. By the end, I was left with an appetizer-level satisfaction rather than that from a full meal.
A MERMAID IN PARIS, directed by Mathias Malzieu
You ever feel like we fall in love with mermaids just cuz we’re supposed to?
A pure Parisian fantasy, A MERMAID IN PARIS will beguile those with a weakness towards whimsy and leave the more cynical wanting a bit more from their story and characters.
Here we have a classic fish out of water story: A beautiful mermaid, Lula (Marilyn Lima), ends up lost in the arms of a handsome musician, Gaspard (Nicolas Duvauchelle.) They’re both charming, sure, but only lightly so: These two are archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out characters. In this aqua-hued fable, it works.
Of course, the attractive musician lives in a picturesque apartment that would feel at home in a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, and he works at his family’s restaurant, Flowerburger, which is attached to a sumptuous cabaret where he also performs and where everyone we meet is a colorful character. This is much more of a storybook adventure that will appeal to nearly every age range rather than anything plumbing the depths of, say, THE SHAPE OF WATER. It’s an aesthetically stunning film perfect for any viewer looking for a bit of a magical celebration to escape into for a while.
I became a big fan of the French band Dionysos after seeing 2013’s JACK AND THE CUCKOO-CLOCK HEART. Band member and director Mathias Malzieu returns with another memorable soundtrack and film that pays tribute to traditional darkness-tinged fairytales, and it’s very welcome in a world that currently seems to lack any kind of magic at all.
BLEED WITH ME, directed by Amelia Moses
There’s a certain subgenre in horror and thriller films that I’ve yet to fully connect with: the bleak, emotionally confusing tension pressure cooker movie. You know, put a couple with problems or some friends who grew apart from each other in a confined space, add some kind of otherwordly element to really put the screws to the already existing tension, and voilà.
Now, sometimes it hits (I was one of the ones that last year’s THE LODGE really worked for), but that’s usually only when the story plunges itself deeper than its initial restrained ambiguity and tackles the real issue with its bare hands. Amelia Moses’ BLEED WITH ME almost gets there for me, but not quite.
What it does get right is the awkward social dance of spending extended periods of time with people who you’re not quite friends with. Every interaction has a strained cheerfulness about it, and if the people don’t connect, it can quietly but quickly sour. That’s beautifully acted here, especially with the lead, Rowan (Lee Marshall), who displays the delicate balance of quiet fear and suppressed secrets straining to break out during a pleasant meal with incredible skill.
While the story didn’t move me, it’s a beautifully shot and directed film that takes the time to craft the effective horror reveals as well does the beautiful landscape, and I cannot wait to see what Amelia Moses has in store for the future.
SLAXX, directed by Elza Kephart
I’m certainly not too cool for a gimmick-laden comedy horror film: In fact, they’re often my favorites. SLAXX didn’t fit me quite as snug as I would have liked thanks to some half-realized character motivations and some puzzling (though most likely due to budgetary concerns) restraint on showing the audience gooey aftermath on a few on the kills. If you enjoy this genre, this is one to eventually get to while not making it a high priority. If you’re ambivalent or even dislike horror-comedy, this one certainly won’t change your mind. The setting is king, though: Having mayhem break out in a faux-message, sanctimonious hipster fast-fashion-at-premium-prices clothing store was a stroke of brilliance.
KAKEGURUI, directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa
Based on a popular manga that has spun off into an anime, a live-action series, and now a feature film, KAKEGURUI often feels like a cartoon that snuck its way into the realm of flesh and blood, and it’s a total triumph.
Set at an extravagant private school with a brutal hierarchy system, students win and lose (actual) fortunes along with social stature with a gambling-based economy. A sect of students are finally rising up against the powerful student council (who uses those who lose at the games as house pets, though this is kept very PG-rated), so they decide to throw a school-wide gambling tournament to steel the status quo by offering a chance at starting your dream life from scratch.
KAKEGURUI is one of my favorite surprises of the festival. While the concept of pitting high school students together in a brutal battle is nothing new, this one infuses so much fun, heart, and weirdness that it’s in a class all its own.
TEZUKA’S BARBARA, directed by Makoto Tezuka
Macoto Tezuka adapts his father Osamu’s adult manga from 1974 in a dizzying story that melds erotica, noir, body horror, and dark comedy. Yosuke Mikuro (Gorô Inagaki) is a successful but frustrated novelist in the great tradition of how most male writers who read a lot of Jim Thompson self-insert themselves into a story. He’s cool and desired, but he’s also a neurotic wreck who has no idea what he really wants. That’s when Barbara (Fumi Nikaidô) blows into his life, somehow magically helping to control his strange carnal impulses while becoming a muse to his literary work.
What at first threatens to be merely a standard manic pixie dream girl or yandere-centric plot, BARBARA instead shows itself to have depth beyond surface-level male fulfillment fantasy. There is some truly disturbing imagery as well as ideas at play here, yet the film doesn’t stray away from the delights of all-consuming infatuation, either. For anyone who wants a film that can titillate as well as disgust and challenge (fans of Eckhart Schmidt’s DER FAN and author Nicholson Baker should especially take note), this is a dark, adult adventure that’s well worth seeking out.
THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND, directed by Kevin and Matthew McManus
It’s rare to see filmmakers, especially ones as young as the McManuses, handle emotional trauma and old-school horror movie frights with equal aplomb, but THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND embarks on an unpredictable plot with no course correction needed, and this may very well be their big breakthrough.
While their mockumentary Netflix series, AMERICAN VANDAL, was deeply hilarious, it also knew that a premise needs intriguing stories and layered characters to truly thrive. There as well as here, the small but essential corners of home and family life are bared in a realistic and compelling way, and that acts as a welcome glue helping to connect a story that’s constantly transmogrifying and playing with the audience’s expectations. This is one of the memorable word-of-mouth titles from the festival to look out for: Big, bad things are tackled here, and it’s done with confidence and creativity that dedicated moviegoers are always thirsty for.
THE COLUMNIST, directed by Ivo Van Aart
One of the most talked-about films of the festival, THE COLUMNIST proves that, sometimes, we all just need a violent wish-fulfillment fantasy to unfurl before our bloodthirsty eyes. Anyone, especially women, minorities, the generally disenfranchised, and those who speak up for them, will be able to find a bit of fun catharsis as columnist Femke Boot (Katja Herbers, who has shades of young Juliette Binoche) snaps after realizing that whether she prints her political opinions or fluffy, relatable content, she’ll receive unceasing abuse from Twitter, Facebook, and the dreaded comments section.
Soon, Femke embarks on a dizzying mission to rid her world of these trolls while also juggling her job, teenage daughter and activist Anna (Claire Porro), and a burgeoning relationship with successful crime writer Steve Dood (Bram van der Kelen.) What’s unique about THE COLUMNIST is that it tackles a heavy modern topic that has been endlessly dissected — online harassment, especially the kind that’s clearly deeply rooted in misogyny — and instead of preaching or trying to deliver a specific message, it’s pure catharsis. We all know why Femke snaps, and even when she starts losing the plot a bit as killing becomes a little too easy for her, most of us are still cheering her on as she goes on a spree that would put most top movie serial killers to shame. If you’d never hurt a fly but don’t mind daydreaming about eviscerating the last persistent idiot you had to block on social media, THE COLUMNIST sees you.
Tags: Amelia Moses, Angela Bettis, Bram van der Kelen, Brea Grant, Canada, Claire Porro, David Arquette, Elza Kephart, Fantasia Film Festival, Fumi Nikaido, Gor? Inagaki, Ivo Van Aart, Julian Richings, Justin Dyck, kaiju, Katja Herbers, Kevin McManus, Lee Marshall, Macoto Tezuka, Marilyn Lima, Mathias Malzieu, Matthew McManus, Michaela McManus, Mick Foley, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Nikea Gamby-Turner, Osamu Tezuka, Quinn Armstrong, Sheila McCarthy, Stacy Keach, tak sakaguchi, Tsutomu Hanabusa, Yuji Shimomura
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