Fantastic Fest Part 1: The Indie Films of Fantastic Arcade

This year, Fantastic Fest debuted “Fantastic Arcade,” a new wing of the festival focusing on independent video games and all their heavenly glories. Rather than giving you a rundown of the festival, I’ll just direct you to the article I wrote for The Escapist covering the event.

Unfortunately, 1,500 words just isn’t enough to talk about everything that happens during a four day event, especially if you’re writing a travelogue rather than doing straight-up events coverage. As a result, I didn’t really get a chance to talk about the films I saw during Fantastic Arcade, some of which really deserve attention – so consider this an appendix to my article.

NERDCORE RISING (U.S., Available on DVD)
GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW



What the hell can I say about this movie? Nerdcore Rising was by far my favorite film of the Fantastic Arcade portion, indeed, one the best music docs I’ve seen in years – which is saying quite a bit, since the Mötorhead RockDoc Lemmy was one of my favorite films of this year’s SXSW Film Festival.

Unlike Lemmy, which is more of a celebrity profile, Nerdcore Rising follows an identifiable story arc. As the film opens, we find then 32 year-old Damian Hess, a man with a Bond villain’s name and a line coder’s body, preparing for his first national tour. Hess works in the rap subgenre of Nerdcore, a term he himself coined. Nerdcore rappers like Hess – stage name MC Frontalot – perform rap and hip-hop music that expresses geek culture experiences like playing collectible card games and pining over goth girls. It’s a fun, often hysterical mash-up that leads to some extremely clever and unexpected lyrics. The chorus of one of his headliner songs, Braggadocio, runs: “Now it’s time for a little braggadocio / While I swing my arms like Ralph Macchio.”

Thankfully, Nerdcore Rising doesn’t make the same mistake as the other music film of the festival Reformat the Planet by focusing too much on the music. Though the concerts are one of the highlights of the film, Nerdcore Rising succeeds because it gets you invested in the characters. Frontalot and his bandmates are a mish-mash collection of hyperactive band geeks, RPGers, and Star Wars nuts. They’re oddballs, but amiable and supremely likable oddballs. As they yammer at each other in British accents on the tour bus, quote Reservoir Dogs, and practice their Wookie screams as a voice exercise before concerts, I couldn’t help but feel like I wanted to hang out with them. One scene, where the bassist tries to teach the film’s director to play Magic: The Gathering, is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in a documentary.

And that, for me, is what separates a good music doc from a mediocre one. In a good music doc, the music itself takes a backseat to the artists who make it. It gives the audience something to latch onto and care about. There’s real drama on display in Nerdcore Rising. Frontalot was taking a major leap of faith with a nationwide tour, leaving his freelance programming work and gambling his savings on something that could’ve very well turned out to be an enormous financial error. That tension reverberates beneath all the gags and performances like a just-strummed guitar string. It lends meaning and sincerity to the action, and lets the audience share in highs and lows of the tour, as MC Frontalot and the Minibosses play packed bars, injure themselves, lose equipment, and pick up their first groupie (who repeatedly insists to the camera crew that she’s not a groupie).

Capping things off, Frontalot was there for the screening. He played the opening night of the festival – one of the perks of attendance.


RED VS. BLUE: REVELATION (U.S., Available at www.roosterteeth.com)
Strongly Recommended



If, like me, you haven’t seen the hit Halo Machinima series Red vs. Blue since the early seasons, Revelation feels like being smashed in the face with a thirty-pound graphics card. What sold the series originally was its clever writing, but now the visuals are, well, there really isn’t any word for them other than “beautiful.” The Halo 3 engine looks incredible, and on the big screen it’s eerily close to theatrical-quality, especially when the Reds and Blues launch into all-out CGI action scenes that are awe-inspiring yet still hold onto the series’ unique brand of humor that shifts from highbrow to lowbrow and back again in the time it takes to reload a Battle Rifle.

Honestly, with action scenes this inventive I’m not sure why anyone’s still holding their breath for a Halo movie. My overall experience with Halo is shaped less by interacting with Cortana and Master Chief, and more by BSing with my friends while running them down with the Warthog. Frankly, Red vs. Blue captures the vibe of playing Halo like no cannon-correct film possibly could.

The plot is a little beyond me. After missing something on the order of three seasons, I kept up with what was going on alright, but don’t feel like I could describe it without extreme generalizations and factual errors. I’m not sure if Revelation is the last of the series, but it wraps the plot up nicely enough that it easily could be. If so, it’s a fitting sendoff for the little show that could, a true indie success story the likes of which Fantastic Arcade was created to celebrate.

PLAYING COLUMBINE (U.S., Available at www.playingcolumbine.com)
If you are interested in videogames GO SEE THIS RIGHT NOW



Playing Columbine could easily be characterized as the most important film of Fantastic Arcade. Currently, it stands as possibly the only seminal film about videogame controversy.

In April 2005, indie game programmer Danny Ledonne released a self-made game titled Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, allowing it to be downloaded free from his website. The game is a sprite-based top-down RPG similar to the Zelda games, with simple SNES graphics. The game itself is an exploration of the motives behind the Columbine shootings, and places the player in the shoes of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to show what Ledonne believes led to the tragedy – namely lack of parental oversight, social isolation, and easy access to guns. The game is chilling, informative, never shows a gun being fired or a student being killed (when they’re clicked on they disappear) and is an extremely strong piece of rhetoric suggesting that the media and the American public would rather blame violent outbursts like Columbine on scapegoats like videogames, metal, and horror movies than address questions of gun control and absent parents. The game is not fun, and can’t be classified as entertainment.

Of course, you can’t make a game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG! without causing an enormous stir, and a story-hungry media picked up the story and ran with it without ever playing, or even viewing, the game itself. The issues brought up by the controversy are still central topics in the games-as-art and the games-as-self-expression debates: Are games protected under the 1st Amendment? Do violent videogames promote violent action? Are games a legitimate medium for exploring sensitive, and even tragic topics? Do the detractors of videogames have a point, or are they using the debate for political capital? You’d be hard pressed to find any film that engages this wide a range of questions, and does so with as much finesse as Playing Columbine does. The debate is framed through a series of interviews with the game’s creator, the game’s detractors (including recently disbarred attorney and longtime videogame opponent Jack Thompson), school shooting victims, professors, and judges from the Slamdance games festival. Slamdance plays a large role in the story of Playing Columbine, since the game was pulled from competition at the height of the controversy, causing a mass walkout of other indie game participants and event sponsors.

There are certainly problems with the film, however. The most glaring issue is that Playing Columbine was both produced and directed by Danny Ledonne, the creator of Super Columbine, a fact that’s not made explicit until the end of the film. It’s a sneaky tactic, and makes you call into question every point the film makes, even the ones you agree with. The film also frames Super Columbine in a manner that’s slightly dishonest. Watching the film, you’d think that the game ends with the shooters’ suicides, and a slideshow of crying victims and destroyed infrastructure, finishing with a photo of the shooters’ bodies. In fact, the game goes on after this point, as both Klebold and Harris go to hell and fight demons. The section is supposed to be a satirical treatment of news reports that insisted the shooters’ proclivity for Doom led to the shootings, but the hell section muddles the overall message and just seems in poor taste. (Some would argue that the whole game is in poor taste. I might be on board with that, but I would argue that at least the portion in the school uses poor taste to prove a point.) While Ledonne has always resisted people’s calls to remove this portion of the game, arguing artistic integrity, it appears that his artistic integrity is fine with editing around it if it makes it easier for him to prove a point.

Playing Columbine is a must see for anyone interested in the future of videogames and ethics in the age of interactivity. Agree with it or not, you’ll be talking about the issues it raises long after you’ve ejected the disk.


REFORMAT THE PLANET (U.S., Available at www.2playerproductions.com/projects/rtp/)
See It If You’re Interested



As stated above, there are basically two ways to go about making a music documentary. The first is to make the movie about the musicians, and the second is to make a movie specifically about the music. Reformat the Planet is of the second stripe, and it carries the same risk that all documentaries about music do: namely, if the viewer isn’t interested in the music, then he’s not going to be interested in your film. Unfortunately, I didn’t fall in love with Chiptunes during Reformat the Planet, and as a result felt a little lukewarm about the movie as a whole.

Chiptunes are songs played on vintage videogame equipment, most popularly played on the Nintendo Game Boy but also on the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. Contrary to what it looks like during the performances, the Chiptunes DJs don’t actively play songs on the equipment. They compose the songs in advance and essentially press “play” onstage, then create a show by dancing, using colored light displays, and modulating the sound output of the electronic equipment. As a spectacle, it’s mesmerizing; the problem is the music itself.

It’s not bad, really. It’s highly danceable, often high energy, and has a good beat, but it’s too much like Techno for my liking. Songs tend to be extremely repetitious, so that you’re bobbing your head to a good beat thirty seconds in, but start tiring of the song at the one minute mark. Ten-second riffs tend to get used over and over for minutes on end, and after awhile everything just starts to run together.

This is a problem because Reformat the Planet uses New York’s premier Chiptunes event, the Blip Festival, as a microcosm of the larger worldwide movement. As a result, a substantial part of the film showcases one festival act after another, with little respite to let the audience process the music in between songs. Speaking for myself, it was just too much. I staggered out of the theater not being able to tell the difference between any of the acts I saw, except two that were headlined by women and one that was a more traditional guitar band with an NES backing them up. The flashing lights and bleep bloop music had wiped out everything else.

Which is a shame, really, since the movie is perfectly interesting during the interview portions, particularly when the artists are demonstrating how they modify their hardware in order to turn a 20 year-old electronic toy into a sophisticated sound synthesizer that produces extremely catchy music. I only wish that these portions were more interspersed with the later performances to give the audience a little breathing room, rather than bombarding them with one seizure-inducing show after another.

On balance, I liked Reformat the Planet. The pacing was off, but it was a cool exploration into a subgenre I knew almost noting about. It also sports what is hands-down my favorite film title of Fantastic Fest, and that certainly counts for something.

PS: I was unable to see Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission because of scheduling, but I’ve heard really good things about it, and Garriott’s such a fascinating guy that this basically counts as a sight-unseen YOU MUST SEE THIS recommendation.

What I Saw At Fantastic Fest Part 2: Hey! Hey! Great Fun Asian Film Spectacular Edition!

Whenever you go to a genre festival like Fantastic Fest, you find that little subcultures develop within the few thousand people that attend the festival. Chances are, you'll care for one genre more than another, and as a result you'll become pretty familiar with the people who share your tastes as you wind up next to them in line or in a theater. By the end of the week, you're seeking each other out and saving each other's seats, comparing notes on what you've seen and what the verdict was. All the Asian film fans tend to stick together, as do the gorehounds, the horror fans, the weird cinema aficionados, the action junkies, the Hollywood premiere-hoppers and the animation freaks.

The funny thing is that at a genre festival as diverse as Fantastic Fest, you wind up in more than one subculture at once. I myself was heavy on the Asian films, the weird cinema and action movies, and was only a minor dabbler in the horror and animation camps. (I'll admit it- I'm a wuss when it comes to horror films.) As a result, the following post is devoted entirely to the awesome Asian films I saw, whereas the next post will be loosely devoted to "action movies." There are some real gems down there today, so don't rush...

And just a note, by rights, Kawogama Harumo: Battle League in Kyoto should be at the top of this list, but I did it last post before thinking of grouping these films by theme.

PRIVATE EYE (South Korea, Playing at Hawai’i International Film Festival, No US Release)
GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW



(Sorry, couldn't find a subtitled trailer. There is one here)

Dae-min Park may be the only person who loves L.A. Confidential more than I do, and I say that because Private Eye is essentially Park's attempt to make his own version, set in 1910 Seoul. And surprise, surprise-it works, in fact it works like gangbusters. I really liked this movie, but it doesn't quite live up to the film that inspired it.

1910 Korea is heating up as Japanese interests make inroads in the country and the locals start worrying that the Land of the Rising Sun’s intentions may not be too benevolent. Seoul seethes with enough corruption and intrigue to warrant calling in Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer all at the same time. However, they’ll just have to make do with bumbling but brilliant Jin-ho (masterfully protrayed by Hwang Jeong-min), a western-style PI who ekes a living taking snapshots of cheating spouses and selling them to the tabloids.

Meanwhile, meek but genius-grade medical student Kwang-su lives a bleak existence in a teaching hospital, being lorded over by his Japanese instructor who suggests that Kwang will never be a true doctor until he dissects a real human body. Lucky for Kwang, he stumbles across a dead guy in the woods and takes him home for practice.

Then Kwang learns it’s the Interior Minister’s son. Oops.

Hoping to clear his name before he’s caught in the city-wide manhunt, Kwang hires Jin-ho to find the killer before he’s accused. With the help of a gadget-inventing noblewoman (Uhm Ji-won), the pair begins a rousing adventure through the city of Seoul, trekking through hospitals, murder scenes, opium dens, and a decidedly sinister circus.

Apart from some sloppy editing that causes minor continuity errors, Private Eye is a tightly-wound mystery tale that’s above all fun, something that’s often missing from Korean films. It isn’t strictly an historical film, since it draws just as much on James Bond as it does turn-of-the-century Korea, but the setting creates a delicious tone of old versus new and east versus west that delivers up interesting visual payoffs throughout, (Jin-ho walking into a traditional circus while wearing his porkpie hat is one, Uhm Ji-won swathed in a dress while holding a welding mask in front of her face is another). The city of Seoul itself seems convincing and alive, like you could step onto the muddy streets and slurp noodles at a street side stand along with the characters. I felt the same way when I watched L.A. Confidential, as if I could check into the seedy neon motels and sleep on their stained mattresses. What really anchors the whole thing though, are solid performances from the entire cast, with the standout being Hwang Jeong-min’s soft-boiled private eye. The first time Kwang tries to hire him in the murder investigation, he slams the door in the kid’s face and says he doesn’t take dangerous jobs. It’s a refreshing dose of reality in a genre where heroes often go to the ends of the earth for strangers.

Do not miss this film, it’s good storytelling, genuinely humorous, and has enough twists and turns to keep it going. The continuity errors are a shame, since the mystery format tends to make things like that stand out, but good acting and writing can cover a multitude of sins, including these.




ROBOGEISHA (Japan, No US Release Date)
Strongly Recommended (GOREHOUNDS & FANS OF WEIRD CINEMA ONLY)

STRONG CONTENT WARNING ON THIS TRAILER!



The only Secret Screening I managed to get into turned out to be the (not “world” for legal reasons) premiere of Robogeisha, which ranks as the flat-out oddest movie I saw at Fantastic Fest, and brother that’s saying something.

See, when you watch as many movies as I do, you need to see films like Robogeisha every once in awhile. Having seen hundreds of movies that follow traditional plot structures and use stock characters, I can not only guess the next plot twist in an average movie, I can guess the next line of dialogue. For people like me, movies that are as off-the-wall as Robogeisha bring back the kind of what-happens-next suspense we don’t get from the standard summer movie fare. This is a movie where almost anything can happen.

Kids, do I even have to explain why this movie rules? When the trailer came out on YouTube, there was some discussion over whether the film actually existed. There were those who assumed no one was bizarre enough to make a feature-length film like this, even as a joke.

Oh they were so sublimely wrong.

I’m not even going to attempt to describe the plot—but it’s actually a lot more traditional than it seems. It’s perplexing, it’s surprising, and it’s all far less bloody than you’d think. To even describe what happens would be to ruin some of the fun, but just to give you an idea: at one point the heroine drowns a guy in his own stomach acid

I must be kidding, right?

Watch it. Oh, then you’ll see.

By then it will be too late, Shiro Castles will be turning into angry robots and punching buildings, then the buildings will fountain blood, then the geisha will all turn into Transformers and drive up the sides of the buildings so they can take over the Shiro Castle by dueling the evil businessman inside so he can’t drop his Ultimate Bomb into Mount Fuji.

I’m going to be honest here: I’m not sure how much of this movie I saw and how much I hallucinated, I lost a lot of sleep last week. I will tell you this though: almost every kill scene in this film gained raucous cheers from the audience.

Robogeisha exists in that weird netherworld of B-movies that are exactly what their titles are. No one walks into a movie with a title like this thinking it’s going to take home Oscar gold. Some of the effects are massively cheesy and the first scene doesn’t fit into the film’s chronology at all, but considering its miniscule budget (which ran in the low hundred thousands) Noburo Iguchi has made a movie that gives a huge bang for your buck. It’s rare that a film can remain tongue-in-cheek while still offering up action that’s fun to watch, but Iguchi manages it. There are some inspired scenes of comedy as well, such as a bureaucrat dodging sword-wielding assassins while on his cell phone, politely explaining to a superior that he can’t take his call at the moment.

Things only got more manic during the Q&A, when director Noboru Iguchi, special effects director (and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl director) Yoshihiro Nishimura, festival director Tim League and Marc Walkow of the New York Asian Film Festival came out in traditional Japanese skivvies and danced up and down the rows of seats, waggling their pale asses in the faces of the audience. Afterward, the “Tengu Girls” from the movie ran in costume and performed a swordfight, then started sticking the filmmakers in the ass with pins. After that, things got a little weird...

There's videos on the Fantastic Fest website if you really want to hunt for them. Afterward, the cast and crew joined the rest of the festival attendants at the nearby Tim League-owned bowling/kareoke club the Highball, where they performed kareoke, judged a "Samurai Calling" competition and had one of the actresses perform a pole dance, which is her sideline trade (it was an artful one, rather than a sleazy one). Again, there are videos on the Fantastic Fest website if you really feel the need to check it out...

No one, goddamn NO ONE throws a party like Tim League.




CRAZY RACER (China, No US Release Date)
GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW




Crazy Racer has my all-time favorite cash for drugs exchange I’ve ever seen on film. It also has one of the better explosions, which you can see in the Fantastic Fest Trailer if you search for it on YouTube, but I didn't post here because giving it away would be criminal.

Mainland Chinese director Ning Hao has been called the Chinese Guy Richie, and considering this twisted, intricately-plotted gangster comedy, it’s a soubriquet that will probably stick. In about the first five minutes of Crazy Racer, we get the following information: Geng Hao is a champion bicyclist who comes in second in the race of his life. Hoping to salvage some face out of the defeat, he does a quickie endorsement for an herbal supplement while in the back of the locker room, but the drink makes him fail a drug test and his silver medal is stripped. The shock causes Hao’s long-suffering coach to die of a heart attack, and the bitter cyclist decides to go after the sleazy businessman who conned him in order to raise enough money to give his coach an “executive burial.”

But that isn’t really what this movie is about, it’s about bumbling first-time hitmen, Tong gangster flunkies with so few fingers they fumble their pistols, frustrated cops, nagging wives, and CEOs that dress like Superman. All these characters swirl around the usual gangster movie anchors: a fortune in heroin, a misplaced corpse, the ubiquitous briefcase full of money and a very unfortunate tank of turtles. What’s amazing about Hao’s work isn’t that he manages to juggle all these elements, but that he manages to juggle all these elements and make them feel new and interesting. I’ve probably seen six movies since the early ‘90s which have the same “crime caper goes wrong” premise as Crazy Racer, but by blending these genre staples with Chinese pop culture and religious traditions, he keeps the surprises coming.

The only caveat is that this is a movie where you really have to hang in there and pay attention. Most of the scenes before the halfway mark are setup, and if you haven’t kept up you’ll be wondering what the hell is going on. It also will do you well to familiarize yourself with the tradition of “hell money,” fake currency that’s sacrificed to the dead during Chinese funerals.

Seriously guys, keep an eye out for this one. Ning Hao has the potential to be the next big thing in Asian film and the people who are in the know about him from the beginning will have some serious film geek street cred down the road. Besides, we’re talking about a Chinese director who isn’t part of the Hong Kong cabal and is trying to strike out and do something different—and that’s pretty cool.




K-20: THE FIEND WITH 20 FACES (AKA: The Legend of the Mask) (Japan, No US Release Date)
Strongly Recommended



Every once in awhile I’ll see a movie that plays so strongly to my sensibilities that it seems like a “greatest hits” reel torn from my childhood imagination. K-20: The Fiend With 20 Faces is that kind of film.

In an alternate timeline where World War II never happened and aristocrats still run Japan, master thief K-20 terrorizes the upper classes with high-class heists. The unflappable Inspector Akechi is closing in on K-20 following the theft of a rare and potentially devastating Tesla device, when K-20 tricks a gullible circus acrobat, Endo, to be caught in his stead. On the run from Akechi’s gyrocopter-mounted SWAT teams, the army, and a corps of boy detectives, Endo finds that to catch K-20, he must become K-20. The plot really starts to gel when Endo saves Akechi’s rich-girl fiancé from the clutches of the masked thief and... well, you can guess the next plot twist from here, but let me just say that there are some pretty good surprises in store.

This movie is full of the ‘30s-‘50s pulp adventure tropes that I adore. It’s wall-to-wall master criminals, police inspectors, circus acrobats, boy detectives, aviatrixes, street urchins, military generals and gadget inventors. For Christ’s sake, it revolves around a Nikola Tesla doomsday machine. How much does that rule? Sure, the acting is sort of cartoony and sometimes verges on caricature, (and often it shades into cheesiness), but the wackiness of the movie feeds on that sort of energy. However, some people will be turned off by the fluctuating tone, which wavers up and down from dark to jubilant within single scenes. It’s not a perfect movie to be sure. The climax doesn’t jump the shark, but it certainly steps over it, and some of the more obviously borrowed elements can be distracting (Peter Parker will be suing for patent infringement on that wrist-deployed grappling hook).

But none of that matters to me, because this movie is flat out fun. You can make the same allegations of overacting against the Indiana Jones movies, but they work for the same reason K-20 does. Movies like this aren’t about reality, they’re about taking the tought wouldn’t it be cool if... to the furthest limit possible. They exist in a world of broad humor, amazing stunts and well-turned plot twists.

If you’re into the kind of pulp archetypes I mentioned above, don’t miss this movie. This movie was the most fun I had at Fantastic Fest, and one of the few I will be ordering off Amazon as soon as it’s available.




VAMPIRE GIRL vs. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL (Japan, Showing at Hawai'i International Film Festival, No US Release Date)
See It If You’re Interested (GOREHOUNDS ONLY)

(VIOLENT CONTENT WARNING ON TRAILER BELOW)


Yoshihiro Nishimura is best known for his master’s thesis in splatter cinema, Tokyo Gore Police a movie so extreme that I'm halfway sure it put me into shock. However, TGP is well-respected in the gorehound and unintentional humor community, and most of Nishimura’s fans agree that Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is nowhere near as shocking as that lauded film.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

In contrast to Gore Police, Vampire Girl is a twisted romantic comedy about a high school love triangle gone oh-so-very wrong. Mizushima is a normal high school boy who’s unfortunate enough to be the crowning desire of Keiko, the spoiled daughter of the vice-principal, who he manages to keep at bay most of the time. Everything begins to come apart one Valentine’s Day when Mizushima accepts a chocolate from the cute new transfer student Monami, cementing them as a couple. But this isn’t ordinary chocolate—when Mizushima takes a bite out of it he finds that it has some very, ahem, unique filling. Like blood... her blood. Turns out, Monami is a vampire and is apparently thinking of a much longer romantic commitment than Mizushima is really comfortable with. Understandably, he freaks out and runs off, having been half-turned to one of the denizens of the night.

But how does the overbearing Keiko feel about all this? Well, pretty pissed is a good summation, especially after she is killed in an accident and reanimated by her science-teacher father, who lurks in the basement wearing a Kabuki costume, doing bizarre experiments on dead students with the help of the “oversexed school nurse.” With Keiko’s new form, a patchwork of the strongest parts of several different students, she sets out to battle Monami and win Mizushima back. The rest of the film consists of a series of over-the-top action sequences as the two girls battle each other, while poor Mizushima sits on the sidelines and wonders why no one asks what he wants.

Every time I see a Nishimura movie, I feel like the first few rows should be labeled SPLASH ZONE, like at Sea World. Arterial blood spray plays a large part in Nishimura’s visual style, but here is played for laughs rather than gross-out value. Oh sure, there’s some really disgusting things here, but they’re cartoonish on the whole and you won’t see anything too disturbing. Which is not to say the film isn’t shocking... Nishimura riffs several subcultures and stereotypes that are prevalent in Japanese culture, such as wrist-cutters (who have an intramural team), chain-smoking Chinese teachers, and Ganguro girls, who are known to dye their skins brown and bleach their hair in order to look more like “California Girls.” In Vampire Girl, the Ganguro girls are obsessed with what they perceive as African American culture, which includes walking around in blackface, wearing bones through their noses, and banging drums while chanting, “Yes we can.” While the humor in the Ganguro scenes comes from the girls embracing wild stereotypes as truth, the scenes are still extremely uncomfortable. In some ways, the socially aggressive humor is just as shocking as the castrations and mutilations in Tokyo Gore Police.

In the end, the reason to see Vampire Girl is to take in some extremely odd visuals and way over-the-top violence, with some pretty good humor thrown in. (There’s a particularly fun sequence where the director of The Grudge makes a cameo as the chain-smoking Chinese teacher... and threatens to curse the class.) This movie buries the needle on the crazy-o-meter, but between the spraying gore and highly politically incorrect humor, it’s a difficult thing to recommend. Having said that, if you're in the mood to see a gonzo Japanese movie with a seriously twisted sense of humor, you can't go wrong with this one.

You’ve been warned.


NEXT TIME: ACTION MOVIES GALORE! DISTRICT 13: ULTIMATUM, UNDER THE MOUNTAIN, MANDRILL, FIREBALL, VAN DIEMAN'S LAND AND UWE BOLL'S RAMPAGE!

PLUS: TIM LEAGUE PUNCHES UWE BOLL IN THE FACE, AND WE HAVE IT ON VIDEO

Things I Saw At Fantastic Fest (And You Should Too) Part 1

For the last week I've been at Fantastic Fest, the largest genre film festival in the United States, soaking in the glory of skull-burstingly awesome cinema until my eyeballs hurt. I saw 24 movies in a single week and attended three parties, and lucky you, I'm going to share every bit of it without you having to lose any of the sleep I did.

A note before we start: In general, I declined to see movies that were opening soon. For example, I skipped Zombieland, and Paranormal Activity in exchange for either going to movies I'll never have a chance to see on the big screen, like Crazy Racer, or the ever-inticing Secret Screenings. If you heard that a movie played at Fantastic Fest and it isn't included here, it either means the show sold out before I could pick up my tickets (Ninja Assassin), it was a Secret Screening I didn't get into (Dr. Parnassus) or something I had a ticket to, but ditched because it was playing at an inconvenient time or I wasn't going to get a good seat (Paranormal Activity).

So strap yourselves in and prepare for your world to be totally changed...

SOLOMON KANE (UK, October 28, 2009)
Strongly Recommended



The next person who tells me Solomon Kane is a ripoff of Van Helsing gets punched in the throat. Sword-and-Sorcery king Robert E. Howard created Kane in 1929, and any character who hunts vampires, witches or werewolves while wearing a wide-brimmed Puritan hat is Kane's spiritual descendant, not the other way around. Jackman’s Van Helsing isn’t fit to clean Kane’s flintlocks.

Let's begin with me saying this: Solomon Kane contains hands-down the best and most badass R.E. Howard moment ever filmed—you’ll know it when you see it.

This film is the best example of balls-out Sword and Sorcery fantasy I’ve ever seen. Michael Basset draws good characters, the fights are brutal, the monsters are (for once) actually scary and the origin the filmmakers invented makes sense in the context of the original stories. Production designers crafted every frame of this movie to be dirty, smelly and filled with crows eating dead men, just like a Howard movie should be.

That aside, the best thing about this movie is James Purefoy himself. This man gets Kane on a visceral level. He’s managed to craft a dour character without making him gloomy, he’s got a bit of a mad glint in his eye, and the moment he steps onscreen he looks like he’s ready to beat the shit out of someone. The fact that Purefoy can totally inhabit a badass character will be nothing new to anyone who saw his growling performance as the violent, fratboy-like Marc Antony in HBO’s Rome, but watch anyone unfamiliar with him gasp as he launches into one of Kane’s famous Puritan rages.

You’ll see almost every plot twist coming, but who cares? Howard’s writing never carried itself on innovative and surprising story lines. The original stories pretty much boiled down to: Kane wanders down the road, finds a monster and/or oppressed peasants, stomps everyone’s faces, continues wandering down the road—roll credits. There’s something wonderfully retro about this film that way, it isn’t trying to prove that it’s somehow smarter or savvier than its source material, and as a result is much more fun. It also manages to reverse the recent trend of casting supernatural creatures as heroes and makes the magicians and creatures of the netherworld out-and-out bad. Having a hero that burns witches instead of dating them is a really refreshing throwback. Even though it's straightforward, it's very modern and aware, and much more dialogue-driven than you’d expect—and there’s always that subversive idea lurking beneath the surface that Kane likes punishing the wicked a little too much.

There is some burned crust on this tasty little confection though. A few of the monsters look a bit too much like they were borrowing wardrobe from Middle Earth, and I’m sure it’ll make the fanboys scream “rip off” at the top of their lungs. Further on the upside, during the Q&A with director Michael Bassett, he suggested that this would be the first film in a trilogy. Let's hope the second film finds Kane pimpin' around Africa, smiting zombies with his Juju Staff and wrestling Anacondas.

...

Man I love Solomon Kane.


KAMOGAWA HARUMO: BATTLE LEAGUE IN KYOTO (Japan, No US Release Date)
GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW


You won’t find this movie in theaters, but write down its title right now. Done that? Good. Whenever this movie comes out on DVD, rent it, watch it online, I don’t care, but see this flick. But here’s the deal: you’re not allowed to read about it, watch any trailers or ask anyone about it. This movie is stupendous, but only if you go in totally cold. It’s without doubt the weirdest feel-good college comedy of all time, the kind of gonzo batshit insanity only the Japanese can dream up. I’m not exaggerating when I say I laughed through almost this entire film.

Two Freshmen at Kyoto University, Akira and Koichi, get recruited by a club called the Order of the Azure Dragon, “a normal social club, the kind you’d find anywhere.” If you don’t believe that, well, neither do our duo, but they go along. Sure, the initiation ceremonies are a little odd, but the seniors buy all the beer and the girls are cute, so what’s to complain about? A love triangle rapidly forms between Akira, the luscious Sawara, and the glasses-wearing, toolkit-toting physics student Fumi (Chiaki Kuriyama, who you know as Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill) and it looks like it’s going to be a by-the-numbers love comedy until everyone starts stripping off their clothes and dancing. After that, things start to get a little weird...

Kamogawa Harumo charmed the pants off me, but its comic power comes from the viewer finding out the secrets of the Azure Dragon at the same time as the protagonists. It's fairly kid-friendly and very girlfriend-friendly, so don't worry that you're going to see faces ripped off and lots of gratuitous nudity- this isn't Tokyo Gore Police.

Please, please, please watch this without searching for a trailer. You’ll thank me, I promise.


KRABAT (Germany, No US Release Date)
Recommended



It’s a movie about a Wizard School.

Wait! Wait! Don’t walk out; this one’s different, I promise. It involves people turning into crows and was based on a German children’s book called The Satanic Mill. Satisfied? I thought so. Moving on...

Krabat is an orphan during the Thirty Years’ War, whose hobbies are starving and shivering. One night, he’s called in a dream to an old mill across the hillside, where a grizzled one-eyed man called The Master takes him to be one of his twelve apprentices in the dark arts. While there are a lot of creepy things going on, he becomes caught up in the power of magic and neglects to wonder why his mentor, head journeyman Tonda (Daniel Brühl, the sniper from Inglourious Basterds) seems to be having a nervous breakdown. Krabat keeps from asking too many questions at first, content to be able to turn into a bird and defend the nearby village from roving bands of soldiers, but as soon as a blue-eyed girl enters the picture, all that starts to unravel...

Krabat is a callback to old fairy tales, the kind where magic was frightening and witches ate children instead of teaching them chemistry. If you want a break from Hogwarts, trust me, the Master’s Mill is miles and miles away.


GENTLEMAN BRONCOS (US, Late October 2009)
See It if You’re Interested



The latest offering from Jared Hess, the director of Napoleon Dynamite, which I did not like. Like that earlier film, these characters are funny in a quiet and quirky way, and the visual style is drab and detailed. Except for the fantasy sequences, Broncos retains the downbeat tone of Dynamite, and a sort of banal gloominess shrouds both films. Every time I watch a Jared Hess movie I spend most of the running time feeling sorry for the characters and wondering if their creator loves them. Somehow I keep picturing Hess as the Master of the Ant Farm, laughing as he tortures his poor creations in their bland, rural world.

In Broncos, melancholy teen writer Benjamin Purvis attends teen writing camp with his favorite Sci-Fi author, Ronald Chevalier, a kooky breast-and-Native-American-fashion-obsessed recluse who is in the middle of a career slump. Strapped for time on a deadline, Chevalier plagiarizes Ben’s novella, turns his hero into a transsexual, and makes it a hit. Meanwhile, Ben’s amateur filmmaker friends buy the rights to his novella and begin work on an epically terrible adaptation.

The movie often strains the bounds of believability, particularly when its more extreme characters play for laughs rather than approach the scene straight. The plot really starts popping seams in the middle, when Ben's Yeast Lords fanfilm premieres at a local theater and his friends are interviewed about it on the local news. Is there really that little going on in this town? Balancing that, Jermaine Clement gives a performance that involves some truly funny scenery-nibbling that makes the film a bit more palatable, and the sequences inside Ben's novel Yeast Lords that allow Sam Rockwell to ride on the back of rocket-propelled missile pod-laden deer break up the tedium. But the most fun parts of this movie contain Clement and Rockwell, who are both underused, and the whole never really adds up to anything. I'm also suspicious of any movie wherein the the plot claims a novel is a work of genius when it's so plainly stupid. The sequences with a shaggy Rockwell sewing his balls back on and shooting lasers at cyclopses are fun as they're happening, but as soon as publishers start freaking out over how good the book is, you can almost hear the audience thinking, Are you fucking kidding me? Hess claims to be a sci-fi fan, but instead of satirizing the genre and saying something interesting about it, he sets up an absurd straw man caricature to set alight. The message seems to be that sci-fi writers and fans are misanthropic loners who have something deeply wrong with them, which weirdly clashes with the loving credit sequence that showcases vintage sci-fi cover art, set to In the Year 2525.

And another thing... what the hell is it with Jared Hess and characters with accents? In Napoleon Dynamite it was a little more subdued, but here it's really broken the dyke. It works for some characters, but others have such grating voices I can barely stand when they come onscreen.

Every time I see a Jared Hess film, I walk out smelling mothballs. See this one for Sam Rockwell and Clement, but otherwise don't bother.

FIRST SQUAD (Russia/Japan, No US Release Date)
Not Recommended--or recommended to those who are interested



Can you imagine a Russian produced, written and acted movie drawn in anime style by 4C, one of the most reputable animation studios in Japan? Now picture that movie starring a group of telepathic Soviet agents trying to stop an undead army of Teutonic knights from ravaging the Eastern Front, and you’ve got the premise of one of the weirdest anime films on record. That’s right, it’s Nazi vs. Soviet supernatural ops, and if the movie lived up to the image that creates of supernatural knights kicking over T-34 tanks it might have been one of the most epic pieces of animation ever created. Sadly, the battle scenes are lackluster and the film is criminally short—and when you factor in how much of that time is spent describing alternate history back story, the thrills are woefully short lived. There are cool things to be seen here--a device for sending people to the netherworld that looks like a dentist chair crossed with an old diving suit particularly stands out—but the whole thing never works as a whole. There are also live-action interviews with (supposed) "veterans" and "historians" cut into the film, but most of it doesn't contribute to the story, at best padding the 75 minute runtime and at worst undercutting the action. Thankfully, they left it open for a sequel, so here's hoping they make the most of their idea next time around.

As a footnote: why do directors always feel they have to take the time to explain that the Nazis had secret occult programs? Isn’t this a staple of pop culture memory? Check this one out for the novelty, but otherwise don’t bother.

NEXT TIME: ROBOGEISHA, METROPIA, THE LEGEND IS ALIVE, UNDER THE MOUNTAIN AND RAMPAGE