Poster by Geof Darrow

It’s that time again for my annual sojourn to Fantastic Fest, the annual Alamo Drafthouse week long love letter to horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world. This year’s festival runs from Sept 18-25, here in Austin in the South Lamar location.

As in year’s past, I begin my coverage with a multi-part/day preview.

Fantastic Fest Preview Day Four

Wastelander Panda: Exile

The Apocalypse has come and gone; its survivors forming small communities for protection. Banished to the vast Wasteland, Isaac – a giant humanoid panda – sets out to find a young girl and reinstate his family into the Tribe of Legion.

The idea is preposterous on the surface – a web series fusing elements of Mad Max, Lone Wolf And Cub and Zatoichi revolving around a walking, talking, sword fighting panda bear. It’s the sort of thing that simply should not work, not at all, or at least not without descending into wild camp. And yet it does work. And it works in no small part because talented writer-director Victoria Cocks plays things absolutely, one hundred percent straight. There is nothing camp here, not at all. And, yes, Cocks will make you buy in to the emotional plight of her furry protagonist.

Driven by the force of its creator’s vision and her team’s remarkable ability to build complex and compelling worlds seemingly for pocket change, Wastelander Panda has become a sort of organically growing beast with an initial proof of concept video going viral and sparking chatter around the world, leading to a three episode prologue arc released for free online in 2013 to prove they could actually carry a proper story and now leading to this: Six ten minute episodes, hopefully leading to a full television series and feature film outings, which we are very proud to bring to audiences for the very first time.(Todd Brown)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCk5tRFBDME

The Incident

A pair of brothers are confronted by a policeman in their apartment. A violent struggle ensues. The fight continues into a stairwell. When they attempt to exit, they find that the staircase has turned into an infinitely repeating corridor from which they cannot escape. During the same time frame, a family leaves home for a vacation. They travel down a familiar road towards their destination. As time passes, the stretch of road and the surrounding desert begin to repeat. Like their counterparts in the stairwell, they are also stuck in a loop.

In 2013, Isaac Ezban pitched THE INCIDENT at the inaugural edition of Fantastic Market/Mercado Fantastico. The jury awarded the project with Best Presentation. The completed film premiered at the 2014 edition of Marché du Film as part of a special week of screenings organized by Blood Window at Ventana Sur. Now, Fantastic Fest is proud to present the film’s North American premiere.

THE INCIDENT is a surrealistic sci-fi vision that uses the idea of infinite loops to explore both the frailty of human life and broader metaphysical concepts. Ezban’s influences, which range from Philip K. Dick to Rod Serling, are readily apparent, but there is a very original vision at work here. Repetition is a key component of the film with the two stories taking place over a decades-long time span. The characters spend the rest of their lives trapped in loops. While elements of their environments constantly regenerate, none of them escape the reality of aging and death. THE INCIDENT is an ambitious, puzzle-like film from a rising new talent. (Rodney Perkins)

Horns

In the opening scene, Ig (Radcliffe) foreshadows, “When you go through Hell, the only way out is to walk deeper through the fire.” Since he’s been unanimously accused of raping and murdering his longtime girlfriend Marren (Juno Temple, seemingly named from the EXORCIST priest), Ig can only wonder how much deeper into the fire he can go. He wakes up one morning with horns growing from his head and strange new powers, including the ability to have anyone tell them their darkest truths (“I’ve never been with a jigaboo before,” a neighbor says). Ig also has the skill to make them act on these desires. He’s initially appalled by this development, but the opportunity to use these powers to find out the truth in Marren’s death is a dance with the devil that’s too good to pass up.

HORNS skillfully navigates several genres and themes: fantasy, religious drama, detective mystery, and it takes the basic structure one sees in superhero origin stories. Aja does a strong job combining all of this, but the heart and backbone of HORNS is a love story. Ig is hellbent on finding who murdered the love of his life while his community is out to lynch him for the very crime that destroyed him. Many flashbacks are given to Ig and Marren, which scope out their entire relationship, elevating the film beyond its dark nature. She was his Garden of Eden, and that drives everything about the film.

With three superstars behind it—actor Daniel Radcliffe, director Alex Aja and novelist Joe Hill—HORNS is one of the genre event films of 2014. (James Shapiro)

Waste Land

Leo Woeste (Jeremie Renier) is in many ways the prototypical homicide cop. He’s driven, focused, and in many ways married to the job. But he’s also married to Kathleen and does his best to be a father figure to his young step son and so when he learns that Kathleen is pregnant with their first child he makes a firm decision: His next case will be his last. He chooses his family of the job, not realizing that this last job will pull him so deeply into his own darkness that his family may never recover.

The murder Leo must crack is of a young Congolese man, the clues leading him farther and farther into an enigmatic underworld of tribal mysticism and the illicit trade in religious artifacts. The crime also brings Leo into the seemingly irresistible magnetic pull of the victim’s alluring sister, her drawing power seemingly magnified exponentially by Leo’s subconscious fears of impending fatherhood.

After the far more playful foray into action comedy with his sophomore feature Dirty Mind, Belgian director Pieter Van Hees concludes the thematic trilogy he began with acclaimed debut Left Bank on a dark and oppressive note. This is a noir that embraces the darkest elements of the genre – elegant and highly intelligent, yes, but grimy, impulsive and seemingly filtered through a nicotine haze as well. Though Van Hees may not have won the international acclaim of his contemporaries such as Michael Roskam (Bullhead) he is every bit their equal and another example of the complex and compelling talent currently on the rise in Belgium.(Todd Brown)