Fantastic Fest Grinder

[ Mood: Happy ]
Diary of the Dead

Having found the sprawl of making Land of the Dead "annoying", George Romero reboots his zombie mythos in his latest Dead film. Diary follows a crew of film students who, in the face of the emerging zombie armageddon, head to Scranton, PA in mobile home. Armed with a camera, one of the students is determined to record everything for posterity, aka YouTube. Along the way, nerves are rubbed raw, zombies attack and the number of survivors drops away.

Diary is a wonderfully low budget affair and stays true to the first-person camera work a la Blair Witch so, there is a lot of shaky and out of focus footage. As we are reminded several times, "If the camera didn’t see it, it didn’t happen." And that’s where we run into trouble. Romero has always used strong themes to stand above much of the horror crowd and in Diary, he takes on today’s pervasive, invasive, and easily manipulated media. This makes for a fine target and the premise of the movie is well-suited for it. But unfortunately, the audience is beat repeatedly over the head with the "cameraman as voyeur" stick way too many times. It honestly takes half the voice over work that went into the effort to remind (nudge, nudge, club, club)us the audience gets enjoyment from a similar act of voyeurism. That plus some very wooden acting throughout mars the film.

The horror master himself attended the screening and gave a great QnA. He drilled us on the rules for zombies. There’s no infection, so no matter how you die, you’re going to come back with an appetite for human flesh. Oh, and of course zombies are slow, if they tried to run, they’d snap off at their little rotting ankles.

Finishing the Game

May 10, 1973. Bruce Lee collapses and dies in a Hong Kong hospital, leaving only a few minutes of fight footage for what should have been his magnum opus, The Game of Death. How will the Game’s producers finish the film? Easy, find another Bruce.

Justin Lin’s mocumentary, Finishing the Game, follows the casting crew and several hopefuls on the audition trail for the next Bruce Lee. There’s much to like here despite the need to go for some obvious jokes at times and the drag in middle of the movie. When Finishing the Game swings, it hits a home run more often than not. Roger Fan’s smarmy, confident Breeze Loo rules over almost every scene he’s in. And lordy! The Golden Gate Guns, in all its Streets of San Francisco glory, nearly stole the show. I say check it out with two one-inch thumbs up.

As an extra treat, Alamo Lars MC’d the Bruce Lee Scream-alike contest. After a shy start, the audience (and Alamo staff) warmed up to it. Check it out here.

End of the Line

Maurice Devereaux offers one seriously bloody ride on the Montreal Metro. Karen (Ilona Elkin), a nurse at a psychiatric hospital takes the late train home after one of her worst days ever. After being rescued from a horny creep in the subway by an average nice guy, things go from bad to worse. Horrific flashes of a dead patient are interrupted when members of Christian cult all receive the call to start some hard-core apocalyptic ministering on anyone they can find. Once the blood starts running on the Metro, it doesn’t stop until the credits.

Once you get past an over use of jump scares early on, this low-budget survival horror tale gets rumbling down the tracks with some solid acting and cinematography that squeezes every drop out of the minimal locations. Patrick (Robin Wilcock) chews up every scene he is in, top notch! During the QnA, Devereaux mentioned that he self-finances his films. Well, either l’homme has a large bank account or has some really talented friends that work on the cheap. There’s a lot of gore effects and they look fantastic, even when a fetus mugs for screen time after the worst C-section ever.

There’s nothing deep here, just some good B-movie fun. Props to Deveraux for making such a solid indie film with no irony or winking. I hope to see more of his work in the future.