Fantastic Fest Grinder

[ Mood: Amused ]
The Substitute

Last year, Fantastic Fest worked hard to establish themselves as an international film festival and the results this year are looking good. For example, take the Danish scifi adventure, The Substitute (Vikaren). It’s thrilling, it’s funny, and it’s smart, all without a giant budget or overdosing on special effects.

The Substitute pits a class of young schoolchildren against their new substitute teacher, Ulla Harms. She cruel and strange, and oh yeah, an alien. She wraps the parents and school administration around her finger. leaving the kids to on their own. What is Ulla’s plan for the children, and what part do chickens play in all of this?

The child actors are great, and Paprika Steen is more than their match as Ulla. Her sweet-cruel-sweet transformations are entertaining as they are monstrous. This is a fun Sooby-doo adventure with just enough thrills to make you really fear for the kids but laugh along the way.

Surveillance

Surveillance is Jennifer Lynch’s Rashomon style dissection of a horrible crime scene by a pair of FBI agents. There’s much to like in this movie, but the mystery is not one of them. It is clear in the first five minutes what the mystery is, so you spend the rest of the movie waiting to see where the movie goes and how the inevitable events play out.

FBI agents Anderson and Hallaway descend on a rural precinct to collect the eyewitness reports of a horrible mass murder perpetrated by a group of serial killers. Just as in the classic Japanese tale, everyone is hiding something and it is up to the agents to extract the truth. Unfortunately, the truth comes with a very high cost.

Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond deliver some great, quirky performances, but several members of the supporting cast also deliver the goods, especially Pell James and Ryan Simpkins. Lynch (who also directed Boxing Helena) turns out a dark, twisted, but intelligent serial killer flick. Well worth checking out.

JCVD

JCVD is what film festivals are all about. You hear about a film that sound so ludicrous you’re surprised someone even made it. But then you learn it has a buzz and realize that you might never have a chance to see it, so caution to the wind you give it a chance. And in this JCVD turned out to be a surprise treat, in fact, it is my Fantastic Fest favourite so far (but hey, we’re only on day 2). By the way, JCVD stands for Jean-Claude Van Damme. Yes, I am pimping the Muscles from Brussels.

Van Damme plays himself in JCVD, a tender at times comedic drama about his failed marriage and career. After losing custody of his daughter he returns to Belgium to clear his head and look for new work. Strapped for money, he makes a desperate trip to his bank to pay his laywer fee and blunders into a bank heist. Sound like the setup to a bad 80s action film? Yes, and that’s precisely what you don’t get. Jean-Claude has virtually no heroic action scenes in the entire film. And when forced to act without his fists in an ensemble cast, Van Damme is surprisingly good. In fact, towards the end of the movie, he turns out a long, fourth wall breaking monologue all done in a single take. The self analysis in that scene is sharp and painful.

I have no idea where Van Damme can take his career from here, but he and writer/director, Mabrouk el Mechri, deserve much respect for this standout metafiction piece. Seek out this cleverly structured film, you will be amazed what the sweaty dude from Bloodsport can really do.

Feast 2

I liked the first Feast movie when it premiered back in Fantastic Fest 2005. It wasn’t high art, but it was a total beer movie that poked fun at monster movie convention while still delivering the thrills. The film makers hoped to top their last effort, but sadly this sequel fails in the worst way, it is just plain boring.

Feast 2 picks up immediately after the first ends as Harley Mom’s twin sister and her bike gang come looking for her. The trail leads them to a generic small town that has been ravaged by the monsters. The feasties have wiped out most of the population and the survivors and biker chicks band together to stay alive and escape.

The film quickly dissolves into a series of completely laborious attempts to go for the "oh, not they didn’t!" reaction pasted together. Probably the worst of these is an extended pee and fart joke in the form of a monster dissection scene. Perhaps if I wasn’t so bored, I wouldn’t have notices all of the gaping plot holes, terrible character decisions, and continuity problems, bored I was. Apparently there’s Feast 3 coming, maybe the story and the fun will show up there.