Tag Archives: 2025

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Sugar Rot — Fantasia Festival 2025

Sugar Rot had its Quebec premiere on Aug 1 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Sugar Rot is billed as a feminist, punk rock, body horror film. It does involve the horrific transformation of a body, that of the protagonist fittingly named Candy (Chloe Macleod). One location in the film presents a few punk rock bands performing. And the John Waters-esque story world produced by director Becca Kozak is obsessed with female body standards and the normalization of the exploitation of women’s bodies. So, check, check, and check on the billing. At face value, at least.

There is a cruel contradiction at the sugary core of Sugar Rot. As Candy’s body becomes candy (literally), every character wants to Continue reading Review: Sugar Rot — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Lurker — Fantasia Festival 2025

Lurker had its Canadian premiere on Aug 1 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Alex Russell’s debut film Lurker is about obsession. It is in one sense about the parasocial relationships fostered by celebrity, but more accurately it is about the mind of a person who manipulates the world around him in order to embed himself within one celebrity’s orbit. It is a film about a sociopath, essentially.

Matthew (Theodore Pellerin), this sociopathic personality, works at a clothing store occasionally patroned by an up-and-coming musician named Oliver (Archie Madekwe). Matthew plays a song over the speaker that is calculated to get Oliver’s attention. When he gets it, he pretends to have never heard of Oliver’s music. He, of course, has heard it. In fact, he relentlessly stalks Oliver’s social media to gain Continue reading Review: Lurker — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: $POSITIONS — Fantasia Festival 2025

$POSITIONS had its Quebec premiere on July 30 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It is hard to shake the resemblance between Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS and Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time. The two brothers at the center, the economically motivated premise, the ill-conceived choices, the propulsive synth score. The two films are so similar, in fact, that by the time this review goes live, every other person on the Internet will likely have already made the comparison.

The biggest difference between the two films is in the tone, where $POSITIONS is more overtly comedic. More specifically, it is a comedy of errors meets grossout comedy sort of cringe comedy. And its gags get so Continue reading Review: $POSITIONS — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: OBEX — Fantasia Festival 2025

OBEX had its Canadian premiere on July 29 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It’s 1987. “Computer” Conor (Albert Birney, who also directs) spends his morning talking lovingly to his dog Sandy and watching the news on one of the three television sets stacked in a row in the middle of his living room. He works from home, rapidly typing out on his Macintosh computer digital recreations of photographs that people send to him. His neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) arrives weekly to check up on him and bring him groceries, but he never opens the door.

While thumbing through a computer hobbyist catalogue, Conor stumbles upon a mysterious ad for a video game called “OBEX.” Not only is it a game, but it is Continue reading Review: OBEX — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Fantasia Festival 2025 Reviews — Lucid and Every Heavy Thing

Lucid and Every Heavy Thing had their world premieres on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Lucid

Mia (Caitlin Taylor) is an art student without inspiration. When she screws up her self-portrait, she nails a dead fish to it at the last minute and hurries to the studio. Her instructor and most of her classmates are unimpressed. Desperate for Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2025 Reviews — Lucid and Every Heavy Thing →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025

Hellcat had its world premiere on July 25 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Brock Bodell’s Hellcat is immediately intense. A rickety mobile home tearing down the highway is our setting. Inside is Lena (Dakota Gorman), who wakes to the jolting movements of the vehicle the home is hitched to. Assessing her situation, she finds herself padlocked inside with nothing in her pockets. A voice over an intercom (Todd Terry) tells her that she is “infected” (in a nice touch, the voice comes through the mouth of a taxidermy wolf head). This driver, Clive, claims to have found her injured, and that he is driving her to a doctor. But the red flags quickly start to mount as Lena investigates the trailer.

My immediate thought on being presented the premise is that the title of the film was likely giving the twist away, or that the title was a red herring. In either case, I would have preferred the lack of clarity that the film dropped me into. There is enough ambiguity to what is going on—until Continue reading Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Romance

Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn had its world premiere on July 23 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Shina Mizuhara (Ui Mihara) is a bored actress. Promoting her new film, she lazily answers softball press questions. When she doesn’t get anything satisfying out of the interview, she turns to the camera and starts drooling. Completely unmotivated, Shina strives for a change of pace by vacationing in New York City.

Jack (Estevan Munoz) is an imaginative and passionate wannabe filmmaker. Growing up on Nirvana, George Romero, and Takashi Miike, Jack wants nothing more than to bring a punk rock ethos to film. Instead, he is a lowly intern for a New York studio, slaving away while only getting slightly closer to his dream.

When Shina and Jack get drunk at the same dive bar (and Jack finds Shina outside lying in someone else’s puke), an unlikely Continue reading Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Animation, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Dog of God — Fantasia Festival 2025

Dog of God had its world premiere on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Dog of God is the type of film that begins with the triumphant, heavy metal castration of a giant demon. You’re probably familiar with the type. Those Latvian rotoscope animations with heightened folkloric subject matter and a bawdy, crass sense of humor. There’s got to be hundreds of them out there.

In all sincerity, Lauris and Raitis Ābele’s Dog of God is quite unlike any other animated feature out there. It has the grimy ambitions of a Heavy Metal, a Ralph Bakshi film, or, more recently, a Mad God. But its mix of period fantasy and visual psychedelia (and its oddly high sex drive) make for Continue reading Review: Dog of God — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Hold the Fort — Fantasia Festival 2025

Hold the Fort had its world premiere on July 16 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Herbert Gruber (Mark Ashworth) sets down a box of “Shoot ‘Em Dead” shotgun shells and hands his wife Mable (Devney Nixon) a wooden stake. Herb insists that nothing could convince him to sell his family’s land. Over his dead body, and all that. “Nothing’s takin’ my land,” Herb says. Then, he arms himself for a night full of a cryptid sort of self-defense.

William Bagley’s Hold the Fort is a broad horror comedy centering on the new tenants of Gruber Hills. Following Herb apparently not making it through the night, the suburb has a new home for sale. Lucas (Chris Mayers) and Jenny (Haley Leary) arrive to the warm welcome of the HOA representative (Julian Smith), who informs them of the portal that annually sends through a bevy of Continue reading Review: Hold the Fort — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

Lists, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Fantasia Festival 2025 Lineup Preview

2025. Another year, another Fantasia International Film Festival experience. Fantasia is a massive festival centering on international genre cinema. I love covering this Montreal fest. It’s selections are always diverse and offbeat, turning me on to pockets of the genre film space that I was not privy to. So let’s just get down to it. Five films in this year’s program (probably) worth adding to the watchlist. Let’s go.

This year’s Fantasia Festival runs from July 16 to August 3.

Every Heavy Thing (Mickey Reece)

I have seen three Mickey Reece films courtesy of Fantasia Fest, and they were all intriguing formal experiments. His work feels like the natural progression of the mumblecore/mumblegore genre (i.e., it’s lo-fi and low-key, but moves past the self-seriousness and intentional lack of effort that caused mumblecore to taper off in the first place). His films aren’t Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2025 Lineup Preview →