Tag Archives: Fantasia Festival

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 →

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

Review: Parvulos — Fantasia Festival 2024

Parvulos is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

I’m going to give Parvulos the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its politics, in that I’m assuming it isn’t trying to have a politics at all. I begin by saying that, because the premise of the film is that a raging, deadly virus out-paced the rollout of vaccine boosters, so the government put out an untested vaccine whose unintended side effect was zombie-ism. The film first poses the question: What if society crumbled because of a deadly virus. Then, as an end-of-first-act twist, it posits instead: What if society crumbled because of that virus’s vaccine?

This first act is a slow-developing world building section in which three brothers, living alone in a home in the country, struggle to Continue reading Review: Parvulos — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: Me and My Victim — Fantasia Festival 2024

Me and My Victim is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Me and My Victim begins with co-director Maurane reciting a poem at a party. The poem is about the disparity between pornographic depictions of yoga and massaging and their real-life counterparts. There is a tension felt in the voice of the poem’s speaker, in that she both desires the perversity of the pornographic contexts and is violently averse to the notion of being touched by the men giving the massage and running the yoga class. Within the context of the poem, it is an intriguing tension, and this dichotomy between attraction and disgust (kind of, sort of) defines the narrative of the film.

The bulk of the documentary is a series of recreations of Maurane’s early dates with a romantic partner (the other co-director, Billy Pedlow), dates which are inflected with strange sexual tension. The intent is to expose Continue reading Review: Me and My Victim — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: House of Sayuri — Fantasia Festival 2024

House of Sayuri is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Koji Shiraishi, known for the unsettling Noroi: The Curse, gives us in House of Sayuri an initially by-the-numbers haunted house film that pleasantly surprises with a second act rug pull. The film focuses on a family moving into a new home, where strange things immediately start occurring. It becomes evident that a violent ghost is haunting the family, bringing death and darkness to anyone who stays the night in the house.

House of Sayuri spends a good portion of its runtime recycling the same scare formula. A person wanders through the narrow corridors of the new home at night, finds themselves in Continue reading Review: House of Sayuri — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Review: Black Eyed Susan — Fantasia Festival 2024

Black Eyed Susan is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Scooter McCrae could be described as an underground filmmaker. His three features have all been made on shoestring budgets and have provocatively challenged conventions. I remain a neophyte to McCrae’s work (I promise I will watch Sixteen Tongues very soon, but I didn’t have time to catch up with it ahead of this review). At the same time, I imagine I will see similar themes and moods to Black Eyed Susan present in his earlier films.

In the film, a man with a history of alcohol dependency and aggressive outbursts, Derek (Damien Maffei), is hired by an acquaintance to work at an artificial intelligence development company. The technology the company wants to push to market, and which Derek is tasked with testing, is a highly realistic Continue reading Review: Black Eyed Susan — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: The Soul Eater — Fantasia Festival 2024

The Soul Eater is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

In the rural town of Roquenoir, France, a series of murders and kidnappings have taken place. One survivor, a young boy, says it is the work of the “Soul Eater,” a creature of urban legend that steals children away into the woods.

Two investigators working under different jurisdictions are tasked with investigating the case. Elisabeth (Virginie Ledoyen) works for the National Police and is focused on the murders. Franck (Paul Hamy), the captain of the National Gendarmerie, is focused on the missing children. The two butt heads as they seek answers about this mysterious series of crimes.

Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, best known for their bloody 2007 film Inside, bring glimpses of the gruesome to this otherwise Continue reading Review: The Soul Eater — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Western

Review: Mash Ville — Fantasia Festival 2024

Mash Ville is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Mash Ville is the type of ensemble crime film that is so jam-packed with plotty incident and odd characters that it feels as though the film is doing a lot and thus must be doing something interesting and new. The film aspires to be something like an acid western, and it may also draw comparisons to Tarantino or the Coens, in that the film attempts to blend slick humor with farce with black comedy.

The problem with an overly plotted black comedy about death and crime is that, if you do too much, it becomes Continue reading Review: Mash Ville — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: Cuckoo — Fantasia Festival 2024

Cuckoo is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

I can’t help but feel that Cuckoo is a series of intriguing parts in search of a sum. Writer-director Tilman Singer introduces potentially fresh approaches to well-worn horror-thriller ideas, but these ideas never fully culminate in something satisfyingly original.

In the film, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a young rebellious teenager, moves from the United States to Germany to live with her father in a secluded estate in the Alps with his new wife and her young daughter. It is a decision she quickly regrets. Feeling homesick, she calls her mother and leaves a message saying as much. More than this, she is put off by the home, the neighboring resort at which she is given a job, and the people populating the area. In particular, Mr. König (Dan Stevens), the owner of the resort and Gretchen’s father’s employer, unnerves Gretchen.

Par for the course with horror films, strange and inexplicable occurrences start bringing themselves to Gretchen’s attention. Her mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu) starts convulsing in her bedroom in an apparent seizure brought on by a sound coming from the nearby woods. Women coming into the resort lobby occasionally fall suddenly ill and vomit. Mr. König insists that Gretchen not Continue reading Review: Cuckoo — Fantasia Festival 2024 →