Tag Archives: movie review

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

Review: Touched by Eternity — Fantastic Fest 2024

Touched by Eternity is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

The opening of Touched by Eternity suggests that the secret to immortal life is yeast. In particular, yeast KC1822V, which is the subject of experimental research to test its life-sustaining properties. A man who is never given a name, but he claims everyone calls him Fatso (Andris Keišs), lives alone in a trailer, watching video podcasts on the study of this yeast and purchasing it by the box load. He eats the yeast raw, despite the plea of scientists that doing so could be dangerous. This disclaimer proves to be, at least partially, true, as when the courier delivering the latest shipment curiously tries some himself, he keels over with foam bubbling from his mouth.

None of this is of too much consequence to the plot of Touched by Eternity, the quirky vampire film from Mārcis Lācis. Fatso stumbles upon a fitting substitute for immortal yeast: Egons and Carlos (Ivars Krasts and Edgars Samītis) two pansexual vampires that show up immediately following the delivery carrier’s poisoning in search of a screwdriver. Soon, Fatso is thrust into Continue reading Review: Touched by Eternity — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Bookworm — Fantastic Fest 2024

Bookworm is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I recall seeing Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy back in 2019 at midnight at the Alamo Drafthouse during Fantastic Fest. I also recall being dead tired and not particularly jazzed by the Ant Timpson experience. I’ve since returned to his feature debut following an adequate amount of sleep, and I can still see why I had been turned off by the experience at the time. It’s slow-build story structure and unlikable characters require a little bit of patience. However, while the film is by no means perfect, it is clever and nasty in the right moments.

Timpson’s latest, Bookworm, is a much different type of film (although, both films have a fascination with estranged dads). Far from the oddball comedy thriller of Come to Daddy, Bookworm is an oddball, mostly family-friendly comedy about dangerous predators in the New Zealand wilderness.

After her mother falls into a coma due to a Continue reading Review: Bookworm — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Steppenwolf — Fantastic Fest 2024

Steppenwolf is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

Steppenwolf is a formally striking piece of grand existential absurdism. Within the confines of a brutal civil war, the characters in the film (in particular, the sociopathic Brajyuk) face death with an ironic distance that would make Camus’ Meursault proud.

The film opens with the violent takeover of a remote police compound where political prisoners are being tortured. When staring down the barrel of a gun, Brajyuk (Berik Aitzhanov), a corrupt police interrogator, tells his rebel captors that Continue reading Review: Steppenwolf — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Ebony and Ivory — Fantastic Fest 2024

Ebony and Ivory is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

Ebony and Ivory is absolute nonsense, and that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Imagine a biopic about the creative experience behind one of the best-selling duets in pop history (the Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder song of the title), then pay a back-alley surgeon to lobotomize that idea out of your brain forever. What remains might be Ebony and Ivory.

Jim Hosking, the director behind the divisive cult gross-out film The Greasy Strangler, brings the two legendary musical icons together in a cabin in rural Scotland, only to Continue reading Review: Ebony and Ivory — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Apartment 7A — Fantastic Fest 2024

Apartment 7A is screening as part of the 2024 Fantastic Fest, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I’d be lying if I said I’ve read Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby. Although, it sits on my dining room table (because the one bookcase I own overflows). It is a burnt orange hardcover volume, slim, with similarly orange-y paper, as the book is from the original Random House printing. I found it on the side of the road when I was 16, in a box of other very old books ready to be tossed into the back of a garbage truck.

So I haven’t read it. But I thumbed through it after watching Natalie Erika James’ Apartment 7A, because it Continue reading Review: Apartment 7A — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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 →