Fantasy Filmfest 2004
01/08/2004 . Source: Sasha Soren 

Sasha tells how starting out in Munich, and cutting a creepy swathe through Stuttgart, Cologne and Frankfurt, to a final week-long blowout in Berlin, the Fantasy Filmfest dishes everything from haute horreur to gore-n-splatter.

FILM/Festivals/Germany

Fantasy Filmfest
July 21 - August 18

Boom-sha-la-la-la, it's the magickal horror/fantasy tour.

Starting out in Munich, and cutting a creepy swathe through Stuttgart, Cologne and Frankfurt, to a final weeklong blow-out in Berlin, the Fantasy Filmfest dishes everything from haute horreur to gore-n-splatter.

The festival kicks off with black comedy/fantasy "Kontroll". The film centers on a group of ticket inspectors and a killer having a field day on the Budapest metro.

Also in the 'recurring horror theme/cautionary tale' category, "Perfect Strangers", in which the protagonist learns that her dark prince charming is, in effect, not. He's played by Sam Neill, who has this penchant for playing quiet, bug-eyed lunatics.

Then there's first-time director Greg Page's ghost-horror film "The Locals," which tells the story of friends Grant and Paul, who hit the road for a weekend of surfing and booze, etcetera. Instead, they meet...The Locals. Mouha-ha-ha.

Urban legend springs to life in "Koma," a psychological thriller that kicks off with that 'wakes up missing a kidney' scenario.

Directed by Lo Chi-Leung, "Koma" unites Hong Kong horror queens Lee Sinje ("The Eye") and Karena Lam ("Inner Sense"), in a game where the victim and the victimizer can no longer keep their identities separate.

For folks who get a kick out of luxuriating in paranoia, there's "Freeze Frame", "The Machinist" and "Hanging Offense". They're all various takes on the theory that if you believe they're out to get you, one day you just might be right.

In the blood-as-impressionist-art category, try "Dead and Breakfast", featuring six friends who get stranded in Lovelock, featuring David Carradine as a Buddhist innkeeper, and, of course, The Locals.

A creepier gore option: "The Ordeal". Which, like the title "Funny Games," kinda tells the story right there.

Full-on action in several wire-fu/thriller/fantasy hybrids: "Dead End Run", "The Twins Effect/Chin Gei Bin", or "Sword in the Moon".

Swordplay epic "Azumi", features kick-ass swordswoman Azumi, trained since birth as a master assassin.

Another option: "Arahan", which starts off with the premise that the guardians of galactic peace are actually rumpled, ordinary folks:

"Arahan": 2004 A.D. - In the midst of Seoul, where high-res camera phones, MP3s and iPods capture the attention of the young...window-cleaners calmly carry on their job, dangling thousands of feet above the ground. Wrinkled grannies on the street handle heavy satchels as if they were air-filled balloons. What if these are the "masters" of the secret disciplines of the East, preserving the peace of our world without our knowledge?

Next off, the satanic-possession-film-batch, headed up by the world premiere of "Strandvaskeren/The Drowning Ghost"; middling storyline about weird doings at an all-girl school, but some creepy visuals. In "Evil Words", a horror novelist seems to be the catalyst for a horrific killing spree.

Moving on to the more esoteric, there's "Nothing," a surrealistic comedy by the same director who popped up with sci-fi/thriller oddity "Cube" in 1997.

This time around, the protags know each other - but that doesn't help them any. Best friends Dave and Andrew wish they could escape from their dead-end jobs and boring lives.

They get what they wished for - sort of. They open the door to the outside world to find that nothing exists beyond a white void of non-being.

What they've got: Themselves. Their house. And nothing. Are they dead? Is life just on 'pause'? Can they write anything on their blank slate?

Questioning their existence, Andrew and Dave ultimately reject these hypotheses: after all, they still have cable...

Next up, anime meets live action in "Immortel (Ad Vitam)".

Visually mind-blowing, but skimpy on plot, "Immortel" is the dark sci-fi/cyberpunk brainchild of comics-artist-turned-director, Enki Bilal.

It's New York City, 2095 A.D. or thereabouts; eugenics is getting a bad rep, mysterious messages appear around the city, signed by the 'spirit of Nikopol', the ancient Egyptian gods gang up on Horus in their pyramid, which is busy floating in mid-air over the post-apocalyptic gloom of New York City. As this is (still) New York City, no one notices.

Horus is looking for a one night stand with a girl who is, inexplicably, blue. Mystery man Nikopol finally puts in an appearance and loses a leg, Horus ropes him into tracking down the girl with the blue tears, further incomprehensibility ensues.

A doctor and a serial killer show up, and, incidentally, there's an election going on.

Keep your eye on the blue girl. The movie's about her.

The meandering storyline is drawn from two of Bilal's graphic novels: "La Foire aux Immortels/Carnival of Immortals" and "La Femme Piège/The Woman Trap" in his Nikopol Trilogy (the last volume is "Froid Équateur").

Lastly, for everyone who saw "The Ring" and got the jeebies about TV screens - here comes a brand-new way to scare yourself.

It's "Ringu" all over again, only this time it's all about the creepyhaha dial tone, in "One Missed Call".

What goes down: Yumi Nakamura is out drinking with her friend Yoko, when Yoko receives a call on her cell phone.

The ring tone is completely new to her - the display reads "One Missed Call". When she checks the message, it seems to have originated from her own phone.

Even weirder, there are screams that sound like her own on the message, but the timestamp on the message is dated three days into the future. Hmmm.

Three days later, at the exact time of the call and with the same piercing scream, Yoko plunges to her death from a railway bridge.

Kenji, another friend of Yumi's, receives the same sort of call. Poof. Gone.

One more victim. Same ol' creepy ring. Everybody is still hanging around with Yumi, but why, we don't know, because it's not like she's bringing them any good news, if you catch our drift.

This time, Yumi's best friend, Natsumi receives the call of doom, but the message is a little different. Video footage on the phone's display shows someone sneaking up behind her own terror-stricken self.

Natsumi knows she is doomed and starts to lose it. Ignoring Yumi's pleas, she agrees to go on TV live and undergo an exorcism at the hour she is predicted to die.

Meanhile, Yumi, who's understandably freaked at her new role as incidental slingshot-of-doom, teams up with oddball funeral director, Hiroshi Yamashita (Shinichi Tsutsumi), whose sister was killed by the same horrifying curse.

The two of them follow the trail of deaths, trying to make sense of it all. As do we all.

Natsumi's moment of truth approaches. At the forecasted moment, live on national TV, she dies a horrifying death, which makes for some killer ratings.

As bad-luck-babe Yumi and funereal cutie Yamashita gaze down on Natsumi's twisted corpse...Yumi's phone begins to ring.

(Is anybody else wondering what would've happened if they'd just...picked up? Death gets caught out on the other end making a crank call, and has to cover: "Er, sorry, wrong number"?)

Director Takashi Miike had a blast shooting the film, saying he even scared himself. 'Course, we can wait for the new "One Missed Call" ringtone to start surfacing any day, now. Brrr-ing.

NB: Yes, there really is a street called Nymphenburger. Quit bugging us to say it sounds rather rude. Genau. Blame it on those mad Bavarians.

Find it:

MUNICH July 21-28
Cinema, Nymphenburgerstrasse, 31
Get info: 089-55-52-55
City, Sonnenstrasse, 12
Get info: 089-59-1983
BERLIN August 11-18
Cinemaxx, Potsdamerstrasse,5
Get info: 01805-246-36-299

Tour schedule:
Munich, July 21-28
Stuttgart, July 28 - August 4th
Frankfurt, August 4th-11th
Cologne, August 4th-11th
Hamburg, August 11th-18th
Berlin, August 11th-18th

FILM/Festivals/Montreal

FanTasia
July 8-August 1
Montreal's "FanTasia" festival is a surefire cure for cinematic ennui. Showcasing some of the most original and unusual new films, "FanTasia" draws more than 70,000 visitors during the festival's three-week run. With reason.

Why?
Proposition: Three weeks of outrageous, thought-provoking celluloid from Japan, Spain, South Korea, Italy, Hong Kong, Germany, Thailand, Denmark, France, Russia, India, New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Australia, Holland, Scotland, Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain, the U.S., Quebec and Canada. In one place. Six bucks a ticket. Go, go, go.

Predominantly a fantasy/action/horror festival, "FanTasia" is still home to a lot of offbeat, eclectic films whose individuality secures them a spot of their own.

Only one major nit-pick: they're not doing too well on finding cool movies featuring competent women. Nary a one on the list, with the (dubious) exception of swordfu flick, "Azumi". And that's pushing it. Maybe next year.

Some finds unearthed at past festivals: Hideo Nakata's "Ringu", Kang Jegyu's "Shiri" and Satoshi Kon's "Perfect Blue" all made international debuts at FanTasia. Among Canadian premieres, "The Blair Witch Project", "Wendigo" and Park Chan-Wook's "Joint Security Area".

New this year: "Komistok Fantasia" (July 16-18) for fans of comix/manga, featuring film shorts and feature-length movies (ex: "Immortel") adapted from comic books, and a showcase of work from publisher DC Comics, Dark Horse, Slave Labor Graphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Éditions de la Pastèque, l'Oie de Cravan, l'Association and Oni.

Right. Back to the main fest.

More than 100 feature length movies and some 60 short films (most notably action, comedy, documentaries, drama, martial arts, science fiction, fantasy and cult movies) screen this year.

Highlights: Features

"A Journey Into Bliss"
Inside a gigantic floating "snailboat", grizzled Captain Gustav is on the verge of retirement. [Then] his ship stumbles across an island that for all intents and purposes, does not exist. The region is under surreal monarchist rule, lorded over by crazy king Kniffi.

Talking frogs, insightful snowmen...Ladies and gentlemen, meet Wenzel Storch. He has come to us from another planet with a mission to illustrate how delirious filmmaking can be when with NO RULES and a ton of imagination. - Mitch Davis

"Fantasia"
A small detective agency struggles to get by in 1969 Hong Kong. The situation takes an unexpected turn when Fugu polishes a magic lamp and out pops Bobo, a sorceress who's just graduated from a Hogwart-style magic school and thus is less than fully prepared to weave her spells correctly (there's this awkward delay, leading to some serious problems).

Bobo is the trigger for a series of anarchic situations that will quickly dump our heroes into a great big chaotic mess...hysterically funny but genuinely touching. - Julien Fonfrêde (trans: Rupert Bottenberg)

"Into the Mirror"
The Dreampia shopping center is about to reopen. The head of mall security is hard-drinking former cop Yeong-min. Employees of the mall are committing suicide on the premises -- or so it seems. What look superficially like open-and-shut cases are, upon deeper consideration, ambiguous and troubling. For starters, the victims are all right-handed, yet the wounds suggest they were inflicted with the left.

"Into the Mirror" is a solid addition to the growing bank of atmospheric, psychological horror films from Asia.

Well-executed special effects cleverly confound the viewer, shuffling reality and reflection like a deck of cards and creating a sense of constant, eerie disorientation. Take a look in the mirror -- are you sure it's yourself staring back? - Rupert Bottenberg

"Jailbreakers"
Minor criminals Yoo Jae-pil and Choi Mu-suk break out of prison for entirely different reasons: Jae-pil to stop his former fiancée Kyung-soon from marrying, and Mu-suk to justify the six years it took him to dig the escape tunnel with a spoon.

Once out of prison, the hapless duo discover that they were both in line for a full pardon in two days time. Now they just have to find a way to break back in. - Donato Totaro

"Ritual"
A filmmaker in the throes of a serious creative block wanders erratically through the city. He discovers an enigmatic and eccentric girl sitting on a train track, clutching a red umbrella (her shield from the outside world) and ceaselessly repeating that the next day will be her birthday. This is the ritual that she repeats day after day, anticipating the moment that she'll disappear. Fascinated, the filmmaker begins following her, and so begins an aimless urban pilgrimage where everything leans to the...unexpected. - Julien Fonfrêde (translated by Rupert Bottenberg)

"Romasanta"
Let it be said right away that Paco Plaza's "Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt" is one of the best werewolf movies ever made; a tense, edgy, chillingly macabre tale, graced by passionate and credible performances from a fine cast of actors. The film packs a real punch, and the impact is heightened by the knowledge that it's based on true events.

Elena Serra and Alberto Marini's script is adapted from award-winning novelist Alfredo Conde's book, "Romasanta: Unreliable Memoirs of a Werewolf," an apocryphal, first-person account of the criminal exploits of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who carried out a string of savage murders in the forests of the Galician hinterland in the mid-19th century. He was finally caught and put on trial in 1853.

Incredibly, his claim that he couldn't be held responsible for the killings since he suffered from lycanthropy was sustained by highly influential "scientists" of the day.

Romasanta was condemned to life imprisonment. He died in prison under circumstances which remain unclear to this day. - Mike Hodges, "Fangoria"

"The Uninvited"
Weeks away from marriage and exhausted after a long day at work, Jung-Won falls asleep on the subway. He awakes disoriented, just in time to catch his stop.

Upon exiting, he sees two little girls seated alone on the train, themselves deep in sleep. The next day, Jung-Won again loses himself in the minutiae of marriage planning until he learns that two girls were found poisoned on the subway.

When he gets home, he has a vision of the dead girls seated lifelessly in his kitchen. This will not be the last time he encounters them...

In a psychiatrist's office, he meets a narcoleptic named Yun, whom he learns is also having visions of the dead children. As their conversations become deeper and more introspective, they find that they share a tragic bond with one another.

It wouldn't be fair to reveal another beat, but suffice it to say, this doesn't go anywhere you'd expect it to, and [the punchline] will leave you chilled to your very soul. By first-time feature director Lee Soo-Yeon. - Mitch Davis

Highlights: Short films

(Pre/reviews: Mitch Davis)

"Little Things"
Hilarious, slightly mean animation from the UK details how the miserable and mundane in daily life repeat in an unstoppable routine - even under the harshest of circumstances.

"Living Dead Girl"
The dead rise, the living begin to be eaten and a couple barricade themselves into an old home. Sound familiar? Think again...

"Never Ever After"
Mariano Baino returns...with this strange short fairy tale about bodily alterations in a self-conscious society. Deep saturated lighting, dada-ist art direction, and ghoulish wit are the order of the day.

"Table 13"
Arthur has planned what he believes is the perfect robbery. He has assembled his dream team of criminals for breakfast. Unfortunately for Arthur, the prospective victim of this brilliant robbery was also invited for breakfast at table 13.

Highlights: "Komistock"

"Arzak Rhapsody"
Jean "Moebius" Giraud is one of the most celebrated artists of the modern French comic-book world. His art is a psychedelic kaleidoscope of the weird and the wonderful, rendered with signature precision. His stories are a descent into deep dream logic, unique fables pulsating with fear, laughter, lust and profound, mystical imagination. Moebius himself wrote, drew and directed all 14 brief episodes seen in "Arzak". Moebius will be on hand at the screening of "Arzak Rhapsody". - Rupert Bottenberg

Find it:
Hall Theatre and J.A. De Sève Theatre
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8, Canada
Get there: Metro: Guy-Concordia
Get info/tix: (514) 790-1245, (800) 361-4595

FILM/Festivals/London

Rushes Soho Shorts Festival
July 31-August 6th

Skirting a thinnish line between indie cool and marketing ho-ha, Rushes Soho Shorts (tagline: we want your shorts) hits London cafes this month, with continuous screenings of short films in venues all over Soho.

On the plus side, it's free, and you can go walk-about in Soho to catch new work by emerging directors, in several categories: animation, drama, comedy, and arthouse music video. Old Compton Street/Shaftesbury Avenue area is fest central.

The festival wraps with a party at "Sound" in Leicester Square - see http://www.soundlondon.com for more details.

Shortlisted films in competition:

"JoJo in the Stars"
In a world without color -- a story of love, self-sacrifice and jealously set against a nightmarish and hauntingly beautiful world in black and white.

"Little Things"
Sketches of a dysfunctional world in which everybody has their favorite foibles. And neurotic habits. When a cataclysmic event shakes things up, do we adapt, or are we just too set in our ways to give a damn?

"The Brick"
Black comedy about a lazy demon who's become delusional, thinking he'll be able to take over the world with a magic brick.

"After Dolly"
Reflections on the future of cloning.

"Ten Minute Movie"
All Sam wants is a shot at fame. But sometimes fame shoots back. Sam's got just ten minutes to get the girl and stop the plot from spiraling out of control.

"Gone"
A boy goes through hell when he witnesses something terrible but fails to act to stop it.

"Terrible Kisses"
A woman's gift to her lover - lipstick kisses all over his body - turns into an indelible nightmare when the kisses won't wash off.

Find it:
Too many venues to list. Here's a venue/screening info/metro map.

Get info:
020-7935-3337, 020-7734-2255

Sasha Soren

(c) Sasha Soren 2004

This article first appeared in "arte six" - all the arts. all the time.
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