Dispatch From Fantastic Fest

My first time covering Fantastic Fest, the Austin-based genre film festival put on by the folks who run the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, was an unusual one. For starters, I didn’t actually attend the fest.

Chalk it up mostly to car troubles. And anyway, on the first day of the fest, Tropical Storm Imelda hit, turning most of Texas into a massive outdoor pool and making it impossible for anyone to attend a film festival on that day — even if they were showing Jojo Rabbit.

Thankfully, since I had press credentials, Fantastic Fest had an online screening room ready for me, and some publicists hooked me up with screener links to other films that were playing at the fest. So here is a rundown of the features I managed to check out while covering this festival from afar.

The Good

First Love

Of course, my favorite film from this festival would be the latest from the notoriously unpredictable Takashi Miike, the sick bastard who gave us Audition, Ichi the Killer and Gozu. This one’s about an orphaned boxer (Masataka Kubota) who becomes the reluctant savior of a tormented, drug-addicted sex worker (Sakurako Konishi). After a drug heist goes wrong, they both get swept up into a full-on war between Chinese and Japanese mobsters. I’m sure I’ve seen this several times before, but Miike wonderfully takes this pulp romance to hilariously hyperviolent, surprisingly farcical heights.

The Death of Dick Long

You’d think with a title like this, this backwoods black comedy (which premiered earlier this year at Sundance and opened in theaters this weekend) would just be a slyly sophomoric free-for-all — and it kinda is. Two working-class dirtbags (Michael Abbott, Jr. and Andre Hyland) try — and usually fail — to cover up their involvement in the accidental death of a drinking buddy after a night of wild partying. Needless to say, the reason for their actions is a real jaw-dropper. But what’s more amazing is how the movie (coolly handled by Swiss Army Man co-director Daniel Scheinert) delivers all this lunacy with a straight face, showing you how something that sounds like a stereotypical white-trash joke could actually end up shattering the lives of everyone involved.

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

This documentary from directors Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen (which will play during the Graveyard Shift at this year’s Nashville Film Festival) tackles something that took me by surprise: the campy, homoerotic legacy of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. I never knew this sequel was considered a “gay movie” by critics, detractors and hardcore fans. But as Mark Patton, the star of the movie and the subject of this film, explains, starring as the poor kid who gets terrorized by Freddy Krueger this time around damn-near ruined his life. The documentary shows the gay actor accepting his newfound role as an LGBTQ+ icon, even though he has horrible memories of getting virtually blackballed in the industry for being too gay a leading man.

Memory: The Origins of Alien

If you’ve gotten tired of the Alien prequels Ridley Scott keeps churning out (which nobody even asked for), go back to the 1979 movie that started it all with this doc. Yes, this film is a tribute to the movie, but it’s also a tribute to the late screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. Writer-director Alexandre O. Philippe breaks down the bounty of influences (H.P. Lovecraft, EC Comics, H.R. Giger — of course) that inspired this sci-fi-horror trailblazer, while also getting interviews with cast members, crew members and scholars about their favorite moments from the film.

Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks

Anything that salutes the kung fu movies I grew up watching on Saturday afternoons instantly earns a place in the good pile. This flashy doc from Serge Ou has a bevy of talking heads (Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Cynthia Rothrock, Sammo Hung and even Fab 5 Freddy, among others) giving their two cents on the chopsocky cinema created by the Shaw Brothers (who famously passed on the talents of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan) and Golden Harvest, which inspired everything from kick-ass blaxploitation flicks to breakdancing, The Matrix and the wackadoo action movies coming out of Thailand, Indonesia and Uganda.

The Bad

The True Adventures of Wolfboy

Some of my fellow film-critic colleagues have been quite enamored with this uplifting, coming-of-age journey from director Martin Krejčí. As for me, I found it clumsy and cloying. This Tim Burton-esque trip into loving yourself has Jaeden Martell (who played young Bill in the It movies) as a bratty boy stuck with a rare disease called hypertrichosis, which causes excess hair to grow all over his body, including his face. One night, the kid runs away from home in search of his mother, who skipped out a long time ago. Along the way, he does business with a nefarious carnival owner (a scenery-chewing John Turturro), robs gas stations with an eyepatch-wearing woman (Eve Hewson) and befriends an aspiring cabaret singer (Sophie Giannamore). I know this sounds kinda cool, but, trust me, it’s a mess that doesn’t get good until the last 20 minutes.

Happy Face

What starts off as a condescending, mediocre, feelgood movie ends up becoming a straight-up disaster. This Canadian flick from director Alexandre Franchi is about a long-haired teenager (Robin L’Houmeau) whose cancer-suffering mother (Noémie Kocher) is in the hospital. Unable to handle being at his mom’s bedside, he instead infiltrates a support group for disfigured people in an effort to be less shallow. (He bandages his face up so people won’t catch on.) Before you could say, “Get the fuck outta here!!” this pretty boy eventually teaches these people (who are actually more interesting than this asshole) to swat away the insults idiots say to them on the regular and hold their heads up high. Yet another movie where people have to be told what to do by an attractive, pale-faced, male dipshit.

Cosmic Candy

This movie has the unfortunate habit of being insufferable. But that’s OK — you’ll most likely forget that you saw the damn thing anyway. An awkward supermarket employee (Maria Kitsou), who is obsessed with the titular, Pop Rocks-ish candy, suddenly becomes a caretaker for a 10 year old (Pipera Maya) after the girl’s father vanishes. Coming out of Greece, first-time director Rinio Dragasaki lays on the quirkiness. But the characters are more like hollow, poorly-developed archetypes than people you can relate to, especially the so-called heroine, who goes back-and-forth between being an eccentric introvert and an unstable menace.

Tammy and the T-Rex

The movie masochist in me sat down to watch this low-budget, 25-year-old shitshow by Stewart Raffill, the man behind such travesties as Ice Pirates and Mac and Me. A young Denise Richards plays a high-schooler who learns that the brain of her comatose boyfriend (the late Paul Walker) has been transplanted inside an animatronic dinosaur, courtesy of a crazed neurosurgeon (Weekend at Bernie’s corpse Terry Kiser). Apparently, this new cut is gorier than the version released in 1994. Whatever. All I’m hoping for now is that this movie immediately get reviewed on the How Did This Get Made? podcast.

The What-the-Fuck-Was-That?

Climate of the Hunter

Perhaps the most batshit-crazy entry I saw is this psycho-thriller/psychodrama mashup from Oklahoma auteur Mickey Reece. (This will also play during the Graveyard Shift program at this year’s NaFF.) Two constantly-at-odds sisters (Ginger Gilmartin, Mary Buss) battle for the affections of a rakish childhood friend (Ben Hall), who also happens to be a vampire. Did I forget to mention all of this may or may not be a running hallucination of one of the sisters? I couldn’t make heads or tails of this — and yet, I can’t help but admire its ballsy, relentlessly bonkers attitude.

Butt Boy

For some reason, this year’s fest featured several selections, in both the feature and short categories, that dealt with twisted assplay. And as the title practically lays out for you, this jet-black trip to Crazy Town goes full-tilt on the anal antics. After a prostate exam, a suburban schlub (co-writer-director Tyler Cornack) discovers the joys of shoving things up his ass. But he takes it one step too far when some children end up missing. (Yeah, you heard me.) Then, it’s up to an alcoholic detective (Tyler Rice, doing an impression of Gary Oldman doing an impression of Robert De Niro) to get to the bottom (sorry, couldn’t resist) of things.

Son of the White Mare

Another restored cult fave is this endlessly kaleidoscopic animated fantasy from Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, originally released in 1981. Based on Hungarian folktales, this film is about a cocky young warrior who grows up suckling from the teat of his equine mama so he can grow up big & strong and defeat the evil, princess-imprisoning dragons his mom used to tell him about. Man, if you’re looking for a practically nonsensical yet visually astounding film you can watch while getting hella baked, you definitely can’t go wrong with this one.