Fantasia Festival 2020
Shudder’s The Mortuary Collection Offers Halloween Horror With a Morbid Mean Streak: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: “The world is made of stories…” and they are left behind by the dead. Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) is an aging mortician tasked with not only caring for the bodies of his recently deceased clients but for the stories of their deaths. These he collects and keeps in the massive library of his sinister and dilapidated mortuary. After officiating the funeral of a child, he meets Sam (Caitlin Custer), a young woman looking for a job. Her interview takes a turn for the macabre as she asks Montgomery to scare her with his tales, setting the stage for this spooky anthology. It was a Dark and Stormy Night… Set in the vague past, The Mortuary Collection feels like Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark for twenty-some...
Shakespeare’s Shitstorm Is Lloyd Kaufman’s Manifesto for the Age of Outrage: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Legendary purveyors of late night schlock, Troma Entertainment put their own spin on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest by swapping out a tropical storm for gallons of whale feces and a deserted island for New Jersey. All of this in an attempt to skewer online culture and big pharma’s conquering of America with gross-out gags and a politically incorrect sensibility. What Is Past Is Prologue: That iconic Troma logo — you know, the one with the New York City skyline set against a blood red sky with spotlights in the air — is like a warm blanket for genre cinema lovers who were weaned by Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Sheer on USA’s Up All Night. The memorable, simplistic fan fare conjures up an instant wave of nostalgia, but...
The Mortuary Collection Is Halloween Horror With a Mean Streak: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: “The world is made of stories…” and they are left behind by the dead. Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) is an aging mortician tasked with not only caring for the bodies of his recently deceased clients but for the stories of their deaths. These he collects and keeps in the massive library of his sinister and dilapidated mortuary. After officiating the funeral of a child, he meets Sam (Caitlin Custer), a young woman looking for a job. Her interview takes a turn for the macabre as she asks Montgomery to scare her with his tales, setting the stage for this spooky anthology. It was a Dark and Stormy Night… Set in the vague past, The Mortuary Collection feels like Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark for twenty-somethings with a d...
The Dark and the Wicked Is 2020: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Two siblings venture out to their remote family farm, where their father is slowly dying and their mother is unraveling from grief. Something else is happening, though. There’s a darkness behind the sorrow, an evil slowly poisoning the soil… Something Wicked This Way Comes: Grief is on the mind. Thanks to our ensuing pandemic — and really, the collateral damage of our current administration — we’re a populace poisoned with misery. So much so that it’s become an appendage of our day-to-day, something we’ve had to deal with to check in and check out without losing our minds. In a timely twist of fate, grief has also informed some of this year’s most affecting films, be it Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods or Natalie Erika Jame...
Brea Grant’s Lucky Gets Blunt on the Ways We Fail Women: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: On the surface, Lucky is a quirky slasher with an intriguing premise. May (Brea Grant) is attacked night after night by a masked man and no one in her life seems willing or able to help. The elevator pitch for this film must have been relatively simple: “What if you were being attacked and no one cared.” Yet hidden in this premise is a depressing truth and an unflinching look at the experience of dealing with trauma as a woman in America. Grant, who also wrote the script, goes all in on the metaphor, following it long past its logical fallacies to deliver a message that has been coded and hidden for far too long. Lucky may be heavy-handed, but by breaking the boundaries of believability, director Natasha Kermani deliver...
Unearth Is a Slow Burn Metaphor for Parasitic Capitalism: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Kathryn Dolan (Adrienne Barbeau) and George Lomack (Marc Blucas) head neighboring rural families struggling to make ends meet in a crumbling economy. Tensions arise when one family signs a contract allowing fracking on their land, but their fates intertwine when this decision inadvertently releases a parasite previously locked within the earth. John C. Lyons and Dorota Swies’ tale of economic horror presents a compelling if uneven picture of the devil’s bargains working class people are often forced to make in order to survive. Parallel Parasites: Unearth is a timely metaphor in the midst of a pandemic which has crippled the US economy. We meet both families when they’re tottering on the edge of financial ruin and ...
John Carpenter Confirms Involvement With Blumhouse’s The Thing Reboot
For someone who doesn’t love work, John Carpenter certainly stays busy. On Saturday afternoon, the Master of Horror confirmed a number of projects while speaking with Fantasia Film Festival as he accepted their Lifetime Achievement Award. For starters, Carpenter let it slip that he’s working with Blumhouse and Universal on their forthcoming reboot of The Thing. When pressed if it was a prequel or a sequel, he played it coy and stayed mum as he’s wont to do. As previously reported, that project is reported to be a new reimagining of John W. Campbell Jr.’s Who Goes There?, only Universal and Blumhouse are also planning to pull from its recently unearthed and expanded version of the novella, Frozen Hell. Given that Carpenter is currently working with Blumhouse and Universal on their...
Julia Fox Dominates Surprising and Sexy Pitch-Black Rom-Com PVT CHAT: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Jack (Peter Vack) is a lonely boy in the big city. He lives in a rundown apartment—the only kind anyone can afford in New York City–where his windows are duct-taped over and his day-to-day involves either bowls of Maruchan ramen or online poker games. But he also engages in BDSM scenes with a number of cam girls, and one in particular has caught his eye. Enter Scarlet (Julia Fox), who dominates Jack from afar, making him a human ashtray as smoke billows out from her big beautiful lips. As time ticks away and more and more money is dropped, Jack and Julia begin to connect on a deeper level, a connection that sets both parties up for twists that audiences will never see coming. I’ll Always Love You New York: With PVT CHAT...
12 Hour Shift Brilliantly Brings Hospital Horror to the Working Women Comedy: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Mandy (Angela Bettis) was having a bad day before her double shift at the hospital. She’s expected to provide a kidney transplant to some local gangsters. The only catch is that Mandy’s new courier Regina (Chloe Farnworth), who just so happens to be her half-cousin, has lost said kidney en route to the hospital. Frantically, they both try to get their hands on a replacement kidney as the clock keeps ticking. Fortunately for them, there’s a whole lotta fresh meat to choose from… Working 9 to 5: Angela Bettis should be familiar to horror fans, thanks to her iconic performances in a trio of Lucky McKee movies: 2002’s May, 2005’s The Woods, and 2011’s The Woman. She’s a stunning presence, who wears the stress of every one o...
Perdida Offers an Indelible Spin on the Hitchcock Thriller: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Eric (José María de Tavira) is a rich conductor living in a gorgeous modern home. So, why when we meet him is he getting fall-down drunk by himself at a dive bar? Enter Fabiana (Cristina Rodlo), the bartender on the night Eric causes a scene. Feeling curious, Fabiana brings Eric back to her place to let him sleep. When he wakes up, Eric rewards Fabiana with a pleasant afternoon date that leads to sex and a fast-tracked relationship. After practically moving into his apartment, detectives arrive with questions surrounding the last of Eric’s girlfriends. Seems one went missing not too long ago, though Eric insists it’s less nefarious. She left him. Fabiana’s not sure what to think, but then she starts hearing strange soun...
