Fantastic Fest 2009 – Roundup
by John on Oct.01, 2009, under Reviews
Fantastic Fest at the famed Alamo Drafthouse in Austin caters to a specific kind of movie geek. There are a few mainstream movies, but most of them contain gore, zombies, ninjas, or boobs. The festival is gaining in popularity, so this year contained more mainstream movies and several great indie films hoping to get a wide release. I was here on business but I got a chance to see a few of the showings. Surprisingly, I enjoyed just about all of them.
Rampage – An Uwe Boll film. His resume is like an art gallery of crap. Oddly enough, Rampage is his best film. The plot followed a logical progression. No characters randomly disappeared/appeared for no reason. Instead, it’s a well told, yet incredibly disturbing tale of a man shooting up a small town.
As I’m sitting there watching this, I’m thinking, “Wow. This movie is from a director who has taken an unbelievable amount of internet hate. And to answer all that, he writes a movie about a man shooting up everyone who wrongs him.” I was checking the exits just in case.
In the Q&A after the movie, the lead actor made a comment that “some movies shouldn’t be made. Probably including this one.” Easily the most uncomfortable movie I’ve seen in a while.
Down Terrace – This movie comes out of the UK and is about a family involved in the drug trade trying set get things back in order after the father and son are released from prison. It’s a black comedy, so imagine what The Godfather would be like if you laughed whenever someone died. That’s probably a horrible description, but Down Terrrace won a Best Picture award at the festival. It deserved it.
Sweet Karma – Here is a little indie revenge flick. I usually like this genre only to see how directors handle the internal impacts revenge takes on a person. Sweet Karma handles it very well and had a great ending.
Sweet Karma’s hero is a mute, Russian woman who travels to Toronto to rescue her sister out of the sex trade. In an uncomfortable moment during the Q&A, the director was asked about the reasons for having a mute heroine. In his response (with the actress sitting right next to him), he said that he knew he wanted to cast her for the part since he had done some model shoots together, but dialog “would introduce a dynamic we weren’t really prepared to deal with.” Translation: when your pretty girl can’t act, make her mute. Strangely enough, she won a Best Actress award at the festival – without a line of dialog.
Duress - I wasn’t really interested in seeing this until I saw the description. It said something along the lines of, “I’ve seen a lot of thrillers and none of them are thrilling because they all follow the same formula. Finally, here’s one that’s unique.” I’m paraphrasing that, but it sold me enough to catch it and boy was I glad I did. It’s a creepy, psychological thriller that wraps up all the loose ends it introduces along the way. I love it when a movie does that, and I love it even more when I’m surprised in the ways it does.
Duress was released theatrically in Greece, so hopefully someone will pick it up for the US box office. Second to Toy Story 1 & 2 3D, Duress was the best movie of the festival for me. I’ll keep an eye out for it and if a studio picks it up, I’ll let ya know.
