Black Gate

In 2020 a group of Japanese directors launched ‘Kaiju Defeats Covid,’ a viral scheme in which kaiju fans were encouraged to send in clips of themselves using the kaiju they had around the house (well, or models thereof) to destroy the COVID-19 virus. There’s something appealing about this idea, enlisting the very large to defeat the very small: like a reversal of War Of the Worlds. At any rate, Director Shunji Iwai took the core of this idea and built a feature film out of it, making first a series of videos for YouTube and then expanding them into a full feature film.

The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died In 8 (8日で死んだ怪獣の12日の物語, Yoka de Shinda Kaiju no Juninichi no Monogatari) follows an actor named Sato (Takumi Saitoh, who has been in many things including Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory and Tokyo Vampire Hotel, here playing a version of himself) temporarily with no work due to the COVID shutdown of the Japanese film industry. To fill the time, he’s bought ‘capsule kaijus’ online, small monsters that hatch from a capsule and will grow; Sato plans to send their final forms to take on COVID (the idea of capsule kaiju, incidentally, is taken from a 60s TV show called Ultraseven). He gets advice about the creatures from a director he knows, Shinji Higuchi (one of the directors behind the Kaiju Defeats Covid project, also the co-director of Shin Godzilla, and the director of, among other things, the live-action Attack On Titan), and watches a YouTuber raising her own capsule kaiju. And he chats with other friends and co-workers. The entire film is in fact a series of video calls, occasionally interrupted by scenes of dancers, or a drone flying through a city, all of it in black and white. (Wikizilla.org claims that this is the first kaiju movie shot entirely in black-and-white since 1965.)

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The Small Gauge Trauma showcase is the Fantasia Film Festival’s annual collection of short genre films. Mostly these are horror movies, sometimes action; science fiction shorts get their own showcase. Small Gauge Trauma 2021 featured 10 movies from a total of 8 different countries.

It started with “Aria,” from the UK. It’s a 13-minute piece from writer-director Christopher Poole, which begins as a couple (Susannah Fielding and Daniel Lawrence Taylor) set up a new security system and digital assistant: Aria. Which soon begins to behave oddly, and surreal moments blur the line between waking and dream. It’s a solid enough story with some ominous touches and memorable images, though I didn’t think the ending really paid off the promise of the earlier oddity.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail (UK, 1975)

So, you think The Green Knight is a different cinematic take on the Arthurian legends? Well, okay, it is, but let’s go back to the early Seventies, the first time the Brits were really breaking the mold of Camelot and rolling out the Round Table.

Arthur of the Britons, Season One

Rating: ***
Origin: UK, 1972
Director: Sidney Hayers, et al.
Source: Network DVDs

Britain’s ITV network had several fine historical adventure shows early on, including The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956) and Sir Francis Drake (1961), but it was a long decade until their next one, Arthur of the Britons, in 1972, and in that time a lot of things changed, including tastes in historical sagas. Hollywood’s Technicolor past was out, replaced by gritty realistic history, at least as it was seen fifty years before now. This series was set during the time of the historical Arthur — if he existed — a time shortly after the Romans left British shores and the Saxons came across the narrow sea to fill the power vacuum. Here, “King” Arthur is one of many Celtic warlords resisting the Saxon advances, but the only one with the vision to see that the Celts must unite under a single leader if they are to hold the parts of Britain still under their control.

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“Choulequec” is a 26-minute short film from France, written and directed by Benoit Blanc and Matthias Girbig, and it’s quite charming in an absurd way. It follows a man, Lucas Lesol (Girbig), searching for Alma (Billie Blain), his missing 16-year-old daughter. On a rural highway he crosses the city limits of the town of Choulequec and finds himself in a bizarre place where an officious sheriff, Chépair (one of two roles for Benoit Blanc), has made up absurd laws. It starts out less like Kafka and more like Alice In Wonderland, possessed of the same left-field logic, and as it goes on becomes increasingly surreal. Fiction bends in on itself, and we’re never sure if we’re watching the characters or watching the characters watch the characters. It’s a story abut stories, and it’s done very well with some very sharp ideas. I’m not sure the end quite resolves anything (in terms of either plot or theme), but the journey along the way is amusing and clever; you can see it for yourself here.

Bundled with the short was Hotel Poseidon, from Belgium, written and directed by Stef Lernous. Lernous is the artistic director of Abattoir Fermé, a theater company founded in 1999. Originally noted for its underground guerilla-theatre style, in recent years the company’s taken cinematic approaches to its staged works (which included an adult adaptation of Alice In Wonderland for the book’s 150th anniversary in 2015). They’ve performed opera and created TV shows, so cinema is a logical progression. Lernous talked a bit about the process of making the film in a question-and-answer session available on Fantasia’s YouTube page; there was only one draft of the script, and he was able to use exactly the actors he wanted in the roles he created. The result is a surreal, grimy film that lurches from sequence to sequence, with intentional swerves in tone and plot. It’s an interesting approach; I don’t think it really works.

The story’s set in the eponymous hotel, a decaying wreck owned by Dave (Tom Vermeir), a passive middle-aged man. He wanders the massive place he inherited some time before, stumbling from one scenario into another. On the same day his friend Jacki plans to host a concert, his aunt dies (with financial consequences for Dave), and a woman (Anneke Sluiters) turns up who insists on taking a room at the hotel even though it’s closed for business. And frankly disgusting: the hotel’s beyond dirty or dingy, an underlit and grotesque near-ruin. We watch Dave stumble through the day, see him attend the concert, see him suffer various humiliations, see him abducted and penned up in a large glass pen that oddly resembles the garden of Eden.

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Back to the Wharf (风平浪静, Feng Ping Lang Jing) is a distinctive mixture of social drama and film noir. It’s a Chinese movie, directed by Li Xiaofeng from a script he wrote with Yu Xin, and has a lot to say about the changes Chinese society’s seen over the last several decades — and says it by exploring dramatic themes: the bonds of the family versus mercenary society, for example. Guilt and atonement. The futility of violence. Whatever specific applicability these things have for China, they’re also things that can play to viewers around the world.

The plot follows Song Hao (played as a youth by Zhou Zhengjie and as an adult by Zhang Yu), who as the film starts is a teenaged student aiming at a scholarship. That’s taken away from him for purely political reasons, and, distraught at the sudden loss of his future, he commits an act of violence. This leads to an accidental death, and his father helps him flee. 15 years later his mother dies, and he returns to his home town, where he cautiously tries to resume relations with his father Jianhui (Wang Yanhui), and starts a love affair with his former classmate Pan Xiaoshuang (Song Jia, Final Master), and goes into business with his former best friend Li Tang (Lee Hong-Chi) — all while trying to make amends to the daughter of the man he killed, Wan Xiaoning (Deng Enxi), without telling her the truth of his crime. But Li’s real estate company has plans for the property where Wan lives, and she’s the final holdout preventing a deal. You can see disaster coming.

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The official opening film of Fantasia 2021 was Brain Freeze, a Québecois zombie movie which played at Montreal’s Cinéma Impérial, a classic movie palace dating back to 1913. For a variety of reasons I wasn’t able to attend, but the film streamed on Fantasia’s servers on August 9, and that showing I decided to check out.

Bundled with the feature was a short, “No Title.” The 9-minute animated film’s written and directed by Alexandra Myotte, and it’s about a UFO chaser in 1990 who goes to a small town in Québec following reports of an alien abduction. He finds a blind sculptress, and an unexpected story. This is an extremely well-made movie, with a sharply written and performed voice-over from the always-faceless UFOlogist (Jean-Sébastien Hamel, also the sound designer), and excellent 2D animation that finds very strong images and brings out some of the cosmic implications of the tale. It’s also got some very down-to-earth themes, about art and love, and a killer line about revenge at the end. Add to that, it ties into some actual local history in the town of Saint-Amable, and nicely evokes the pre-internet feel of 30 years ago. It’s a very good piece, clever, distinctive, and funny.

Then came Brain Freeze, directed by Julien Knafo, who co-wrote with Jean Barbe. Near a major Québec city there’s a small island suburb where the ultra-rich are scheming to use chemicals to grow grass in the middle of the winter so they can play golf year-round. The good news for them is that they’re about to succeed. The bad news is that there will be side effects, in the form of zombies.

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My last film of the fourth day of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival was We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. It’s not technically a genre story, unless you give it a highly determined reading, but it is a story about genre. It’s also a coming-of-age story, a story about a girl trying to find herself and work out her own story from the inspiration of genre tales she loves — even if dangers may come with it.

The movie begins with a long take introducing us to Casey (Anna Cobb), a young teen girl sitting before her webcam. She enacts a simple ritual that begins a — game? spell? We’re not sure at first what to make of what she’s doing; then she tells us of the World’s Fair Challenge, where people perform the ritual we’ve seen and, over time, change mentally. And they upload videos as they do, documenting their progression as they change from what they were into something else entirely. We see some of these videos interspersed among Casey’s own recordings, which she puts up on the web documenting her changes, and her hopes, and her reflections. And then we see an older man, JLB (Michael J Rogers), reach out to her claiming to have secret knowledge about the World’s Fair Challenge, and we doubt his good intentions, and we start to worry even more about Casey and where this challenge will take her.

For a large part of the movie we’re not really sure what’s happening. Almost everything we see is mediated one way or another, something recorded by someone for their own reasons — Casey’s video diaries, or JLB’s weird distorted messages, or other World’s Fair videos. What do we take as reality? Is Casey, who talked about how neat it would be to live in a horror story, going mad? Is there a supernatural force involved? Is she telling a story?

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“M*therfucker” (asterisk in the official title, so far as I can tell) is a 13-minute short written by Adam Peterson, who co-directed with Adam Long. The entire thing takes place in a bar, where Brian (Nick Burr) is meeting his old friend Tony (Tyson Sullivan). Tony’s got a secret, which will turn Brian’s life upside down. Indeed, it already has, several times over. This is a science-fiction story in the form of two guys talking, the dialogue quick and snappy and well-handled by the actors. The performances are in fact the highlight of the film, which is worth watching for them alone. The science-fictional idea at the core isn’t handled clearly enough to really bring out the themes effectively — Brian’s faced with a decision to make, but the nature of the choice isn’t established well. There’s something in here about the way in which trying to fix things can make things worse, but I couldn’t see why the relatively amoral character with the power to fix things is bothering to do so. There’s some clever bits of dialogue, and entertaining acting, but the movie’s ultimately incoherent.

The feature that the Fantasia Film Festival bundled with the short was King Knight. It’s a comedy written and directed by Richard Bates, Jr., and concerns a Wiccan coven in California. I was a little worried going in that it’d spend time mocking the religion, but that didn’t really happen to my eye. Instead, the movie presents a very gentle character-based humour based around themes of community and conforming, and learning not to care about fitting in if it means suppressing one’s individuality.

There’s a fairy-tale–style voice-over intro that introduces us to the coven, and in particular its leaders, the life partners Thorn (Matthew Gray Gubler) and Willow (Angela Sarafyan). They’re good mentors and counsellors for the group, and we see them provide wise words to the couples who make up their coven. But then a secret from Thorn’s past comes to light: far from an outcast in high school, he was in fact the class president and voted Most Likely to Succeed. And now his 20-year high school reunion’s coming up.

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The Mandalorian

We’ve already gone into the origins of the Lone Wolf and Cub films in the manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this week let’s look at its influence on later productions, particularly the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. I’m far from the first person to point out the connections between the two, but as they show the continuing relevance of Lone Wolf and Cub even fifty years later, I think it’s worthwhile to revisit them.

To state the obvious, The Mandalorian draws most of its inspiration from the Western genre, especially the Italian variety known as Spaghetti Westerns, and of course from the Star Wars saga itself. But the Lone Wolf influence is strong: the visual archetype of the solo martial artist fighting off waves of enemies with a young son by his side or in his arms is powerful, and was adopted in whole.

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Written and directed by David Mataró, “Tongue With Capers” (“Llengua amb tàperes”) is a 15-minute Catalan-language short involving the walking dead. Months after a zombie apocalypse, a man (Toni De los Ángeles) holed up in a bar rescues his neighbour (Aina Cortès), who has a strange plan to communicate with the zombies. The film plays as a huis clos, two actors in a single location, with quick dialogue and a twist at the end. Like most zombie movies, it’s about human beings and how they behave to each other; in this case there’s something to say about how well we knw each other and maybe what it’s like to be in community with each other. It’s a nice piece, with a fair bit of nastiness but little gore.

Bundled with the short was the classic 1972 Spanish-Portuguese feature Tombs of the Blind Dead (La noche del terror ciego, also known in English as The Blind Dead, Tombs of the Evil Dead, Legend of the Blind Dead, Mark of the Devil Part 4: Tombs of the Blind Dead, Mark of the Devil Part V: Night of the Blind Terror, and, in a recut form with a tacked-on prologue, Revenge From Planet Ape). Written and directed by Amando de Ossorio, Synapse Films spent over a year creating a painstaking high-definition restoration of the movie. Tombs was quite successful on its initial release, spawning three sequels (while inspiring many other films and at least one comic) and helping to start a boom in Spanish horror cinema. I was pleased to see how well it holds up, especially in the lovely Synapse restoration.

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