Black Gate

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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The Fantasia International Film Festival does a good job matching genres when they bundle a short together with a feature. So Tin Can, a feature-length claustrophobic near-future science-fiction film, came with “Death Valley,” an 11-minute tale of a future of environmental devastation; both about isolation and both featuring protagonists isolated from the world. THe short, written and directed by Grace Sloan, follows a woman in the future living in space who is determined to travel to Death Valley on a barren Earth in order to practise yoga as the sun sets, and then go back into space to attend her friend’s New Year’s Eve party. Things do not go as planned. There’s a nice retro feel to the movie, which looks like it was shot on film, and the effects have the bargain-basement feel of an analog era without feeling cheap for the sake of being cheap — rather, they feel cheap for the sake of an aesthetic, which is perfectly fine. The film’s a little opaque, narratively, but at least provides scope for contemplation; I take it as a piece about the clash between a promised future and the never-quite-dying past.

Then came Tin Can, a Canadian science-fiction movie with strong horror overtones. Directed by Seth A. Smith and written by Smith with Darcy Spidle, it takes place in the near future as a pandemic named Coral ravages eastern Canada. One researcher, Fret (Anna Hopkins) thinks she may have a cure, but then she’s kidnapped and finds herself waking up in a suspended animation pod. The movie’s about her slow struggle to get out of the oversized tin can and learn the truth of what’s happened to her; we as viewers slowly find out as she does.

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I ended my second day of Fantasia 2021 with another feature-and-short bundle. The short film was “The Machine,” a 12-minute piece about a man, newly hired for an office job, who’s given the task of figuring out the purpose of a mysterious machine in the basement. The film was shot on an obvious budget, and though the actors give it their best efforts, the material doesn’t really work. In particular, there’s a shot right at the end whose placement suggests it’s delivering a piece of information crucial to the story — but if it is, I couldn’t figure out what the information was supposed to be. There’s an interesting Kafkaesque idea somewhere in here, but unfortunately it isn’t brought out very well.

The feature was Broadcast Signal Intrusion. It’s written by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall, and directed by Jacob Gentry, who also directed 2015’s Synchronicity. Like that film, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is dark and moody, following a man whose reality becomes radically destabilised. In this case, it’s a computer guy named James (Harry Shum Jr) in Chicago in 1999. He’s archiving old TV broadcasts, and becomes obsessed with a couple of weird incidents when pirates briefly took over the airwaves for a couple of minutes: broadcast signal intrusions. Driven to figure out the meaning behind them, he goes further and further down a dark path.

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“A Piglet’s Tale” is a 12-minute dialogue-free animated short film written and directed by Fabrizio Gammardella. A co-production of the UK, France, and Italy, it starts out looking like a traditional heartwarming family cartoon, with lovely 2D artwork — flowing lines and watercolour backgrounds — and a story about a couple who struggle to have a child. They’re gifted with a birth, and find the child has a rare characteristic. And just as you think you have an idea of what kind of film this is and where it’s going, it takes an incredibly dark swerve, almost as baffling as it is disturbing. Title cards at the end explain: this is a film with a specific polemic purpose.

It’s a purpose I broadly agree with, but I wonder if the film succeeds in supporting its cause. There’s no doubt about the craft involved; the story’s told not only well but in exactly the kid’s-movie style that needs to be caught in order for the short to be effective. In particular, hints at foreshadowing turn out to be feints, an effective touch. But at the same time this means there’s a randomness to events at the end, which risks coming from too far out of nowhere. Ultimately I think the film succeeds, as the randomness can be seen to reflect the experience of (not to be too specific) those whom the film is about in the real world. It’s certainly powerful; the stunned feeling I was left with certainly wasn’t entirely bafflement. It’s a strong movie, and despite early appearances, not for kids.

Bundled with “A Piglet’s Tale” was the feature film Bull, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. Ten years ago, Bull (Neil Maskell) was a legbreaker for Norm (David Hayman), the head of a criminal family in a small English town. Then he vanished, betrayed by Norm’s gang. Now he’s back, looking for his ex-wife Gemma (Lois Brabin-Platt), Norm’s daughter. Bound up with that quest is revenge for what happened ten years ago. The movie tells its story along two tracks, one in the present and one in flashbacks showing what led to Bull’s betrayal, and it all builds to a climax where we see and understand his vengeance — and are left with a final harrowing twist.

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I started the second day of Fantasia with another feature and short film bundled together. The 14-minute short was the Catalan-language “Solution For Sadness” (“Solució per a la tristesa”), a collaboration between the husband-and wife-team of co-directors Marc Martínez Jordán (also the writer) and Tuixén Benet (also the star). Benet plays a woman who lives alone and battles intense depression; one day a box arrives that promises a cure in the form of a gorilla mask. But is it really a solution, or is it a cruel trick? The short has a lot to say about masks and what people are prepared to see, and the narration makes the storytelling work — it moves quickly, and there’s a dry yet heartfelt tone that’s quite affecting. The conclusion’s surprisingly empathic, and I found an ending that might have felt simple instead stuck with me after the film ended.

The feature was Ultrasound. It was directed by Rob Schroeder, with a script by Conor Stechschulte adapting his own four-volume indie comic Generous Bosom (the fourth volume arrives later this year). It is the sort of movie which gains when a viewer doesn’t know much about the plot going in, and the story’s difficult to briefly summarise anyway. But I think I can say a few things about the film nevertheless.

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The Three Musketeers (1973)

Richard Lester directed the best-ever screen version of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and the worst version of its sequel, Twenty Years After. Those films are discussed below, so let’s talk about Lester up here.

An American Jew from Philadelphia, Dick Lester had to go to the UK to make his mark in the movies, though he worked first in television, short subjects, and commercials. His early work was in comedy, and he was part of the gang of English comics that included Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers who created The Goon Show, a direct predecessor to Monty Python. John Lennon was a huge fan of the Goons and of Lester’s hilarious short, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, and Lester got his big break when he was tapped to direct the Beatles’ first feature, A Hard Day’s Night. This kicked off what you might call the Swinging London portion of Lester’s career, during which he made some of the funniest movies of the Sixties, including Help! (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966).

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Most of the films at Fantasia 2021 were new, but some were time-honoured works given a screening either because of a new restoration or because they played the festival in the past and were brought back to celebrate Fantasia’s 25th anniversary. Uzumaki (うずまき, literally “Spiral”), from the year 2000, is a case of both — it has a new 4K restoration, and it played Fantasia in 2000. The film’s an adaptation of the manga by Junji Ito, though since it was made while the manga was still ongoing it’s an adaptation that had to find its own answers for some of the questions the text hadn’t resolved at the time of production. Directed by Higuchinsky, AKA Akihiro Higuchi, with a screenplay by Takao Niita, the movie came two years after Ringu (the original version of The Ring) and the same year as the first straight-to-video Ju-On film. It’s one of the early examples of J-horror, then, but sub-genre aside it’s something interesting to consider in its own right.

The story follows Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune, who would go on to have a role in the live-action Gatchaman), who, like her boyfriend Shuichi Saito (Fhi Fan), is a teen in the small town of Kurouzu-cho. As the movie opens, strange things are happening therein. There’s a mysterious death at the high school. One of Kirie’s classmates has a crush on her and demonstrates this by appearing to her at unexpected times. And Shuichi’s father is growing obsessed with spirals. That last becomes more significant as the film goes on and spirals become increasingly visible through the town — and Mr. Saito’s madness grows worse. And people die. Kirie and Shuichi investigate, desperate to save themselves and the adults close to them and the whole town.

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