Black Gate

Every year the Fantasia International Film Festival presents an International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, and every year it’s worth watching. This year’s edition gathered nine films from seven countries into one 115-minute block. Most of the films tended to the near-future and the dystopic, but still held surprises.

The showcase started with “Mark II,” an 8-minute piece directed by Brent Howard, who co-wrote with Pride St. Clair. Mark (John Ennis) is an office worker in a reality where technology’s taken an odd route: 90s-style PCs and CRT screens but advances in other fields, especially robotics. Mark, despairing at the limitations of his human body, is drawn to the possibility of an upgrade. But will he get what he wants? This is a fine short film that easily could have gone wrong, if the viewer had been left thinking Mark was the butt of a joke; that doesn’t happen, thanks to an excellent performance by Ennis. He brings out Mark’s profound depression, his despair at his body, and in one well-delivered voice-over line seals the film perfectly. I thought it was solid enough when I saw it, but Ennis’ performance has left it haunting me since.

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One of the more chilling films I saw at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival was “Please Hold,” a 19-minute short film directed by KD Dávila and co-written by Dávila with Levin Menekse. It’s not chilling in the way of a horror film, but of well-done near-future science fiction. In a North American city not too far away from now, a drone arrests a guy, Mateo (Erick Lopez), on his way to work. Mateo hasn’t done anything, but he can’t argue with the drone. He’s stuck in a cell with a computer screen, and has to try to navigate unhelpful menus just to place a phone call and find a lawyer and find out what the hell he’s doing in jail in the first place.

The film manages to find ways to make a story that’s basically a man interacting with a screen visually interesting. But the cleverness of the script is really what makes the story work. Mateo has to struggle with a system that’s clearly not designed with justice in mind, but with extracting money from anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in it. Unreadable terms and conditions scroll past as he tries to figure out what’s going on. The system forces him to labour in order to have a prayer of getting anywhere. The movie’s in all an extremely sharp look at the way various technologies are converging with the noxious for-profit prison system to create a new kind of hell, and it’s well worth watching.

Bundled with the short was Indemnity, a South African action-thriller. South Africa’s been developing quite a genre film culture in recent years — beyond science-fiction like District 9, consider previous Fantasia offerings like Five Fingers For Marseilles and 8, to say nothing of Fried Barry. So I was looking forward to seeing what this movie brought. If it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, at least it satisfies expectations in the way you want from a good honest genre tale.

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“The Gloom” (“La Penumbra”) is a 14-minute short from Spain’s Dani Viqueira, written by Luis Sánchez-Polack. It follows a young family with a mother, Laura (Lorena Hidalgo), who is in the middle of intense studies to earn her medical degree, potentially useful as her husband Joaquin is a hypochondriac. After a car ride marked by the squabbling of their children Tomás (Jaime P. Barahona) and Rosa (Lucía Hidalgo), Laura is menaced by what appears to be the incursion of the supernatural into the family home. But more may be happening here than meets the eye. In fact the ending’s fairly simple but emotionally effective, especially as it follows an atmospheric and involving horror sequence. The movie’s a very solid piece of work.

Bundled with it was the American feature What Josiah Saw. Directed by Vincent Grashaw and written by first-time screenwriter Robert Alan Dilts, it follows the family of one Josiah Graham (Robert Patrick, the T-1000 himself). Josiah’s three kids are adults now, in their 30s or thereabouts, and they’ve taken different paths in life. The movie opens somewhere in the southwestern US, with oil men talking about buying the Graham homestead; we then follow the youngest child, Thomas (Scott Haze), living on the old family property, overseen by the patriarchal Josiah. This first act establishes an uncomfortable, horrific atmosphere with some notably disturbing moments.

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“Wao” is a 25-minute short film from Japan, directed by Emi Yasumura and written by Atsushi Asada. It’s an odd mix of teen dramedy and science fiction story, in which a youth named Wao meets a trio of other teens who explain to him he’s an alien. This explains certain mysteries of Wao’s life, but he’s not sure he wants to leave Earth permanently. He decides to stake his future on his parents: if he can rekindle a love that seems to have died, he’ll stay on this planet. Things do not go entirely as planned. It’s an entertaining story which works not so much because of the teens but because of the character depth and relationship backstory given to Wao’s parents (I wish I had a reliable cast list that would let me put the names of the actors to their characters). The moral at the end is a bit pat in the way of an old Star Trek episode, but then there are far worse things to be than an old Star Trek episode. You can call the film whimsical, and I think that’s fair in the sense that whimsy to me works when it’s able to include genuine emotional paradox and a certain amount of darkness; “Wao” pulls that off.

Bundled with the short was Follow the Light (光を追いかけて, Hikari wo Oikakete), directed by Yoichi Narita, who wrote the script with Yu Sakudo. It’s set in a small town in Japan, where a boy named Akira (Tsubasa Nakagawa), gifted at drawing, has recently moved with his father Ryota (Taro Suruga). Ryota’s recently had a divorce and so returned to his old home town, but Akira’s having a difficult time fitting in. Then aliens show up. Or, at least, Akira spots a UFO, a mysterious green light streaking across the sky, and on following the light finds local outcast girl Maki (Itsuki Nagasawa) lying in a crop circle. The UFO’s vanished, but the two teens strike up a relationship, which the film follows in and around subplots about the local school being about to shut down, and Ryota rebuilding his life, and Maki’s uncle trying to hold on to his farmland in the face of financial trouble, and Akira fitting in at a school Maki long ago forsook, and a teacher who may be horribly miscast in her profession.

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Son of Sinbad (USA, 1955)

Sinbad movies loom so large in the history of fantasy film that it’s remarkable there weren’t more of them — only six or seven live-action features from the Forties through the Seventies. Before the sword-and-sorcery boom of the Eighties, if you wanted to watch a film of heroic fantasy, the first thing you reached for probably had Sinbad in its title.

We’ve already covered three of them in this series: Sinbad the Sailor (1947), The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), and Captain Sindbad (1963), but we still have three to go, and two of them are by the moviemaker most closely associated with the most splendid of Sinbad movies: Ray Harryhausen. Unfurl your lateen sails for adventure!

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A drum roll and trumpet fanfare; a multicoloured glassy background; a shield-shaped logo with a sunburst inside it and the big letters S and B. It’s the intro to a film, and it tells you just what you’re going to get. The letters stand for Shaw and Brothers, and for me the Fantasia International Film Festival only feels like Fantasia once I watch a classic Shaw Brothers kung-fu cinema gem. Fantasia selections from the Shaw archives typically draw from the later and weirder end of their catalogue, and so it was in 2021 with Return Of The Bastard Swordsman (天蠶变之布衣神相, Bu yi shen xiang).

It’s the 1984 sequel to 1983’s Bastard Swordsman, which played Fantasia in 2017 and is considered here. Brought to us by director Tony Lu, with a story by Ying Wong and a screenplay by Lu and Kuo-Yuan Chang, it picks up right after the first one ends and eases us back in to the story. The evil Invincible Clan want to wipe out the good guys of the Wudang Clan, so one of the Wudang decides to track down Yun Fei Yang (Norman Chu), who mastered the silkworm style and brought victory to Wudang in the original Bastard Swordsman. He’s gone missing, now, though, in Wudang’s hour of need. Yet the evil Dugu Wu Di (Alex Man) of the Invincible Clan has problems of his own — a group of ninjas from Japan has arrived to challenge the champions of China for supremacy in the martial world.

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Alien (20th Century Fox, May 1979). Directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Dan O’Bannon

I am constantly making Alien/Aliens references to my wife and she is constantly reminding me that she has not, in fact, ever seen any of the Alien movies except Prometheus (damn the luck). Having just finished up the 1979 cadre of sci-fi magazines, and noting that many of them had references to the movie Alien, it was finally time to fix this situation — at least with Alien, Aliens, and that part of Alien 3 where half of Lance Henriksen steals the whole movie.

So, we finally watched Alien. And it appears that nobody at Black Gate has ever reviewed it. In fact, it is such a pop culture touchstone that most people know the story without, well, having seen the story. I’m going to start this review by coming out swinging: Alien is one of those movies, kind of like Blade Runner (another Ridley Scott film) – a movie that is far better than it deserves to be, a movie whose every misstep manages to ‘fall up’ as it were.

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