celluloid consommé

Emerging director Nyla Innuksuk is turning some heads with their Inuit coming-of-age sci-fi horror movie  Slash/Back , a fun and intelligent story that features kids from the hamlet of Pangnirtung. Or as the kids call it, Pang. Maika is a teen girl who feels weary of living under the thumb of her oppressors and in a community too small for her liking, until a life-form crash-lands in the mountains across from her town and threatens the lives of her and her friends. What I find the most endearing about this is how it explains the absence of parents from the immediate goings-on of Pang. Maika and her friends Uki, Leena, and Jesse run into a kind of primal alien gradually taking over the wildlife around them in an attempt to survive on their planet and potentially spread its footprint there to establish a more permanent residence. But it happens to do this on the same day as the hamlet’s community dance for the adults and parents of Pang, where most of them get historically sloshed or...

Box art image courtesy of Well Go USA.   Kim Han-min’s prequel to the excellent Admiral: Roaring Currents (if you haven’t seen that yet it’s perfect timing to track down a copy) focuses a on a more volatile political climate within Korea years prior to the events of the aforementioned film, amidst the Japanese invasion in 1592. As in Admiral , we follow the career and naval campaign of admiral Yi Sun-sin as his countrymen attempt to read the tactics of Japan’s forces, intent on taking over Korea’s key points of command as well as a conquest of Ming China. There are more characters in Hansan: Rising Dragon than from Roaring Currents , but each has their own well-earned moment that contributes to the historic battle that forms the film’s climactic sequence. Both Roaring Currents and Rising Dragon are very much historical action dramas and as such can come under scrutiny for nationalist and/or propagandistic messages. But the creative license in these films read less as a way...

Box and disc art photo courtesy of Well Go USA. When The Witch: Subversion first came out, it shot to the top of a lot of movie enthusiast’s lists — especially for us action adrenaline junkies. I had heard of it through word of mouth rather than an advertising campaign mostly since, at least before Parasite , South Korean films (genre or otherwise) didn’t really get their place in the sun in the west. Since then a lot more films from the Asian continent have been seeing some impressive box office numbers in the U.S., South Korea being one of the top contributors of new & exciting films to premiere in the western hemisphere. At the end of The Witch: Subversion ’s U.S. theatrical run it had finished at around a $24.3 million USD profit, coming in just below Ant-Man and the Wasp on its second weekend in theaters. I like to think that all those who came out for it and became a fan of the film remember how Subversion shifted gracefully from its unusual framing device, pivoting towar...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé The Antares Paradox, dir. Luís Tinoco Feature film debuts hold some ineffable sense of immediate importance to many. So many unknown expectations are either met, missed, or exceeded…so what do we look for in a debut that satisfies us? Is it the style, the writing of the piece and its characters, the message, or a feeling? Writer/director Luis Tinoco addresses all of the above in an astonishingly efficient swoop of the pen giving us enough to chew on for longer than Antares’ 97-minute runtime. We spend the film entirely with Andrea Baeza, an astrophysicist working at a SETI chapter in Barcelona. Her father is terminally ill and hospitalized yet still finds ways to interact with her through recorded video messages Andrea is able to watch and respond to from her lab. He recognizes that his daughter has been hopeful all her life that intelligent life is out there and respects her life’s dedication to the search for it. One fateful, stormy night a...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé The Third Saturday in October Part V, dir. Jay Burleson In 1974 Bob Clark directed what many would consider to be the first slasher proper. We could get into the proto slasher/giallo markers and who did what first but that wouldn’t be fair for this review since this film has nothing to do with that part of slasher history. But we’ve kind of made our own sequels to Black Christmas by paying homage to it so much, or stealing from it to make our own horror slashers to wrap around a different aesthetic. We can view Halloween as one of these in some regard, its numerous sequels notoriously picking and choosing what parts of the original 1978 story to build on. The franchise also serves as a springboard of ideas in The Third Saturday in October Part V , using some of the more ridiculous plot points from past slashers but balancing that with its serious murder/mystery and sometimes giallo roots, just with a hell of a lot more blood and gore. Its pl...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé The Elderly, dir. Fernando González Goméz & Raúl Cerezo (From left to right) Naia (Paula Gallego), Lena (Irene Anula), Mario (Gustavo Salmerón), & Manuel (Zorion Eguileor). Raúl Cerezo & Fernando Goméz’s newest collaboration The Elderly achieves an odd type of alienation. In Madrid various elderly people have started to act strangely, and Mario’s mother has just committed suicide rendering her husband Manuel effectively alone. The family tries its hardest to stick together but Manuel rebels, acting out against Lena, Mario’s second wife and his daughter Naia’s stepmother. But as Mario and his family arrive at a loss as to what to do, we see this type of behavior bubbling up around the entire geriatric population of the city. To make some things worse, there is also a steadily climbing heatwave and an approaching electrical storm. Other than the sense that the storm is creeping closer and closer to the city, the heat rarely factors ...

Carlota Pereda’s Piggy hits theaters later this month, October 14th from Magnet Releasing. Theatrical one-sheet for PIGGY, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing. There’s something magical about Piggy. Carlota Pereda expands on her short film of the same name, alternating poignant coming-of-age moments between paralyzing horror. Set in the small village of Villanueva de la Vera, Sara is a teenage girl who works at her parent’s butcher shop and faces regular fat shaming from her schoolmates. She becomes boxed in and held down through abusive methods used by her bullies — which include her family members. Pereda shoots Sara’s struggles through tight framing and a restrictive academy aspect ratio to bring the viewer to the same baseline level of anxiety and discomfort that she undergoes on a daily basis. When she goes to the village’s swimming pool after everyone’s left she seeks relaxation. With no one there to harass her, Sara hopes to finally breathe and compose herself a...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé Deep Fear, dir. Grégory Beghin Horror surrounding the exploration of underground caverns will always appeal to me. In 2005 I went to see The Descent knowing next to nothing about it and found just how much the terror of uncharted subterranean spaces affected me. It’s a movie that has certainly made an impression on countless moviegoers and horror fanatics. It’s no question Deep Fear has been touched by Neil Marshall’s influence of spooky spelunking but there’s a different feel to it here. Where Descent felt it was of its time in the horror trends of the 2000s it also lent a psychological torment that haunted its characters, even before they find the entry point into the depths below. Always just below the surface, unspoken but felt by paying close attention to each woman’s expressions and reactions, their histories and journeys were felt but not explained. There is an attempt to replicate the feeling of this in Deep Fear . But it competes wit...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé Chop & Steele, dir. Ben Steinbauer & Berndt Mader Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett are a couple of guys who are pretty good at finding weird tapes. They started amassing a large collection of them that they would watch together and share with friends, then the library got so big they felt they had to share it with the world. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Found Footage Festival, or have been fortunate enough to have attended one in the past. What you may not know about Nick or Joe is they both have a penchant for pranks. They’ll pull pranks on each other or for the hell of it, ranging from seasonal DMV photo pranks to harmless personal ones in the name of comedy. But they wanted something more so in putting their heads together to go bigger they branched out to numerous small local news outlets. They appeared on TV as made-up characters who would show up to educate the early, early morning crowd and newscaster staff, instead intending to roya...

Well Go USA Brings the Creature Feature to Home Video This October There’s a noticeable lack of films featuring subterranean monsters. Tremors brought the bacon and while its sequels provide some diminishing returns they do scratch an itch. We’ll take whatever we can get these days. Dale Fabrigar’s cut-to-the-chase title They Crawl Beneath aims to deliver that feeling of being sold on a trailer or premise, with a co-starring role of Michael Paré to sweeten the pot. To put it mildly, the movie will be much of what those interested by the idea will expect. But we’ll watch a monster worm movie any day of the week, right? For those that say yes, Well Go USA has you covered. Plot Synopsis: Young police officer Danny (Joseph Almani) is working on an antique car at his uncle’s remote ranch when a major earthquake hits, pinning him under the vehicle and leaving him bloodied, alone, and with no way to call for help. Just when he thinks the claustrophobic nightmare can’t get any worse, somethi...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé Brutal Season, dir. Gavin Fields Set up immediately as a stage play for the screen, Brutal Season starts incredibly strong. As it introduces the time period, setting, and characters with a warm & welcoming narration we start on a path that suggests this has something different to offer than just a play stylized for film. But as the story unfolds the impact feels rather small. This has nothing to do with the single setting or limited cast of characters, but where the story’s winding mystery leads us. Fields directs his emotions incredibly well into his actors, an attribute that overshadows each one of their performances that almost overrides their plain method of line reading. Whether the matter-of-fact way the characters interact with each other is tied to the 1940s period or a deliberate choice, some may not be on board for how this presents. The Trouths are a small family living in a seaside town. Charlie, the head of the family, takes ...

Fantastic Fest @ Home @ celluloid consommé Bad City, dir. Kensuke Sonomura Kensuke Sonomura has already made a name for himself with 2019’s Hydra , his action-heavy debut following an assassin who’s changed careers for the restaurant industry as a chef. Where that has a shorter runtime but a tendency to stretch its pacing, Bad City feels much roomier for Sonomura’s tendencies. Focusing on a Yakuza/Korean mafia feud with intricate political implications with law enforcement can’t always be squished into a palatable 90-minute film. A new special investigations unit is created to take down a Yakuza lord who’s announced his bid for mayor of Kaiko City, a notorious crime-riddled hellhole. Parallels to The Wire will be drawn but by doing so it doesn’t detract from the focus. Much of the procedural attitude here resembles David Simon’s series but opts to keep a distant kinship almost as if it were a springboard. It of course can’t match Simon’s blistering condemnation of the infinite layers...