Fantastic Fest 2008

Brief Summary: James Tresswick and Mark Vincent are victims of a brutal bully named Gary Parker who has maltreated both boys, marking their bodies and spoiling their young lives. In their last year of high school, James and Mark find a way to stop being victims. They're going to kill Gary... Full Description: High-Schoolers James Tresswick and Mark Vincent were mercilessly bullied throughout childhood by their nemesis Gary Parker. The torment only ended when Gary was hauled off to prison five years ago. Now back on the streets, he is once again beginning to make their lives a living hell. Their outlook is dim until Mark happens to witness a murder burying his victim deep in the nearby woods. The duo crafts what should be a perfect plan: blackmail the killer in to killing again, this time their mortal enemy Gary Parker. This perfect plan, however, doesn't work out exactly as envisioned, and the boys find themselves in a worse predicament than imaginable. ACOLYTES is a perfect accompaniment to our NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD Aussie Retrospective. Director Jon Hewitt shows that he’s a worthy heir to the Ozsploitation throne, delivering a tight knuckle-biter thriller with enough brutal violence to make the likes of Brian Trenchard-Smith stand up and cheer. The film is so much more than just a horror/thriller, though. Hewitt takes time to develop a fully-developed visual world. The first act establishes an idyllic tableau with rich detail and beautiful cinematography. These are innocent kids in a tranquil town living their lives with only childhood concerns. That is, of course, until they toy around with a murderer hell-bent on obliterating their serenity into a chaos of fear and brutality. (Tim League) Director Jon Hewitt will be live in person to introduce the film and answer questions afterwards. We also expect Jon to rock not only the Ozsploitation category of Fantastic Feud but also the subsequent Karaoke microphone.

Brief Summary: A squadron of trained gunmen lay siege to a supermarket at closing time. What first appears to be a robbery soon takes on other worldly dimensions. Full Description: It's the end of yet another night at Hastings Supermarket, an idyllic family grocery store in Buck Lake, Arizona. But the normal closing-time monotony is broken when a group of masked and armed-to-the-teeth militants invade the store, immediately killing several of the employees and shoppers and holding the rest hostage. Though the hostage-takers at first appear to be robbers or terrorists, they reveal themselves to be a cadre of rogue scientists that have discovered and tracked an alien infestation to THIS STORE on THIS NIGHT, and they are determined to find out which of the survivors are extraterrestrials and end the invasion at any cost. ALIEN RAIDERS is a throwback to what we consider the golden age of creature features, the 1980's. This one falls somewhere between the seriousness level of THE THING or TREMORS. Nostalgic without being stale, ALIEN RAIDERS draws strong performances from a young ensemble cast composed of mostly working character actors that you've seen in a million small parts. You might recognize the monster hunting team: Carlos Bernard from his recurring role as Tony Almeida on "24" and Matthew St. Patrick who played Keith Charles on SIX FEET UNDER. The plot explores what happens when you have one of those MEN IN BLACK jobs that you can't really explain to people. When you start invading public spaces to blow shit up, the bystanders naturally think that you're the bad guy, and there's not a lot you can do to convince them otherwise. So you don't bother, and you do your job and damn the consequences. But sometimes those bystanders can b e pretty tough and wily, and some of them ARE the monsters. But which? For a modern alien creature movie, the filmmakers refreshingly rely on practical effects for the punctuations of gore. The carnage happens in the blink of an eye by a monster that you only see in glimpses. This serves to heighten the tension, as you experience the uncertainty of the hostages, who aren't quite sure what just happened, but it's very very bad. You can see them weighing in their minds the present danger of these masked terrorists who are "testing/torturing" them against the mysterious glimpses of a threat that they don't understand. (Karrie League) Director Ben Rock will be live in person to present the film. Check out the trailer here .

It's been said that animation isn't just for kids anymore. Well, that's ESPECIALLY the case at Fantastic Fest. We'll be showcasing all aspects of genre entertainment in animated form, some of which will make you laugh, and some of which will make your body revolt. BERNIE'S DOLL Dir. Yann Jouette / UK, France / 2008 / 12 min. A self-loathing cat food canner looks for happiness in all the wrong places, especially when he learns that a "female" companion can be ordered by mail. Beautifully animated in a style that proves to be less cute n' cuddlythan first glance would have you believe. BLOOD WILL TELL Dir. Andrew McPhillips / Canada / 2007 / 4 min. A uniquely animated nightmare that follows the beat of your pulse and unweaves the secret link between man and insect. Music by Sigur Ros. CITY WASP Dir. Stephan Wicki & Tod Steven / Switzerland, USA / 2007 / 6 min. A man combs a semi-sentient metropolis to create his own personal symphonic Frankenstein! Live action animation combines with an arguably musical score to create a short that's guaranteed to be unlike anything you've ever seen. A COFFEE VENDING MACHINE AND HIS SWORD Dir. Chang Hyung Yun / Korea / 2008 / 29 min To ward of defeat in his future life, a dying ninja warrior wishes to be reincarnated with a skin of steel. He returns to modern-day Korea as a coffee vending machine. DOG Dir. Hermann Karlsson / Scotland, Iceland / 2006 / 2 min. A loving eulogy to man's best friend. This animated comedy features a canine skeleton and some goofy yet sincerely tearful memories. THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF MR HOLLOW Dir. R. Gudino / Canada / 2008 / 6 min. A simple photograph becomes increasingly sinister upon closer scrutiny, until nearly every evil that lives in mankind's heart is unleashed upon the viewer. From the fiends at Rue Morgue! FANTAISIE IN BUBBLEWRAP Dir. Arthur Metcalf / USA / 2007 / 4 min. You think it's hard being a human? Try living your life as a roll of bubble wrap! This semi-animated short follows the lives of several little poppable pals as they fall in love,question their existence and -- of course -- get fatally pinched by human fingers. FILM NOIR Dir. Osbert Parker / UK / 2006 / 4 min. A senses-shaking tribute to the criminal acts of yesteryear, as traditional film noir elements are transformed through animation and bizarro artistry into a wholly original gripping thrillride. FISH Dir. Naoko Masuda and Max Margulies / USA / 2007 / 2 min. The filmmaking team behind last year's FF hit THE BIRD, THE MOUSE AND THE SAUSAGE are back with a new stop-motion food tale that reveals the nature of pescatorial reproduction. GAME OVER Dir. PES / USA / 2006 / 4 min. We don't need no fancy arcade...we got an arcade RIGHT HERE! Mysterious innovative stop-motion wizard(s) PES bring the universal excitement of video games into the real world in bold, unnatural ways. KARAOKE SHOW Dir. Karl Tebbe / Germany / 2007 / 5 min. Here at FF, we've always recognized karaoke as a true art. But filmmaker Karl Tebbe succeeds in turning up the karaoke insanity to visually deafening levels in this megashock of musical indulgence. MUTO Dir. Blu / Argentina / 2008 / 8 min. Street art taken to the illogical, beautiful maximum as an urban landscape is transformed into a moving palette of impossible creatures. Is this the most ambitious animation project of the century? Yes. THE SQUIRREL NEXT DOOR Dir. Carla Coma / Canada / 2007 / 2 min. True love sees no barriers...including species. Taxidermy animation that will make you want to run out, kill things and create great art. VIOLETA Dir. Anna Solana & Marc Riva / Spain / 2007 / 13 min. Violeta makes a new friend and takes him back home to meet the folks. Too bad the depths of depravity of this family is unparalleled in the history of animation. THE WATERMELON CHICKENS Dir. Won Jong-Shik / Korea / 2007/ 8 min. Watermelon-eating chickens inadvertently kill a boy's grandfather. The child vows revenge...at all costs.

Brief Summary: A prequel to one of the most graphic and visually creative horror movies in recent times, ART OF THE DEVIL 3 is a tale of unrequited love set amid the exotic world of rural Thai black magic. Full Description: Panor, a seductive rural teacher, longs to live a normal, peaceful life like everyone else in her village. But her beauty becomes her biggest curse as she becomes the object of desire from every man that enters her life. Male colleagues and students alike resort to a variety of black arts and love potions in an attempt to win her favor. To counter their endless menace, Panor herself must turn to witchcraft to combat her supernaturally charged suitors. The ART OF THE DEVIL franchise travels in some seriously demented territory. The bloody carnage isn't delivered by the hatchets and machetes of the American horror tradition, but rather by the ancient mythology and mysticism of Thailand. In part 2, you had flaying, boiling water down throats, lots of needles, voodoo dolls, unexpected eyeballs and a pack of lizards that rip forth from an unsuspecting man's back. The directors know why Part 2 was a smash hit - over-the-top visual mayhem and creepy Thai black magic gore. Check out the stills and watch the trailer...this installment (actually a prequel) is out with a mission: deliver the goods. "ART OF THE DEVIL 3 will be more shocking and violent than our previous films. We still want to send the same messages, though, that the gruesome fates of the characters are the consequences of their desire and lust. Only people with dark intents want to get involved with dark magic. We all believe that these things do exist in our modern world, but we want to warn the viewers that it'll only do them more harm than good to mess around with it," -- Ronin Team ART OF THE DEVIL 3 was directed by the seven-man collective known as "Ronin Team," a group behind numerous Thai smash hits: from the war epic BANG RAJAN to the period piece KUNPUN THE WARRIOR to the two previous ART OF THE DEVIL movies. Collaborating closely, the seven members of the team work together in every step from screenwriting to budgeting, casting and directing. One of the members of Ronin Team is also represented in Fantastic Fest 4 with his solo directorial debut, MUAY THAI CHAIYA. (Tim League)

Brief Summary: Hildur, a high-society socialite, is left bankrupt and alone after her corrupt husband is whisked off to prison. With no other prospects, she gets a job selling role-playing games and accessories at Astropia, the town's geek Meccas. Full Description: Leave it to Iceland to deliver a charming film in which LARPing could possible save all humanity. If in an alternate universe, Edgar Wright had an Icelandic brother making his own SPACED feature for the fanboy and comic book culture, the ASTROPIA (Dorks and Damsels) is at that film and Gunnar B. Gudmundsson is that brother. A politically incorrect satire that will make you think of Monty Python in THE OFFICE, and manna from heaven for those who have ever LARPed, been to Comic-Con, played a role playing game, bought a comic book or rented CUJO to a kid under 5, this hilarious low budget Indie should find a welcome home in Austin, with audiences that can totally relate to many of the characters in the film. While mainstream media tries to stigmatize fanboys and comic culture, ASTROPIA gives nerds their mojo in a big way. The beautiful thing here is you don't have to know a single dam thing about the culture; its a fully accessible story to all, but with some succulent, juicy bones thrown to the geek-dogs. The beginning of ASTROPIA feels very much like something ripped off the latest U.S. gossip mags, with a self-centered glamor girl hitting the skids. the out-of-control girl beauty here is Hildur, who is riding a dangerously overloaded gravy train belonging to a no good scammer named Jolli (the great Peter Stormare). Jolli pushes his luck too far and gets thrown in the slammer leaving Hildur homeless and on her own to make things work. Hopeless, without a true friend, her salvation comes from an unexpected direction. It's a magical comic book store called ASTROPIA. Through this metaphysical portal, she departs on a nerd odyssey (or nerdyssey) where the fantasy world of hers and others might just save the day, save the world and get rid of Jolli's evil once and for all. Director Gunnar Gudmundsson, screenwriters Ottó Geir Borg and Jóhann Ævar Grimsson and producer Ingvar H. Pórõarson will be in attendance! This screening is sponsored in part by Gamecock Media Group and their new game Legendary. Check it out at www.gamecockmedia.com

Forty eight hours to make a horror movie - how hard can it be? Get some ketchup, a couple of knives, and invite your buddies over for the weekend. But when one of those buddies shows up dead... Okay, that didn't happen in this year's BLOODSHOTS Filmmaking Frenzy competition. Instead, we've got films made by horror enthusiasts that know the value of investing in blood in today's topsy-turvy economy. We assigned every team a subgenre and a weapon, with genres ranging from First Person Shooter to Road Trip From Hell. Weapons for some teams were simple - a pistol, for example - and for other teams far from easy, but it's really fun to watch the creative solutions people came up with when they had to use gossip/blackmail as a method of killing someone. We'll be screening all of the completed BLOODSHOTS 2008 movies over the course of two programs on two different nights before Fantastic Fest. After those screenings, the results of audience ballots at the theater and online votes at FilmmakingFrenzy.com will determine who the finalists are, and those movies will screen as part of Fantastic Fest on Sunday, Sept 21. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the best in modern homemade horror!!!

Check out all the films in this year's Pink Retrospective. Click here for a show listing. Among the first all-color pink films, Kan Mukai's BLUE FILM WOMAN looks like it is making up for lost time, exploding into its super-saturated hues from the very first frame, as the credits appear over a score dominated by bongos and sitars and the screen is crammed with distorted 8mm images taken from a mock blue film, flooded with prismatic blotches of primary reds and blues and silhouettes of naked female bodies - not unlike a more lysergically-inspired version of a Bond movie credit sequence. The plot of BLUE FILM WOMAN is an equally delirious mishmash of horror, sexploitation and trippy nightclub sequences, centered around the family of a stockbroker whose unexpected financial crash results in him offering up his wife to his sleazy, saurian creditor Uchiyama. After prodding and pawing over her in the standard fashion for films of this genre, Uchiyama then locks her up in the garden shed inhabited by his mutant son Hiroshi, who arrives from the reafters clad in carnationi-colored robes. She manages to escape from his clutches in the nick of time, only to be mowed down by a passing car. With her father now reduced to a gibbering wreck, it is left to the daughter Mariko to seek revenge for her mother's untimely demise. Rising from her job as a nightclub go-go dancer, Mariko winds up as a high-class call-girl catering for a group of prosperous businessmen, whom she blackmails to help her bring down Uchiyama after their nocturnal dalliances are captured on camera. (Jasper Sharp, Midnight Eye) Jasper Sharp, pink film scholar and author of the new Fab Press book "Behind The Pink Curtain - The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema" will be in attendance to introduce the film. Expect to learn a lot about this shadow world of Japanese film culture. Very special thanks to Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema for crucial programming and logistical assistance.

Brief Summary: A cross-country manhunt searchers for an abducted woman and a marauding Indian tribe, but the real villains don't ride horses...they burrow from beneath the ground. Full Description: I appreciate it when horror elements are thrown into an unconventional scenario. This year SAUNA flips a horror body slam on Finnish Spa culture, and THE BURROWERS does the same to the American old west. The story opens with a young man named Coffey (Karl Geary) rehearsing and fumbling with his words. He has a wedding band in his hand and intends to propose to his sweetheart that very night. We cut to the scene of her house where domestic tranquility is interrupted by the all too familiar sound on the desolate prairie, the thundering hooves and whooping calls of an Indian attack. The women and children cloister themselves in a locked barn while the men try to ward off the attack. We catch fragments of the battle only through the sounds audible from inside the barn, but can soon tell that something is different about this attack, something foreign. No bodies are found, and Coffey sets out to follow the trail of the Indians in the seemingly desperate hope that his fiancee is still alive. He joins a scouting mission set on exterminating the tribe, but as they close on the trail, odd sounds are emanating from the perimeter of their camp and members of the party go missing in the middle of the night. Victims' bodies are later found, still twitching and half-alive, buried in shallow graves in the prairie. The search party's only information is filtered through a shifty Indian interpreter who - through a mix of willful manipulation and outright ignorance - informs the party that the "tribe" they are seeking is called "the burrowers", but he fails to warn of the deadly consequences of continuing the hunt. Compared by many to TREMORS (and there are similarities), THE BURROWERS creates an original and elaborate mythology of "the burrowers", steeped in Native American folklore with a subtle dash of environmentalist agenda. J.T. Petty paints a lush, classically western portrait with strong characters, both good and bad, and effectively evokes the hopelessness of the most famous wild west manhunt in film history, THE SEARCHERS. Since his first feature, SOFT FOR DIGGING, (which played the Alamo Drafthouse as part of Kier-la Janisse's Cinemuerte Film Festival) J.T. Petty has steered clear of the pitfalls of the modern horror film: booming musical cues, superficial characters and music-video inspired editing. His films are rooted in the classics with sure camera work, rich characters and stories and plenty of good old-fashioned gothic horror creepiness. THE BURROWERS delivers plenty of chills and thrills, but they are produced with a respect and an understanding of the western and film history in general. (Tim League) With director J.T. Petty live in person.

Brief Summary: Acclaimed Russian director Aleksei Balabanov interweaves stories of cowardice, corruption and horror set against the backdrop of the birth of perestroika in the Soviet Union. Full Description: The title of Russian director Aleksei Balabanov's twelfth film is a military term for the coffins transporting dead soldiers back home during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The effects of that decade-long conflict provide a unifying theme for this ugly, highly controversial noir that recalls the work of Gaspar Noe and Michael Haneke but with a distinctly Russian point-of-view. CARGO 200 begins in 1984 with the introduction of two brothers: a Soviet Army colonel, and the head of the Faculty of Scientific Communism at Leningrad University. The university professor travels to visit his mother in a remote town. When his car falters, he stops at a rural farmhouse occupied by a husband, wife and their Vietnamese farm hand. The professor engages in a philosophical argument about the existence of God with the family patriarch, whose heated criticisms of official atheism are fueled by Utopian dreams and vodka distilled in the family barn. Meanwhile, a young man and the daughter of a Soviet bureaucrat meet at a party. The couple decides to take a drive, and their destination is the rural farmhouse. Lurking in the shadows of the farmhouse is Zhurov, a character vaguely based on Russian serial killer Gennady Mikhasevich. Although Mikhasevich was simply a depraved lunatic, Balabanov presents Zhurov as an emblem of both human perversion and the manifest corruption of the Soviet government. Zhurov’s appearance signals a series of loathsome events that form the rest of the film's narrative, and culminates in an outrageous but fitting ending that ignores all boundaries of restraint. Balabanov’s portrayal of human misery in mid-80s U.S.S.R. is complemented by a dank visual palette that is rife with rotting apartments and offices, rustic grotesquenesses and bleak industrial landscapes. His choice of music, including 80s-era Russian pop and the prominent use of Mozambique singer Afric Simone’s song Hafanana, adds a layer of perverse irony to the film. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal interview, Alekesi Balabanov spoke of CARGO 200 in the following terms: "I show what filth we lived in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards." In light of Balabanov's remarks, CARGO 200 might best be summarized as a grim epitaph for the death of the former Soviet Union. (Rodney Perkins)