Fantastic Fest 2008

Sure, it's a fact that psychopaths love to torture and destroy innocent people. But what happens when your average suburban family gets their hands on a pack of sadistic cannibals? Director Geoff Redknap and producer Katie Weekly will be in attendance.

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' cuddly than first glance would have you believe. Appearing as part of the ANIMATED SHORTS program. CLICK HERE for details.

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!!!

A uniquely animated nightmare that follows the beat of your pulse and unweaves the secret link between man and insect. Music by Sigur Ros. Appearing as part of the ANIMATED SHORTS program. CLICK HERE for details.

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.

Sometimes there's just no way to remain safe...even in our secure homes. Quite possibly the most unexpected surprise in the fest!

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.

This Hansel and Gretel-esque fairytale may seem comfortably familiar at first, but as it unfolds, something unexpectedly dark takes over.... Appearing as part of the skull-boiling SHORT FUSE program. CLICK HERE for details.

Technology and intimacy are at war. This movie is a genuinely creepy exploration of the casualties. With director Davy Sihali and members of the production team in attendance.