Film
Under the Apple Tree
The New York City Horror Festival has come to an end and I’m pleased to say it was a great deal of fun to attend for the first time. One of my favorite parts was the showing of shorts before each feature film. All of the shorts were impressive, but I want to focus on the three stand-outs that really made an impression on me.
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Photo by Raven Adams
Over the weekend, Adrienne Barbeau was honored by the New York City Horror Film Festival with their Lifetime Achievement Award. Though horror fiends will know her from Swamp Thing, The Fog, or Creepshow, her impressive career transcends genre and medium. She’s been on stage and screen–both TV and film–and, in later years, turned to writing novels. It was an honor and a privilege to see her come out to receive the award and offer up a charming Q&A with a multi-generational audience who admired her decades-long, multifaceted career.
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One of the few downsides of Fantastic Fest is that there’s just too many films and sometimes we wind up missing something to which we were looking forward. Dawn of the Deaf was one of those films, and we’ve been lucky enough to finally get a chance to watch. A 12-minute short from the UK, Dawn of the Deaf is a new and clever take on the zombie genre. When a mysterious sonic pulse kills the entire hearing population, only the Deaf are left behind, forced to confront a frightening new reality where the pulse was only the start of their trouble.
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The film pitch for Valentina is undeniably intriguing:
It’s the summer of 2025, and global warming has caused temperatures to skyrocket. Valentina is a middle-aged Latina, obsessed with her own personal hygiene. She channels this fastidiousness into her job as a cleaning lady, making her the maid of choice for affluent New Yorkers.
Valentina reports for duty at a sparkling, all-glass skyscraper on the hottest day ever recorded in the city. As she eagerly polishes and disinfects, the power goes out and the blistering sunlight turns the apartment into an oven. Sweat, heat, and moisture build up so much that Valentina’s vagina screams for mercy.
What starts as a simple cry for fresh air turns into an intervention as her vagina asks after her wages and demands better working conditions. The heat will force Valentina to come face-to-face with a part of her anatomy she’s always ignored, and it will embolden her in the process. Though Valentina initially finds her abhorrent, her vagina is truly an ally who will help her value herself and be proud of who she is.
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On the eve of taking her vows, young nun Colleen (Addison Timlin) returns to her childhood home in Asheville, NC, to reconnect with her family, with whom she has not spoken in three years. She’s drawn back when her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) is released from the hospital after suffering disfiguring injuries in the Iraq War. Now a recluse, he hides away in the family’s guesthouse, distancing himself everyone, including his loving fiancee Tricia (Kristin Slaysman). Their mother Joani (Ally Sheedy), whose suicide attempt provided the impetus for Colleen’s initial departure, claims to recovered, but relies on self-medicating in order to get by. The family patriarch Bill (Peter Hedges) is kind but aloof, seemingly unaffected by everything that’s going on around him. Perhaps the only comfort Colleen finds is her old bedroom, untouched since she left, in all of it’s black-paint and goth glory. Welcome to Little Sister, the new film written and directed by Zach Clark.
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photo by Arnold Wells
In addition to reviewing Simon Rumley‘s new film Fashionista, we were fortunate to sit down with him and the cast before the premiere at Fantastic Fest for a lively and laughter-filled discussion about the film, its influences, the city of Austin, allergic reactions, and much more.
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Challenging films often pay off in ways that you can expect. You go into a film thinking that the subject matter will be titillating, even shocking, and you walk out with a sense of relief in knowing that you got exactly what you bargained for. That is not the case with Elle.
The new film from controversial filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven, is an adaptation of Philippe Djian’s French novel, Oh, and stars the inimitable Isabelle Huppert.
The story follows a successful entrepreneur, Michèle, who is attacked and violently raped in her home by a masked man. It is a film about identity, violence, body possession, and personal responsibility, and it’s a fucking doozy.
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The Lure
We wish we could do a full review for every film we watched, but there just isn’t enough time. But we also did not want to miss the opportunity to address the many films we watched and appreciated.
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When you go to Fantastic Fest you expect to see a few films that surprise you. You’re never disappointed, but there are always those two, three, even five movies that you just can’t stop thinking and talking about after you leave. They capture the stories that you kind of fall in love with. This year, one of those films was Colossal.
The setup for Colossal isn’t necessarily simple, but here it goes. Gloria (Anne Hathaway) tries to deal with her alcoholism by going back to her hometown. Once there, she reconnects with her childhood friend, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). They quickly indulge each others bad habits and become drinking buddies. After a particularly heavy couple of nights, the two learn that they could in fact be connected to the monsters suddenly appearing and destroying Seoul, Korea.
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The Void is a superbly surreal nightmare of a horror film the writer/director team Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski. Haunting from the first moments–a couple fleeing from a sinister house with gun-toting pursuers–the film never relents and never goes where you could ever expect. The approach is very much, throw it all against the wall and see if it sticks. And, almost miraculously, IT ALL STICKS.
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