Fantastic Fest 2017: reviews and interviews from Austin’s culty genre film festival

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was first posted out of Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. It is being republished to coincide with the film’s release on Amazon Prime Video.

One of the serious advantages to smaller, indie speculative-fiction movies is that you generally don’t know what you’re getting up front. In today’s anticipation culture, websites often drool over every possible detail and reveal about the bigger nerd-friendly properties. It’s easy to walk into a big movie feeling like you already know all the major beats, because they’ve been discussed to death online in “Everything we know about this movie” articles, and “Let’s pick apart this trailer frame-by-frame” videos.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review originally ran after the film’s premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. It has been updated for the theatrical release.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who hear the words “Scottish Christmas zombie musical comedy” and start scouring the internet for showtimes, and people who hear those words, roll their eyes, and mutter about the ridiculous extremes of mash-up culture. The latter group will want to skip Anna and the Apocalypse, which is exactly as advertised: a low-budget, high-energy independent musical comedy made in Scotland, and centering on how a group of angsty high-schoolers on the cusp of graduation deal with a sudden outbreak of living-deadism. 

The French-language movie Les Affames (“The Ravenous”) isn’t out to reinvent the zombie movie. Canadian writer-director Robin Aubert is a fan of the genre, and he knows the tropes: the growing hordes of shambling monsters, the thrown-together crew of mismatched survivors, the sudden attacks that winnow them down one by one, the understanding that even a single bite can doom an otherwise healthy person. Aubert embraces all the usual business. And he clearly expects viewers know how these stories go too, because he skips the usual buildup and drops them right into the middle of the action. Les Affames, an indie movie now streaming on Netflix, launches with the zombie apocalypse well under way, and the protagonists well prepped on how to survive from day to day.

But then he adds his own twists on the genre. His zombies clearly feel pain, and they scream when injured. They’re up to some complicated collective project in a field. There’s a fair bit of mystery and even some poetry to their behavior. But it’s not a mystery Aubert is out to solve. I sat down with him to talk about how he made the movie with his family and friends on a shoestring budget, why he made his strange and specific choices, and why he hates the color green in movies.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally published in September, during Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. It is being republished to coincide with the film’s wide theatrical release on January 18th, 2018.

In 2014, a ripple of panic went through animation fandom as the media reported that Studio Ghibli, the beloved Japanese production company behind movies like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, was shutting down. With the latest retirement of co-founder Hayao Miyazaki (who has retired, then returned to feature animation, multiple times now), the rumor was that the studio would close. The reality has been more complicated. Ghibli still exists, but it hasn’t made a new film since 2014’s When Marnie Was There. Its roles on other recent projects have varied: advice and support on Michaël Dudok de Wit’s feature The Red Turtle, co-production but not animation on the TV series Ronia, The Robber’s Daughter. Recently, Miyazaki confirmed he has come out of retirement again for yet another feature, but that one isn’t due out until 2019.

Canadian directors Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard started their filmmaking career together in 2008 with Lost Cause, a tiny comedy they wrote and starred in themselves. The rough edges are clear, but the concept is fascinating: a man’s ghost comes from the future to haunt him by guiding him to better choices. (And at one point, by telekinetically turning a sock into a puppet to interact with him.) Labrèche and Léonard’s latest film, Radius, also has some visible rough edges, but it’s equally high-concept and compelling: the film stars Diego Klattenhoff as Liam, a man who wakes up from a car crash with complete amnesia and a mysterious power. Anything living that comes within 50 feet of him instantly drops dead — until Jane (Charlotte Sullivan) shows up at his house, seeking answers about her own amnesia. 

The film, which is now widely available on VOD and streaming rental services, and opened throughout Canada on December 1st, plays a bit like an extended Twilight Zone episode, as Liam and Jane explore the limits of his radius of death, and try to uncover their own identities while protecting people from his power. I spoke with Labrèche and Léonard at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas about the overheard conversation that helped inspire the film, the moral conundrum Radius shares with Dark Matter, and why you should always put rocks in your potato-corpse.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review originally appeared in conjunction with 1922’s premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. It is being reposted to coincide with the film’s Netflix release.

2017 has been a banner year for Stephen King adaptations, but the batting average hasn’t been so hot. It is easily the best of the bunch: in spite of its “more, and then much more” aesthetic, it hit big with audiences, and is now reportedly the highest-grossing horror film of all time. And Netflix’s Gerald’s Game does a startlingly impressive job of drawing out the novel with memorable performances. The Dark Tower, on the other hand, was a confused, generic would-be series-launcher, and Spike TV’s The Mist and the Audience Network’s Mr. Mercedes series have both been accused of stretching out their stories until their energies get lost along the way.

Writer-director S. Craig Zahler seems to think it’s pretty funny that people don’t know how to categorize his new film, Brawl in Cell Block 99. “All these reviews say, ‘It’s hard to classify it between the grindhouse and the arthouse,’” he chuckles. And he’s right, it is. But that isn’t a problem. For people who love to see some sophistication in their cinematic mayhem, it’s a major thrill.

The film recently had its American premiere at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, alongside other hyper-violent, cult-oriented splatter films like Revenge and Blade of the Immortal. In some ways, Cell Block 99 is a classic exploitation film, about a drug dealer named Bradley (Vince Vaughan) brutalizing a horde of criminals to get to the man who kidnapped his wife Lauren (Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter). But it’s radically different from any other film in that vein. Most grindhouse action movies take a sort of drooling animal pleasure in the fantasy of unbridled violence. Cell Block 99 treats it as a grim job for mature, intellectually balanced men. Bradley is drawn as a startlingly violent thug who’s well aware of his dangerous temper and his capacity for murder. (Faced with evidence that Lauren has had an affair, he calmly tells her to go inside their house and wait for him. Then he beats her car into scrap with his bare hands in a measured scene that’s startling, scary, and funny all at the same time.) There’s a calm deliberation to the entire story, even when Bradley is literally ripping someone’s face off. The combat in particular is ruthless, but beautifully rendered in long sequences that make it clear Vaughn is doing his own extremely convincing stunt work. He’s a revelation in this movie — hard, determined, intimidating, and just soulful enough to be a hero.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.

In its opening moments, the Russian space thriller Salyut-7 feels like an alternate-universe version of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. Two cosmonauts on a spacewalk in 1983 joke with a compatriot inside the Salyut 7 space station, theorizing about when the USSR government will want to experiment with sex in space, and how much time they’ll need to (or get to) spend in Earthside training simulators for the project. Then a minor welding accident punctures one cosmonaut’s glove. As her suit pressure rapidly drops, hypoxia threatens, and she becomes less and less cogent, her partner gently talks her through the rescue process. The music, the editing, and the taut, escalating drama of the scene all belie his perfect calm as he persuades her toward safety. Meanwhile, Earth abides below, beautiful but threatening, and dizzyingly far away.