Pablo (Juan Cano) dreams of being an actor but until that happens, he’s paying the bills doing the only acting role he can find, playing a patient that medical school students can practice on, as well as taking part as a paid member of alternative therapy sessions.
Much of this movie — well, maybe not the ghost but who knows — comes from the life of Chilean filmmaker and screenwriter Roberto Doveri, whose friends make up much of the cast.
Pablo had been just surviving when his roommate leaves, which leaves behind back rent, some clothes, lots of plants, a dog and, yes, that ghost that we see entangle itself in everyone’s life by way of incredibly effective animation.
Your mileage may vary on this as it’s talky and meandering, but then again, a ghost has sex with a guy and you don’t see that all that often, so it is something.
Phantom Project is in select theaters October 4 and VOD and DVD October 25 from Dark Star Pictures.
This is the fourth Motern Media movie I’ve watched this week and just might be my favorite. There are so many stories in here all working together toward one conclusion, but this is a mixture of lost love, family tragedy, musical comedy, science fiction and just plain good old fashioned weirdness all mixed up and made into something just about perfect.
This time, we’re in Tussleville, a place where Walter Moore (Matt Farley) hosts a singing show that’s always live, never taped, and has an upcoming appearance by the girl who got away, Alyssa Caitlyn Pouliot (Elizabeth M. Peterson). Meanwhile, Walter and his cousin Poopy (Chris Peterson) — a grown man who walks around with a blanket — learn that Uncle Dan (Kevin McGee), the man whose ghost visited them throughout their childhoods and made them learn the rules of the Magic Spot may still be saved from his place outside of time and given a chance at heaven. The secret? You have to use the Magic Spot in winter because your body needs to acclimate to this dimension’s temperature as when they are an observer in the Magic Spot, they grow beyond cold. This is why Uncle Dan somehow died of hyperthermia in the summertime.
Walter wants to also use the Magic Spot to remember what Alyssa wore the last time they went on a date two years ago, a condition she’s given if he ever wants to woo her again. Maybe it’s cheating using the Magic Spot to see her in the past, but maybe we should also forgive someone in love.
Most time travel movies upset me because they set up a logic and then step all over that logic. In Magic Spot, Farley and Charles Roxburgh have created a movie that works on whatever level you want to watch it: as a Motern Media fan, as a lover of indie film, as someone looking for a romantic comedy, as a time travel story and so on. It’s also got some of the best songs I’ve heard in their movies.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I have no problem admitting that I cried. I love that this movie could do that to me as well as the fact that it celebrates analog moments. A TV show that only airs live, a place that allows you to silently view the past, a band that plays in the woods only for themselves, all of these things celebrate the moments in life that reward us without being captured for anyone else.
Whatever these guys make, I’m here for it.
Magic Spot is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest. This is part of Molten Media, which has produced independent feature films since the late 1990s. According to Fantastic Fest, “the idiosyncratic cinema of Charles Roxburgh and Matt Farley pay homage to the regional low budget horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s as they unravel bizarre tales set in and around lightly-fictionalized small New England towns. Akin to the manner in which John Waters and Kevin Smith cultivated their cult universes out of tight-knit communities of vivid personalities, Charlie and Farley’s films imagine a unique portrait of Americana as they recruit an eccentric ensemble of folksy friends and family to endearingly perform the offbeat vernaculars and campy melodrama of their wittily verbose scripts.”
Fantastic Fest Burnt Ends has awarded the filmmakers with the first annual Golden Spatula in recognition of their creative spirit, and a partial retrospective of their inventive catalog which includes Local Legends and Metal Detector Maniac as well as more contemporary works which pursue a distinct, but just as wonderfully eclectic and wry comic sensibility.
Written by the returning Don Mancini and directed by Jack Bender, whose career may have been mostly in TV, but he also directed The Midnight Hour so he gets horror, Child’s Play 3 would be the last Chucky movie Mancini would be involved in until Bride of Chucky.
Eight years after the events of the last movie, the Good Guys factory is reopened and near-immediately — why do they keep opening this place? — the blood of Chucky gets on a new doll, the CEO gets killed and Andy (now played by Justin Whalen) is tracked down at Kent Military School, as he has had so many foster families ruined by his PTSD from Chucky that he has to be drafted into this place. By the end, Chucky turns the place into a real warzone, trying to possess a young kid named Tyler (Jeremy Sylvers), slicing throats and throwing grenades.
This movie was made under pressure, as it was greenlit before Child’s Play 2 was even released and was in theaters nine months after that film. It also only made $20.5 million on a $13 million budget, ending the franchise for seven years.
In a replay of the video nasties era, Child’s Play 3 was part of a tabloid panic in Great Britain, where journalists claimed the film had influenced two 10-year-old boys in their murder of two-year-old James Bulger. It was later determined that neither had actually seen this movie. Additionally, sixteen-year-old Suzanne Capper of Manchester was kidnapped and tortured by former friends for several day, then set on fire and left to die. She was forced to listen to the song “Hi, I’m Chucky (Wanna Play?)” by 150 Volts while being abused and one of her abusers, Bernadette McNeilly, started each torture session with the phrase “Chucky’s coming to play.” As you can imagine, tabloids also had a field day with this story, blaming it on the movies when that song was in heavy rotation at the time. Child’s Play 3 was the movie they claimed caused all of this.
Ahlam hakekya is an Egyptian film that takes one of the best giallo plots for its story: Mariam (Hanan Turk) is a painter married to Ahmed (Khaled Saleh) but her life is filled with strangeness, as every night she dreams of the car accident that took the lives of her daughter and first husband. Of course, as you can expect from a movie inspired by giallo, she also starts dreaming of murdering people and when she wakes up, those same people have died the same way as her sleeping visions.
The police get involved and suspect Mariam’s best friend Maay, which raises the question if Mariam is also part of the crimes or if she’s somehow connected to Maay within the world of dreams. This all makes Marian go female giallo crazy and decide that she’s never going to sleep again.
Ask Nancy Thompson how well that works.
Director Mohamed Gomaa also worked on the TV series Qariat El Fingan in which a fortune telling app’s prophecies start coming true. Real Dreams was written by Mohamed Diab, who directed four episodes of Marvel’s Moon Knight series.
DAY 3. DEAD IN THE SUBURBS: Neither is living in the ‘burbs.
Walker Kennedy — the kind of name someone has in a Lifetime movie or a country star, played by Colin Ferguson — and his wife Col — also a Lifetime name, but hey, Lara Flynn Boyle should be a giallo queen and I’ll take this — don’t want kids and are happy to just live in the suburbs. Well, they were.
That’s because their quiet home is soon in the shade of architect Kim’s (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) obsession, a house that seems like a cathedral to Col. Also, if you don’t think that Zack Morris isn’t going to put it to Donna Hayward, you must not watch many Lifetime movies.
Every couple that moves into that house goes absolutely insane and kill one another, which would seem to stop people from moving in but you know, as someone who bought a house next to a Native American ground and the last owner killed himself — at least not in the house as far as they told us — I know how hard it is to get a home.
Based on the book The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, this was directed by Jeff Woolnough, who also made Universal Soldier II: Brothers in Arms and Universal Soldier III: Unfinished Business. It was shot in Toronto, which makes a lot of sense when you watch it, because this neighborhood seems a bit too polite, even when the ladies are all discussing affairs. Man, this movie makes me glad I don’t talk to any of my neighbors other than the biker dude next door.
You can consider Hard to Die either Tower of Terror or Sorority House Massacre III: Hard to Die. It’s kinda sorta a remake of Sorority House Massacre II with some of the same cast and the same director, Jim Wynorski. He made that movie for Julie Corman. Now Roger wanted the same movie.
He also had sets from Corporate Affairs, which was set in an office building. In Mark Thomas McGee’s Katzman, Nicholson and Corman – Shaping Hollywood’s Future, he talked about the issues that the location created as he wrote the movie with James B. Rogers: “This change in locale presented Jim and I with a problem—how to get the women out of their clothes and into their underwear. Try to imagine someone like David Lean or William Wyler wrestling with a dilemma like this.”
The trick that made the movie? The fact that it was set on different levels of a building. McGree added that this led to the knowledge that the characters “…could discover a lingerie company on another level. The sequence where these ladies become so excited when they discover these frilly and sexy undergarments (and just can’t wait to try them on) is as ridiculous and infantile as anything you can imagine.”
That’s from the guy who wrote this.
This movie also uses footage from Slumber Party Massacreto have the driller killer possess janitor Orville Ketchum who just stares at the five ladies who work at a lingerie company in the tower. That’s because the ladies broke the object housing the killer’s spirit that Dr. Ed Newton (Forrest J. Ackerman) was planning on destroying.
Dawn (Gail Thackray, an early internet porn entrepreneur and the creator of Hustler’s Barely Legal), Diana (Karen Mayo-Chandler), Jackie (Deborah Dutch), Tess (Melissa Moore) and Shayne (Bridget Carney) have to survive the night while wearing lingerie and carrying guns, which when combined with the title of this movie may lead one to believe that this was an Andy Sidaris film. Also, seeing as how it’s really a Wynorski movie, it has cameos by Monique Gabrielle and Kelli Maroney. He used the name Arch Stanton here, which is the name on the grave with the gold hidden inside from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter, who also co-directed and co-write this with Vanessa Winter) is a disgraced internet streamer and influencer infamous for stunts like the Baby Moses challenge, in which he goes down a river in a basket, and the video that got him in trouble as he abuses a homeless person. To win back his fans, he has decided to go one on one with his greatest fear: ghosts.
I’ve gone on record about how much I hate found footage movies, but this just works. I love all the extra jokes that come across from the fans watching the live stream as well as how absolutely wild it all gets, with Winter enduring near-Bruce Campbell levels of abusive stuntwork. He’s joined by one of his fans Chrissy (Melaine Stone), who gets to see her idol pretty much act like a frightened child for the rest of the film.
An actual haunted house in Utah was used to recreate the cursed home of suicide victim poet Mildred Pratt which his new sponsors tell him is the most haunted place in all of America. Of course Shawn never really stops being a jerk and angers the spirit of Pratt, leading to him running through room after room filled with so many intense terrors.
Seriously, between all the jump scares and Twitch stream camera I should hate every minute of this, but that should tell you how good it is. No other horror movie this year has actually frightened me — while also making me laugh out loud — more than this movie. In spite of having bits of everything I usually hate, Deadstream is so good that it has my highest recommendation.
Based on the Danish young adult novel by Janne Teller, Nothing may be the best movie I saw at Fantastic Fest and was definitely the darkest.
A young boy named Pierre Anthon (Harald Kaiser Hermann) has seen the inherent purposelessness of life and decided to climb a tree and stay up there like Zacchaeus or a prepubescent Simon of the Desert. His friends are concerned about him and try to get him to climb down. Some throw rocks. He stays there.
Led by Agnes (Vivelill Søgaard Holm), the schoolchildren still want to prove him wrong, so they gather a heap of meaning, each offering sacrifices with deep personal meaning. It starts with typical teenage things but soon the sacrifices grow dark and even murderous.
Much like Kids or Peanuts — truly the only time both have been used in a comparison — parents aren’t there. It’s these kids building a monument to something, anything, facing the idea we all must that the world is not safe and no one can protect us.
Directed by Trine Piil Christensen — who also wrote this movie — and Seamus McNally, Nothing makes me wonder how much I really want kids because when they get this old, how will I talk them out of doing something like this? I figure my kid will be the one up in the tree, but let’s be serious. He, she or they will be the one down in the basement watching slashers with us.
Fantastic Fest’s patented bipedal program of short-subject cinema that buck conventions and blur boundaries of genre, aesthetics and taste returns with a barrage of provocative peculiarities. Expect the unexpected, but prepare for an array of unique sensibilities — from the polished to the anarchic — as absurdism and experimentation abound and silliness co-mingles with severity.
Alegrías Riojanas (2022): Experimental filmmaker Velasco Broca has created a short where an ophthalmologist has his urgent need for a confession interrupted when the priest leaves. Growing tired of waiting, he returns to his office and is killed by a car. Then, his soul travels through a purgatory populated by horrifying demons and devils. Where will his journey take him?
This movie is at once frightening and gorgeous. It’s unlike anything else I saw at Fantastic Fest.
Amor to Love (2022): Taco Bell’s new Grilled Stuft Corazon-a-rito. They say it has three layers of cheesy admiration and sizzling hot passionate ground beef all grilled to deep perfection. Yes, somehow, this was a film made for Taco Bell, but you know, as much as I hate corporations I for some reason I give a pass to Taco Bell. I mean, bean burritos. They’ve been a staple in my diet since I was a child, which is possibly why I’m so fat and fart so often. Also: this movie was fun. You can learn more at the official site.
The Breakdown Parables (2021): Directed and written by Emil Benjamin, this tells the story of a purgatory casting office, as the receptionist (Maria DeCotis) sees appointment after appointment. Through five stories, the actors within the waiting room experience a variety of human emotions as well as baring their truest self; anything in the pursuit of that big part, right? Does the receptionist have dreams of her own? Can anyone be friends in the business of show? Will this all end with a musical number? Is heaven real? Man, that’s a lot of questions. This answers at least a few of them. I certainly had no expectations of this, but if I did, they would have been exceeded. You can learn more at the official site.
From Water Comes Melon (2022): Micah Vassau directed and wrote this tale of the last watermelon on Earth. A young woman discovers it and must decide whether to keep it for herself or share it with the rest of what’s left of humanity. Also, rampant nudity for some reason. I never thought I’d watch a movie about post-apocalyptic watermelons appearing on a beach, but life is incredibly odd and I love that.
Hubbards (2021): There’s a guy who digs every day in a quest to find his brother’s bones. When he needs the sustenance it takes to excavate sibling skeleton parts in the dusty sand and dirt, well, he turns to Hubbards. You may as well. This was a four-part journey into weirdness that I enjoyed and wouldn’t mind watching again.
I Dreamed I Heard a Song Called Habibi (2022): An experimental mixed-media vibe that ruminates on technology, theater and transformation set to a soundscape by Your 33 Black Angels and directed by Benji Kast. It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine referred to the music of this band as “Part XTC, part New Order, part VU; like Galaxie 500 being beaten up by Kraftwerk and the Wu-Tang Clan.” This animation was pretty wild. Check it out:
Precautionary Measure (2021): Created by Lizzy Deacon and Ika Schwander, this tells the story of Helen, who wins a life coaching session in a raffle at her local village hall. What follows is her life coach Helen guiding her through the help she never really needed. Together, they will explore healing strategies to cope with fear, rejection and grief. Maybe they’ll help one another. Maybe it’ll be a mess. They say the unexamined life is not worth living, but who are they anyway?
The Straight Ball (2022): Eugene Kotlyarenko and Nate Wilson made this story about a date that’s filled with information as it falls to pieces. It kind of gave me PTSD, reminding me that I’m really lucky that I’m inside on a cold Sunday night with my wife and not failing to connect with any other person. For that, this movie has made me very thankful.
In the Trout family kitchen in Redhook, Brooklyn on one day in 1948, father is seeking a new job and Junior returns home after being gone for twelve years. Seems normal, but things spiral out of control. I didn’t expect to watch an Americana play dealing with poverty and family regret at Fantastic Fest but here we are. Director and writer Gavin Field has constructed a story of a family with nothing except debt, guilt, alcoholism and painful memories.
It’s intriguing that this is basically a stage performance being filmed, all set within one hot summer kitchen, a place where all the family can do is look out onto the harbor and just stew, ready to explode in rage or howl with sadness at any second…or just sit there, trapped in ennui and silence. It’s no summer blockbuster but in no way does it intend to be. This is film with a mission of emotion, storytelling and showing how a story can be built within one setting and a singular family.
Brutal Season is playing at Fantastic Fest as part of the Burnt Ends selections.
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