Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

After a drunken game of charades, Juan (Brays Efe) witnesses his best friend David fall to the street below and explode into a million pieces in the ultimate dummy drop. Confused and consumed with sadness, he is about to go deep into the world of clay companions and the algorithm that determines how everyone will die.

Yes, Juan’s friend was a golem.

How can you not love a movie inspired by the scene where the German soldier is actually a porcelain doll in Top Secret!?

Directed and written by Juan González and Nando Martínez — also known as Burnin Percebes — this movie finds Juan in the middle of a conspiracy, tracked by a cop (Javier Botet); meeting Maria Pons ((Anna Castillo), a woman who has also seen men explode into bits and pieces; dealing with David’s lover Filtro Valencia (Nao Albet) and wondering why his father (Luis Tosar) doesn’t want to ever discuss the death of the golem.

Maybe working with his dad’s assistant Clara (Bruna Cusí), he will learn the truth.

Whatever it ends up, it’s going to be strange.

Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

Nolan Bentley (Michael Weston) wakes up with his arms tied back behind a tree. After days of no food or water, he may be a little out of it, yet he still notices when The Outdoorsman (A.J. Buckley) pitches a tent next to him and starts talking. He never offers to save him. And Nolan may never know why.

Directed by Marc Schölermann and written by Steve Fauquier, this is a big idea to take the whole way to a full-length movie instead of just a short, but the way this plays with the audience, it does a pretty decent job. Telling any more would give it all away, but Bark is an interesting two-character experiment.

Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

Yasuko (Keiko Takahashi) is alone. The kind of alone where even though she has a husband and a son, she’s alone. Longingly alone. Trapped at home all day, unless she’s running errands. She lives for her family and the only people that she often interacts with are the constant sales calls and salesmen knocking at her door. Some of them are pretty determined. Not all of them are as deranged as Yamakawa (Daijirô Tsutsumi).

He wants to sell her English lessons and she’s made a mistake by leaving the door just chained and not locked. His invasion of her high rise apartment is dealt with by slamming the door, injuring his hand. That’s not where things end.

Yamakawa — like many of the salesmen — knows way too much about his marks. Now, he starts calling Yasuko constantly, breathing heavy, leaving obscenity-laced messages and even leaving tissues stained with his bodily fluids in her mailbox. He nearly gets into her bedroom before her son comes home from school. Yamakawa is innocent now, joining mother and son for a friendly dinner, an invader smiling at the table.

Director Banmei Takahashi, who co-wrote Door with Ataru Oikawa, has a career filled with movies that infuse sex and violence. Incredibly,  Keiko Takahashi is his wife and he puts her through hell here, but in the final moments of the movie, she rises above, literal chainsaw in hand, and pays her attacker back. She never apologized for breaking his hand and she’s not about to apologize now.

This was followed by two sequels, Door II: Tokyo Diary about a call girl and the risks she takes, and Door III, in which a salesgirl is “stalked by the strange and supernatural,” which means that now I need to hunt down both of those movies.

Man, the sound of that doorbell is making me nervous now.

Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

Directed by Junta Tamaguchi and written by Makoto Ueda, this is the latest film from the Kikaku Theater. If you saw Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, you may have an idea of the strangeness and joy that they can create.

This story takes place in the Japanese resort town of Kibune and the Fujiya Inn. That’s where a waitress named Mikoto (Riko Fujitani) works and in the middle of one day, she learns that she is trapped in a two-minute time loop along with everyone she knows. Yet they can remember everything that happens to them and can work together to try to escape.

Somehow, this has a similar concept to the first movie — always two minutes of time — but it goes in different directions and makes me want to see what they do next. What a charming movie.

Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

Aitana (Roser Tapias) brings her wife Gabi (Yapoena Silva) and their adopted son to surprise her parents. Yet when she walks into their gated mansion, her mother Dori (Pilar Almería) and father Justo (Alfred Picó) are anything but happy to see her. Only her wheelchair-bound brother Saúl (Jorge Motos), who suffers from a degenerative muscular disease, is excited to see her. But there’s one more surprise. His caretaker Nadia (Anna Kurikka), a Romanian refugee, has replaced her as her parent’s daughter.

Directors and writers Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera, this starts with the feeling of being replaced and grows darker, as somehow, Aitana’s parents have new friends who have a dark history. Sure, she hasn’t seen them in three years. But can people change that much?

Between this and The Uncle, Fantastic Fest has been filled with some incredibly dark holiday movies.

Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

Gabriel (Mario Mayo) is known to his friends as Nuthead. The ex-convict and once-upon-a-time boxer earned that name but today. he’s finally out of prison and through probation. He’s a free man. All he wants to do is be a mechanic and take care of his dying father Tino (Antonio Mayans!) and spend time with his German shepherd Pepe at their isolated farm.

For people like Gabriel, peace isn’t coming.

He barely has time to mourn for his father when his brother Tinin (Diego Paris) and his girlfriend Estefa (Fabia Castro) arrive, bringing with them Sandra (Ana Marquez) — who wants to seduce Gabriel and go against the gang led by her brother Nica (Ramon Goyanes) — and an army of killers, too.

Luckily, Gabriel also has Mónica (Rut Santamaría) and her skills with a slingshot by his side.

Director and writer Kike Narcea, like all great Spanish genre filmmakers, also is a comic book artist. Those skills are shown here, as this is a kinetic movie filled with violence, bloody knuckles and brawls. Cheers for remembering the past of Spanish films and having a role for Mayans!

And man, this movie builds the battle that will come between Rafa (Fernando Gil) and our hero. If this movie had been made in the 80s, it definitely would have been picked up by New World or Cannon, which in my world is as big of a compliment as it gets.

Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.

It’s Christmas! That’s a good thing, right? Not in this movie.

Majka (Ivana Roscic), her husband Otac (Goran Bogdan) and son Sin (Roko Sikavica)  are prepping for the holiday visit of Uncle Stric (Predrag Manjolovic). When he arrives on Christmas Day, it’s filled with home movies and turkey.

Well, that sounds good, right?

Maybe Stric was a little judgemental and a bit strange, but that’s how relatives we see one day a year are.

Except that the family resets and the day starts all over again. And again. And, horribly, again.

Directors and writers David Kapac and Andrija Mardesic capture the 1980s and the wonder — and fear — of the season. The uncle is rich — the Mercedes is our answer to that question — and he soon exudes a command over the rest of the family. It takes something strange in you to combine Groundhog Day with Last House On the Left, yet this movie pulls it off with style to spare.