Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Anthropophagus II (2022)
It’s pretty amazing to me that this movie exists, seeing as how Anthropophagus came out all the way back in 1980—and was spelled Antropophagus—and already has had several spiritual and unofficial sequels, like Absurd—which is closer to Halloween than D’Amato’s first film, which was released as The Grim Reaper in the U.S.*—and the German sort of sequel Anthropophagous 2000, which was […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Rock-A-Bye Baby (2022)
Tran Long, an influencer who uses his web show Memory of Murder to delve into actual crime scenes, weaves a complex web of interconnected narratives for his viewers. The movie unfolds with a man who killed his lover and his parents, another who broke into a jewelry store and then kills the family that owns […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Kids vs. Aliens (2022)
A feature-length adaptation of “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” from V/H/S/2, this finds kids Gary (Dominic Mariche), Jack (Asher Grayson) and Miles (Ben Tector) being bullied by teens Billy (Calem MacDonald), Dallas (Isaiah Fortune) and Trish (Emma Vickers) with Gary’s sister Sam (Phoebe Rex) caught in the middle. You see, the kids love to backyard wrestle and make […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Eyes of Fire (1983)
Released by Vestron Video in 1987, this forgotten folk horror—also known as Cry Blue Sky—is very similar to The Witch, minus any arthouse aspirations. Instead of a man whose pride casts his family out of their village, this movie is about a reverend accused of adultery and polygamy. Reverend Will Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb, Under Siege) and his […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: King On Screen (2022)
Starting with Carrie, Stephen King was adapted by more than fifty directors and eighty or more films and series were filmed. The beauty of King On Screen is that it brings together nearly every living director who worked on these films, including Tom Holland (The Langoliers, Thinner), Mick Garris (The Stand, Sleepwalkers), Frank Darabont (The Green […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)
The film Jaromil Jires, directed before this one, 1969’s The Joke, has been described as “possibly the most shattering indictment of totalitarianism to come out of a Communist country.” As a result, it was banned for nearly twenty years. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is based on the 1935 Vítezslav Nezval novel. Much like that […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Nightsiren (2022)
Two decades after a tragedy with her sister, Šarlota — pronounced Charlotta — comes back to her remote mountain hometown in Slovakia to claim an inheritance left by her dead mother. Yet when she gets there, her mother’s house has burned to the ground. Staying in her former neighbor’s abandoned cabin — rumored to have […]
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival begins next week!
I’m honored to have been asked to review films for The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN). Launched in 1997, BIFAN is the representative cultural festival of Bucheon, Korean, a UNESCO creative city of literature. Works by master filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, Guillermo del Toro Jang Joonhwan and Na Hongin […]
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