“Fanga” is the Icelandic for prisoner. And that’s what Belle is, as this is a new take on Beauty and the Beast, but one in which Belle remains trapped in toxic relationships. She’s the only person taking care of her family after the death of her mother. And now, to heal her father, she has become trapped by the Beast, who knows how to heal the sick older man with a rose.
Director and writer Max Gold has created a visually stunning film — credit also due to cinematographer Nico Navia — that updates a classic fairy tale that already has Le Bete and the Disney version burned into the minds of film lovers. It’s definitely a bold take, one that has every frame looking like a work of art, as well as a beast that remains truly horrifying.
I saw Fanga at Popcorn Frights. When there’s a way to watch it outside of fests, I will update this post.
Miami Connection will play Popcorn Frights on Sunday, August 21 at 9 p.m. followed by a live commentary by the Popcorn Gallery featuring Miami comics Elli Scharlin and Orlando Gonzalez. You can also buy this movie from Vinegar Syndrome.
Y.K. Kim earned his black belt in taekwondo black belt at thirteen years of age, making him one of the youngest in all of his native Korea. He moved around the world to bring the message of martial arts to the people, from Buenos Aires and New York City to finally Orlando, where he’d set up his fighting empire with his school Martial Arts World and founding the American TaeKwon-Do Federation.
Then Kim met Korean film director Richard Park and they created Miami Connection, a movie that Kim funded with loans, money from friends, his life savings and by mortgaging his school. Sure, he’d never made a film before and had no idea what he was doing. He saw this as another way to get his message out to the people, but every major film distributors and several independent ones basically told him to throw it all away. He responded by spending another $100,000 to continue making the movie perfect.
In August of 1988, the movie opened in eight theaters around Greater Orlando and a few in West Germany, of all places. Even in his adopted hometown, the Orlando Sentinel said that it was the worst film of the year. Kim had thrown $1 million dollars into the film and nearly lost everything.
He continued to be a martial arts teaching success and also learned how to become a motivational speaker, all while ignoring any requests to discuss the film. However, in 2009, Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson bought the film on eBay for just $50 and was amazed by what he had purchased. After struggling to connect with Kim — who continually hung up on him — he was finally able to convince him to let the movie play. The rest is history.
It all gets started with a cocaine deal being interrupted by ninjas led by the evil Yashito, who steal the drugs and take it back to Orlando to party it up. Of course, one of them forgets the money and gets killed. Yashito is not to be trifled with.
Meanwhile, Jeff — who leads a gang of scarf and bandana-wearing camouflage loving bikers that are friends with the ninjas — watches his sister Jane play on stage with the band Dragon Sound. He’s not happy.
I have no idea why — Dragon Sound are the coolest 80’s soft rock hair metal funk band that does martial arts to ever exist. Yes, this ethnically diverse group of five men are all best friends — trust me, they wrote a song about it — as well as roommates, University of Central Florida students, Taekwondo masters and, yes, orphans. They are John, who comes from Ireland and plays bass when he’s not falling in love with Jane. Jack is the drummer and he’s from Israel. Jim is half Korean and half African American, but all kick ass and loves to dibble dabble on the keyboards. Tom didn’t get the J naming convention, but he sings, looks like John Oates and comes from Italy. Their father figure is Mark, the Korean rhythm guitarist and Y.K. Kim himself.
Jeff and Mark get into a fight that’s interrupted by another band who are angry that the owner of the club replaced them with Dragon Sound. They are easily defeated. The film that descends into a series of either music videos, fights, training footage or long scenes of people opening their mail. Please don’t take that as a read that I hated this. Quite the contrary.
After Jeff and his gang are all killed by Dragon Sound, Yashito and his ninjas attempt revenge. Jim just wants to get to the airport to meet up with his deadbeat dad, but he’s nearly killed. No worries, though. Dragon Sound easily — and at times messily — kill all of the ninjas, because murder is obviously not a crime in Miami (to be fair, Y.K. Kim was so well-known and beloved in Orlando, the local government and law enforcement allowed him to film anywhere in the city without permits).
Hardly anyone involved ever made a movie again. Which is a shame, because this movie is true innocence, the glory of making something even though you really have no clue. It succeeds in spite of itself and features songs that will get stuck in your head for, well, forever. Songs like “Friends,” “Against the Ninja” and “Tough Guys.” I waited a long time to see this and my life is better from having sat through it.
Check out even more of the story with this documentary from Vice.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve watched this movie at several fests and consider this a MUST WATCH that you can see at Popcorn Frights today at 2 PM EST.
The Langoliers may be at the bottom of Stephen King adaptions, but if The Timekeepers of Eternity has any say in things, we’ve been misjudging Tom Holland’s 1995 TV miniseries.
Animator Aristotelis Maragkos has printed every frame of that movie and used collage animation to reconstruct, remix and retell the story in an entirely new way, compressing 180 minutes into 64 and taking Bronson Pinchot’s character of Craig Toomey and making him the lead character and not the villain.
This film takes something we’ve seen before and deliriously recreates it as something bold, brave and fresh.
Beyond just a film, now that The Langoliers has moved into the world of paper, it can make comic book-like movements where multiple characters and angles can appear at the same time while the emotions can come out as darker shapes and jagged lines emitted from the actors. Even the ending moves from King, changing the source material in a way that makes this movie its own piece of art nearly separate from where it was sourced.
In the original film, the CGI Langoliers have been selected on so many worst special effects lists, so imagine my joy when they appear to merely be torn chunks of paper that tear through the reality of this story.
Maragkos spent years making this, but trust me, it was beyond worth the effort.
After leaving New York after a mental breakdown, Jennifer (Jenna Lyng Adams) learns from her friend Sam (Alexandria DeBerry) that at least her business life is going well, as billionaire David (Dave Vacis) wants them to work on the design of his new product. He invites her to his private yacht, but that’s when she starts being confronted with visions of violence. Is she possessed? Is this how her anxiety shows itself? And is anyone safe from her?
Director Christian Schultz, who wrote the script with Peter Ambrosio, embraces the form of giallo that is not as much about black gloved killers. Instead, it’s the film in which a female protagonist doubts every single thing in her reality, as she’s an unreliable narrator to herself. Jennifer dreams of being stalked by a shadowy figure that never quite reveals itself; she often awakens to situations that she’s escalated but can’t control.
With just minutes left, a character says, “You look like you have a lot of questions. I’d like to provide you with some answers.” The answers that we get may not solve the mystery of this movie, but the idea that our perception of the world is at odds with what others experience is a universal one; this movie pushes that idea to the limit.
Pregnant restaurateur Eula Baek (Chantelle Han) is in trouble. The pandemic has ruined the money she was making at her restaurant Peppergrass. But she does know that Captain Reuben Lom (Michael Copeman) has several precious truffles that she and her friend Morris (Charles Boyland) could make money from. So they head out of their empty restaurants and try to convince him to give them up.
Directed by Steven Garbas and Han from a script by Garbas and Phillip Irwin, there’s a lot of character building, conversation and wandering in the woods before the movie gets down to the concept that Reuben is dangerous and Morris is greedy.
The main issue? It’s hard to spend so much time with characters that are this unlikeable. But give this movie some credit; it’s anything if predictable.
I had a friend that once said that he knew that if someone, anyone he knew would take pills that he found laying on the ground, it would be me. Well, maybe not after watching this.
Made-in-Florida, shot in Miami, infused with the madness that drugs like bath salts and Krokodil were supposed to unleash on all of us, this is the story of a honeymooning couple — Chloe (Kimberly Laferriere) and Jack (Rogan Christopher) — who are looking at all kinds of experiences to strengthen their relationship, from an abortive attempt at swinging to taking peyote that a near-lunatic blood covered man gives them on the beach before he literally walks into the ocean.
Soon, their not-so-perfect new marriage isn’t their only problem. Whatever the drug that’s in their system, it does more than cause them to dance all night. It awakens a desire for human flesh.
Do Not Disturb is a totally confident film that is as much about eating other human beings as it is about devouring them emotionally through a relationship that should have really run its course. So yeah, unlike all those death of a relationship movies that usually bore me, this one sung right at my heart, because of course some people deserve to be eaten and then the leftovers tossed into the surf.
Don’t miss this one.
Do Not Disturb debuted at Popcorn Frights. When I have more information on when it will be available to a larger audience, I’ll update this article.
After she falls down a steep rock face and gets split up from her friends, Caroline (Christine Nyland) finds herself alone and with a dislocated shoulder. Now, she must make her own path out of the woods.
Beyond acting in this movie, Nyland also co-directed and co-wrote Distress Signals with Terence Krey. They both worked on the movie Unquiet Grave together. Krey also plays James in this film.
The only thing more frightening than being lost alone in nature is being lost with someone you don’t trust. Caroline is already stressed and dealing with an injury; the fact that another person won’t leave her alone — a male someone who has a rifle — certainly doesn’t make having no idea how to get back home any easier.
Distress Signals is a taunt thriller about the limits of survival and if someone can go above and beyond what you expect from them thanks to a life and death situation. If you’re intrigued by man against nature, this is worth a look.
Directed by Jim Demonakos (founder of Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con) and Kevin Konrad Hanna, this engaging documentary is about the world of Mike Mignola and the world he’s created around Hellboy.
Comic book and movie geeks — umm, speaking for myself, that’s the same audience — will enjoy hearing from Doug Jones, Guillermo del Toro, Patton Oswalt, Ron Perlman, Neil Gaiman, Mike Richardson, Art Adams and so many more about how the comic and movies came to life, but the true joy is in discovering how Adams bonded with Mignola and his brothers, how much of Hellboy is Mignola’s father (and himself) and how Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar was inspired to make Hellboy so personal.
There are also moments where the creator discusses how many times he felt defeated and how his family and later wife would help him overcome his fears. Even if you know nothing of the comics, the parts of this movie where Perlman breaks down remembering bonding with his father over movies (and getting the same opportunity to make something so personal as Hellboy), the way that Mignola and Del Toro overcame their artistic differences and how Mignola’s daughter ended up writing his favorite story (and how it keeps returning to his work), as well as how Mignola created a shared universe where others could have the same creative freedom that he found will emotionally reach you regardless of your level of comic or genre movie knowledge.
For those of us who know and love characters like Lobster Johnson and Ben Daimio, this is everything.
Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters is playing at Popcorn Frights and will be available to watch virtuallyas part of the festival.
Due to a traumatic childhood experience — look, I feel like I say this every time in the way of giving advice to horror movie characters and I feel like a broken record, but please please please never ever forever go back home again and set things straight — Anna (Riann Steele) hasn’t been back home in years. She makes the next cardinal modern horror mistake: she takes care of her dementia-suffering grandmother Lucy (Jane Lowe) — The Taking of Deborah Logan has been such a big influence in the near-decade since it was released — but soon realizes that a dark family secret remains and that only her murky childhood memories may hold the key to surviving.
The first full-length movie from director Jamie Hooper after a series of shorts, this movie was written by first-time screenwriter Helen Miles. Even from the start of the story, the old English cottage is quite a foreboding place, as we see a young Anna go from being read a ghost story by her father to being chased under the covers by something she can’t see but has it to be real.
Unlike so many modern ghost stories that descend into herky jerky motions and dark whispered dialogue alternating with strobing light to show us hauntings, The Creeping settles for what has always worked, appearing closer to a traditional and classic ghost story than what we’ve had to take in modern films. It’s quite welcome.
Leader (Destini Stewart), Willow (Sophie Bawks-Smith), Jules (Jillian Frank), Vicky (Mari Geraghty) and Millie (Rowan Wales) have gone all Lord of the Flies Canada edition and leave behind parents and boyfriends to live in the woods all on their own with their own rules and things go about exactly as well as you’d expect when five teenage girls lose their minds.
The girls live under a rule of suitable revenge, which means if someone upsets you, you get to go after them with all the force and madness that an 18-year-old girl who has never left home before can muster which is a metric ton if you were worried about the conversion.
First-time director Avalon Fast and co-writer Emmett Roiko have put together an interesting script, but the performances are stilted and near-student level — I love reading reviews that claim this is intended and makes it a better movie, film people will forgive anything — while the editing is not the best and the sound quality is borderline static at best in some scenes. That said, there are moments that look gorgeous, which stand out and make you wish the same care was delivered throughout the movie.
That said, I do love parts of this, like the letters the girls write to loved ones before they leave, like Leader telling her boyfriend, “When I want you, I’ll come get you.” This feels like a trial run — like your teen years — for something better, remembering the rough edges yet knowing how to imbue them with the honey of experience.
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