As one of the films in Magnet Film’s sixshooter series Donkey Punch is all set to debut on our side of the pond in cinemas on January 23rd. Those lucky people over at IGN have scored themselves the unrated trailer for this stylish thriller which you can find after the break. You just gotta lie about your age and all. Quite frankly, and maybe it’s just my computer, I didn’t see anything ‘unrated’ about it. If you’re a pansy then enter your age and cover your eyes, I guess.
After meeting at a nightclub in a Mediterranean resort, seven young adults decide to continue partying aboard a luxury yacht in the middle of the ocean. But when one of them dies in a freak accident the others argue about what to do, leading to a ruthless fight for survival.
Also, I had the chance to sit down with Olly and have a nice little chat when he was here in October at TADFF. I’ll have that interview up before the release date.
Thanks Janeal.
Continue Reading "UNRATED trailer for Olly Blackburn’s ‘Donkey Punch’"...
Just in time for Christmas. A meaty trailer for Steven Soderbergh‘s sure-to-be-divisive 4 hour bio pic on Ernesto Che Guevara has popped up over at Yahoo. The previous trailers have been aimed at international markets and not included subtitles, but this one remedies the situation quite nicely with a handsome (if perhaps overly sweeping) musical accompaniment. People weary of the ‘usual biopics’ that come crawling out of the woodwork around holiday season to Oscar qualify will likely find Che to be a breath of fresh air. Split theatrically into two parts (like, of all films, Kill Bill) while perhaps best seen together in a single sitting, it is far from a show-stopper if they are seen separately; they are tonally different.
The marketing of the film is going to sell the man, the icon, and the revolutionary action, but the picture is a much more clinical and reaching piece. Really, it is nothing short of the anatomy of a revolution and the figure who became one of the key romantic symbols is one of many elements at play here. Do I want to see this beast again? You bet.
Continue Reading "Trailer for CHE, both parts"...
Ah Labyrinth, the film that made me take notice and develop a crush on Jennifer (Ass to Ass) Connelly that would last until this day. It is of course the awesome Jim Henson directed masterpiece that featured David Bowie as the goblin king all decked out in tight spandex and with a massive glam due on his head. I am a bit late reporting on this one cause the actual screening for this film was last week but the posters are still available and if you are a fan of the film, Bowie, Connelly or artist Todd Slater then you can pick up one of two versions of the poster, regular black or the blue variant.
Mondotees.com is the spot to purchase these so head on through the looking glass.
Yes, we’ve been tracking this one for a while and are promised a trailer soon but in the mean time we’ve got an impressive new gallery of stills from the upcoming Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre including the first released gore shots - though they’re definitely holding most of that stuff back - and the first shots to include the legendary Gunnar Hansen, the original Leatherface himself gone back to his homeland for this one.
An epic tale about a group of whale watchers, whose ship breaks down and they get picked up by a whale fisher vessel. The Fishbillies on the vessel have just gone bust, and everything goes out of control.
Hit the link below for more than twenty images from the film!
Continue Reading "Fresh Gallery Of Stills From Icelandic Horror-Comedy THE REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE!"...
Why can’t all live theater be like Japanese live theater? I mean, seriously, over there they’ve Takashi Miike doing stage adaptations of Zatoichi, someone did a full on live musical version of popular manga / anime Bleach and now Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii has written and is directing a live stage adaptation of the original Tetsujin 28 manga. Japan gets Mamoru Oshii and giant robots. We get Jersey Boys. Japan wins, in my book.
Here’s an odd little sequence of events. French action-zombie film Paris By Night Of The Living Dead - and by action they apparently mean a dose of martial arts - has been in the works for about two years now, generally flying low under the radar, unnoticed while the the rest of the French wave of genre films attracts all of the attention. Well, they’re just about finished now and they recently brought Frederic Ambroisine - film critic, DVD special feature producer, and good friend of this site - on board to shoot some behind the scenes material, presumably for the eventual DVD release. Well, Fred finished first and has gotten the green light to post his feature - titled You Don’t Mess With The French Zombies - in its entirety, with English subtitles included, on his website. Fourteen minutes of Gallic zombie goodness awaits ...
‘Giant plants attack people’. Now, there’s a high concept idea from a time when Simpson and Bruckheimer were barely into puberty, let alone slipping Tom Cruise into a fighter jet. It’s also the premise for the BBC commissioned, modern day remake of the (somewhat iconic) 1962 sci-fi flick, The Day of the Triffids. Itself an adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, the film is one of those camp relics that, though known well by title and poster, is disproportionately famous when compared to the number of people that have actually seen it. I suspect, much like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Planned as a two part drama for BBC1 the script will come courtesy of Patrick Harbinson, the writing talent behind ER and Law & Order. The Beeb has had a go at a Triffids remake in the past – a 1981 version was set in the late 20th Century – but this version promises to update the story with a topical twist involving the search for fossil fuels in 2011. Earlier this year The Ruins had a go at making flora scary again, but for all its ancient-civilization-with-savage-rituals and copious blood letting, the sorry fact is that giant, angry plants just aren’t that scary. Comical maybe. Scary? Not so much. Hopefully the powers that be will err on the side of sci-fi over horror, and if it comes to budget CGI versus a guy in a rubber plant suit, the latex wins every time.
Yes, Cyril Raffaelli always kicks ass, this is true. The man has been a major behind the scenes presence in virtually every major action picture produced by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp but Raffaelli never really got his due until he finally took the lead alongside David Belle - co-founder of extreme sport parkour - in the international hit Banlieue 13 - released on these shores as District B13. The man is a potent fusion of power and grace and we’ve been waiting for more from him ever since.
Well, as has been well chronicled already more is coming in the form of Banlieue 13: Ultimatum, the upcoming sequel to the original hit. As they make their way through production the film makers have been posting a series of behind the scenes videos from the picture chronicling pretty much every aspect of the production. We posted the first three clips here but they are well beyond those three now. In fact, yesterday they arrived at number thirteen. And if you’re thinking that a film with thirteen in the title would want to post a little something special with video number thirteen, you’re absolutely right. What they’ve given us is a behind the scenes look at Raffaelli and co choreographing, rehearsing and then running through a martial arts sequence at full speed. Very tasty and you’ll find it - along with the first three clips - below the break.
Continue Reading "Cyril Raffaelli Kicks Some Ass. Brand New BANLIEUE 13: ULTIMATUM Video!"...
Okay boys and girls, get ready to lay on the blood ... Austrian director Andreas Prochaska - still best known as the editor of several of Michael Haneke’s key films - had a surprise hit a couple years back with slasher picture Dead In Three Days and now, like with all good slashers, he’s back with a sequel. Picking up shortly after the events of the first film this one moves the two surviving characters into new territory and then, once again, getting very dark, very nasty and more than a little bit bloody.
We ran the first teaser for this a while back but the film’s website has just had a complete overhaul, including the addition of the full theatrical trailer plus an extended clip. Check out all three videos below the break!
Continue Reading "Full Trailer Plus An Extended Clip From Austrian Slasher DEAD IN THREE DAYS 2"...
Shinobu Yaguchi’s breakout movie, Waterboys, was a commercial and critical smash, elevating its writer/director from low-budget indie flicks to the big league. But the zany tale of a group of schoolboy losers who form a synchronized swimming team didn’t do his creative muse much good. When it came time to make a proper follow-up (after the little-seen anthology Parco Fiction), he did the obvious thing: he made the same film again. 2004’s Swing Girls was a much more polished piece of work, but there was no escaping the fact that its zany tale of a group of schoolgirl losers who form a swing band was kind of… familiar.
Based on the name alone, you could be forgiven for expecting Happy Flight, Yaguchi’s latest feature, to be the zany tale of a group of university drop-outs who form a budget airline company. It isn’t, thankfully. Breaking from the template of the films that made his name, Yaguchi’s gone and made an ensemble piece. The end result might appropriately be subtitled “A Day at the Airport”: centering around a flight from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Honolulu, it follows the work of the flight crew and the people on the ground, from air traffic control to the old geezer tasked with scaring birds with a shotgun so they don’t fly into the engines of planes during take-off. On a purely educational level, it’s fascinating stuff. (And on another level, it’s a darn good advert for ANA, whose fleet is shown in quite loving detail.)
Continue Reading "HAPPY FLIGHT review"...
Chris Jackson is a gateway for obsessions to pass from the mind to the physical world. To close the gateway he must face his childhood trauma before everyone he knows is killed by extraterrestrials.
Mark this on your calendar boys and girls: Twitch and Caachi Films are very proud to announce that for three days only - December 12, 13 and 14 - we will be streaming Robert Pratten’s Mindflesh in its entirety, for free, here in the pages of Twitch. Call it our Christmas present to you. Our violent, bloody, naked, Cronenbergian Christmas present to you.
We’ll be rolling out the full blooded - and fleshed - version fo the trailer a little bit later as a reminder that this is coming but for now you can check out the PG rated - but still very impressive - trailer below the break.
Continue Reading "MINDFLESH Is Coming."...
Making a children’s animated feature about the art of Biblical caligraphy seems like rather an odd choice and yet that’s exactly what Tom Moore has done with his feature Brendan and the Secret of Kells. And, as we saw with the early teaser back in the summer he seems to be doing rather a good job of it. Well, that teaser was a rough job, prepared largely for internal use, but now the proper theatrical trailer has arrived and it’s looking like very strong stuff, filled with dazzling visuals and a solid sense of style. Check both trailers out below the break.
Continue Reading "Proper Trailer For Tom Moore’s BRENDAN AND THE SECRET OF KELLS"...
For my money Poland’s Platige Image is still one of the truly great, under-appreciated animation houses in the world. Yes, the industry is slowly clueing in and they’re definitely keeping busy but animation fans in general still seem generally in the dark, most likely becaus ethey’re an outfit based in Poland rather than the US or Japan. But believe me, when it comes to animation - particularly digital animation - there are few better anywhere in the world.
Case in point: Platige have just released the trailer for their latest animation short, a film by director Michał Socha titled simply Chick (Laska). Check it out below the break.
Continue Reading "Poland’s Platige Image Returns With CHICK!"...
Director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi has been turning heads around here at Twitch right from day one. His debut film Kichiku marked him as a talent to watch, a status borne out by his next few films before he arrived at his most acclaimed effort so far, Green Minds, Metal Bats. And then Kazuyoshi kind of hit a pothole on his road to success with the high profile Freesia, a film that did - shall we say - underwhelming business. So Kazuyoshi is now doing the sensible thing: he’s getting back to his low budget roots with Non-Ko.
Nobuko tried to be successful as an actress in Tokyo (stage name ‘Nonko’), but wasn’t popular. She married her manager and soon divorced. Now a once-divorced woman in her mid-30s, she returns home to the Shinto shrine that her family runs, to help out with domestic chores. Her father is always in a stubborn rage, her mother is always trying to calm things down. However, Nonko’s married sister, who already has a daughter, scathingly says of Nonko, “It’s all over for her.”
There’s no place to run to and no place to belong, just a backwards little country town. The only thing to do is ride her bicycle to her friend’s bar to drink with the owner, another divorcee. She can’t remember the last time she got dressed up or had sex ...
The film had its debut at the Tokyo Filmex last week and you can find the trailer below the break.
Continue Reading "Director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi Scales It Back With NON-KO"...
While I’m still awaiting the chance to show you a proper trailer for Abel Ferry’s French survival thriller Ferrata - or High Lane in English - that is apparently going to have to wait a little while longer. My enthusiasm for this one, however, continues unabated based on the stellar promo I saw for it at the American Film Market. It’s a fairly basic story, really - a group of young mountain climbers opt to take a disused and abandoned route for their climb and struggle to survive when the obligatory Bad Things happen - but Ferry pulls it off with remarkable realism and style thanks in no small part to the fact that a huge percentage of the film was shot on actual mountain locations.
So, no trailer but if you want to get a look at how this thing was put together there is a brand new behind the scenes reel for the picture now available and I recommend giving it a look. You’re going to be hearing a bunch more about this one.
[The Torino Film Festival just wrapped up - naming Tony Manero it’s big winner, a choice that both surprises and pleases me to no end - and our very own Paolo Gilli was present throughout. He weighs in now with his take on events.]
The Torino Film Festival (21-29 November), that closed this past weekend, is probably Italy’s finest Festival, always equally divided between the old and the new, American, Asian and European cinema. This year’s edition, the second under the supervision of actor-director and Cannes favourite Nanni Moretti (Ecce Bombo, Caro Diario, Aprile and La Stanza del figlio), had again an impressive line up, including W (Oliver Stone), Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson), Somers Town (Shane Meadows), The Escapist (Rupert Wyatt), festival-winner Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain), Die Welle (Dennis Gansel), Made in America (Stacy Peralta), Religulous (Larry Charles), Hunger (Steve McQueen), Dream (Kim Ki-duk), United Red Army (Koji Wakamatsu) and many more.
But Torino wouldn’t be complete without its traditional retrospectives, covering this time the complete filomgraphies of noir-master Jean Pierre Melville and Roman Polanski (including all of his acting roles). Besides those, there was a third retro, titled “British Renaissance”, a list of 36 movies including everything from John MacKenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980) to Peter Greenway’s Drowning by Numbers (1988). Even Michael Palin dropped by to introduce Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983).
Continue Reading "Torino Film Festival Wrap Up"...
Joy! In less than two months from now the International Film Festival Rotterdam will be in full swing again, albeit with a thoroughly changed programme format, when compared to previous years.
IFFR 2008 marked the first time Rutger Wolfson was directing the festival, and as such he didn’t make too many changes in the way films were categorized. But now that he has signed on for at least another four years there will be some changes apparent, starting with the format.
Quoting the IFFR webpage:
...a new and simplified format with three main sections. This will make the programme clearer and do more justice to individual films and special themes.
Gone are festival sections as “Time and Tide” and, most importantly, “Rotterdämmerung”.
I’ll miss that last one because this always contained the anime and insane genre films. This is where you found titles like “Casshern”, “AAchi & SSipak” and “Paprika”, and last year’s edition had (amongst others) “Appleseed: Ex Machina”, “Let The Right One In”, “Rec” and “Dai-Nipponjin”.
But the truth is, the old format did have its problems. Titles could always be in any of several categories, making it necessary to scan them all anyway. The new setup aims to make this a bit easier, and time will tell whether this works out or not.
The three new categories are:
Bright Future: a platform to show work from novice film makers (this includes the Tiger Awards).
Spectrum: work by experienced artists who are known for contributing to international culture.
Signals: a series of thematic sub-programmes, changing every year.
Each category will consist of feature films, shorts and live performances.
NOTE: this year the “Signals” category will feature a special segment on Asian horror called “Hungry Ghosts”, showing several classics of that genre (like the original “Shutter") and some new ones as well…
More titles and guests for the festival become known every week, so I’ll post an overview soon. The full list will be available from the 15th of January onward.
While it’s far too soon to say whether Korean period-set action comedy 1724 Geisha House Riot is actually going to be any good one thing is already certain: this aint going to be your father’s stodgy old period drama. Rude, colorful and loaded up with people getting punched in the face this one is clearly aiming to be a period epic in name only, simply using the setting as an excuse to ramp up the colorful costumes and settings. The first teaser is out now but will likely not mean much to non-Korean speakers as it is little more than a blooper reel loaded up with the key actors swearing at one another. Check the teaser below the break and watch for more as we get it.
** We’ve got the first trailer now, as well, and there’s a whole lot more to it. This is looking fun. Both teaser and trailer are now below the break. **
Continue Reading "History Gets Goofy In Korea’s 1724 GEISHA HOUSE RIOT * UPDATE *"...
We have been following the progress of Albert Arizza’s Spanish serial killer film Ramirez in these pages for a good long time now, from the days the first stills arrived through to it’s first ever screening as a work-in-progress at the Sitges festival back in September. But in all that time the one thing that we haven’t been able to do is show you a trailer for this unusual, strangely meditative piece of work. And that was for one simple reason: no trailer existed. But one does now and it’s a doozy. Sharply edited, crackling with energy and blessed with a man who must be the greatest voice over artist in god knows how long - he does it in English, no less - the teaser actually plays at a slightly higher tempo than the film itself does but for those who want a bit of balance to the experience the opening sequence from the film - which appeared online for a short time a while back - has returned and we’ve got that for you, too.
Check both the teaser and the opening sequence below the break.
Continue Reading "The First Proper Teaser Arrives For Albert Arizza’s RAMIREZ"...
