I’ve already spoken here on my love for the 1974 giallo, Il Profumo della signora in nero (The Perfume of the Lady in Black),
After the link bump we have part one of my interview with Italian filmmaker and noted painter, Francesco Barilli. Il Profumo della signora in nero to this day maintains a cult-like status among connoisseurs of gialli for its uniqueness to the genre and surpassing it as one of the better films in cinema to blur the line in a narrative between reality and fantasy, without ever fully tipping its hat.

In part one of this interview we talk about:
* Setting up the Story
* The Opening Sequence
* Camera for the Opening Shot
* The Main Building
* Blurring the Line Between Reality & Fantasy in the Film
* SPOILER - Ending Discussion

Continue Reading "NIFFF 2008 - Perfume of the Lady in Black Interview Part 1"...

While his recent output has frustrated many, legenday Hong Kong director Tsui Hark still has legions of fans around the globe and those legions will be glad to know that Missing - the director’s horror themed, scuba diving movie with Tony Leung Ka Fai and Angelica Lee - will be arriving on DVD in Hong Kong July 28th.  It’s a region three disc with English subtitles included and is available for pre-oder now.

The folks at Kino-govno.com has acquired the latest teaser poster for the long awaited Russian Horror remake Viy (Вий) and it looks hauntingly good.  Here’s the official synopsis according to the Rospo film Group site:

“Viy is a monster living in the mire of the swamps. It has magic stare that penetrates into the human soul and opens it for every sort of evil spirits. Nothing can save from Viy’s stare”.
(Slavonic Mythology)

Early 18th century. Cartographer Jonathan Green undertakes a scientific voyage from Europe to the East. Having passed through Transylvania and crossed the Carpathian Mountains, he finds himself in a small village lost in impassible woods. Nothing but chance and heavy fog could bring him to this cursed place. People who live here do not resemble any other people which the traveler saw before that. The villagers, having dug a deep moat to fend themselves from the rest of the world, share a naive belief that they could save themselves from evil, failing to understand that evil has made its nest in their souls and is waiting for an opportunity to gush out upon the world. Even in his worst nightmares our materialistic scientist could not suppose that he was going to meet devil’s faithful servant.

The horror film will premiere in Russia on March 12th, 2009.  You’ll find the featurette and two teaser trailer (english subtitles included) below the break.

Continue Reading "Teaser Poster for Russian Horror VIY"...

A brief summary of my response to the trailer for Jason Noto and Rory Kindersley’s Butcher’s Hill.  “Not bad, nicely shot.  Nice design work.  Oh, there are the sketches for the feature version.  Uh, oh, getting a bit cutesy.  OH MY GOD, I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY JUST DID THAT!”

Heh.  Yeah, it ends well.

A chance encounter with the directorial duo at Fantasia left a very good impression, as did the simple fact that they had the good taste to have their poster art done by the same crew that handled Pan’s Labyrinth and that impression was more than borne out by the trailer for their newest short.  It’s meant as a pitch device for a feature version based on the same concept and it’s certainly going to get people talking.  Check out the trailer below the break.

Continue Reading "Things Get Shocking On BUTCHER’S HILL"...

Long time Twitch readers may well remember us talking about Filipino horror film Sigaw a couple years back.  Written and directed by Yam Laranas it came late enough in the run of Asian horror films – and in some ways played to the standard conventions of the genre enough - that many overlooked it but Sigaw was such a well crafted little gem of a film that introduced some subtle changes to the genre that I truly believe it is one of the last truly important films to come out of that initial Asian horror boom.

And so I have been tracking with great interest the development of the English language version of the film.  Titled The Echo it again puts Laranas at the controls shooting a script adapted from his own by the writing duo of Eric Bernt and Shintaro Shimosawa.  The result feels more like a riff on the themes that drove the original film than a straight up remake and it is arguably the most art house oriented picture to come out of Roy Lee’s very commercially minded – in a good way – Vertigo Entertainment.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA: THE ECHO Review"...

Yes, the fear is here.  Dark Floors - the Finnish horror film conceived and created as a starring vehicle for Finnish metal act Lordi - just hit screens in its native country and is making its market debut here in Berlin.  The early teasers were surprisingly effective, making it very clear that Lordi weren’t aiming for a campy cheese fest with this but were rather trying their hand and putting together a legitimate horror film, while also showcasing the sure hand of director Pete Riski behind the camera, and those teasers have been borne out in the finished film.  Not a gore fest by any means - it would likely get a PG-13 rating in the US - the film is a tightly plotted, exceptionally well shot thrill ride that sets the rules of its world very early on, lets the audience know what to expect and then executes flawlessly.  They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but they knew exactly what sort of film they wanted Dark Floors to be and made a very good one.  And, surprisingly, a good amount of the film’s success has to come from the fact that Lordi opted to let others be the stars of their own personal vanity project while stepping back into support roles themselves.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA:  DARK FLOORS Review"...

There is an adage about looking at a car crash and as horrific as it is you just cannot turn your head away. What if I told you that I saw I car crash last night and I didn’t want to turn my head away, that I leaned forward in my seat, that I was horrified but I also laughed uproariously at the carnage in front of me. You would think that I was a sick freak. And while it may be years before that is proved in a court of law follow me for a minute here. 

Continue Reading "FANTASIA: Stuart Gordon’s ‘Stuck’"...

Since interviewing producer-brother team Evan and Peter Katz earlier this year when Pop Skull screened at San Francisco’s IndieFest, I’ve kept in touch with Peter regarding Pop Skull’s festival trajectory.  Pop Skull went on to play at the Boston Underground Film Festival (where it won a special jury prize); the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival; the Indianapolis International Film Festival (where it won a grand jury prize and where teammate Collin Armstrong expanded Twitch’s existing coverage); and Toronto’s Over The Top Fest.  A pending distribution deal for Pop Skull awaits finalization.

Never one to sit still, Peter Katz has organized a panel for San Diego’s upcoming Comic Con on the art of making independent sci fi, horror, and adventure movies, to be held Friday, July 25th, 3:00-3:45PM, in Room 26AB.  The panel will be moderated by Drew McWeeny “Moriarty”, screenwriter and West Coast editor of AintItCoolNews and includes the Dowdle Brothers (co-writers/director of The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Quarantine); Steven Schneider (producer of Paranormal Activity); Jacob Gentry and Dave Bruckner (co-writers/co-directors of The Signal); Eric Zala (director/actor) and Chris Strompolus (producer/actor) of The Raiders of the Lost Ark:The Adaptation; Adam Wingard (co-writer/director/producer of Pop Skull); and Chad Feehan (producer) and Thomas Hammock (production designer) of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane.

The import of this panel discussion can’t be stressed enough as it aligns with existing precedent.  As Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare has pointed out: “[T]he classification of horror texts depends upon its oppositional position vis-à-vis the ‘bottom line’ philosophy of Hollywood productions.  More than any other film genre, horror has shown itself to be consistently rebellious with respect to the Hollywood system.  Many of the genre’s most respected films were made on shoestring budgets and on the margins of Hollywood.” Katz has presciently organized a panel to discuss how this precedent continues up to the present day.

Cross-published on The Evening Class.

Free! Free at last! Free from the shackles of employment I braved a surprisingly chilly night to catch my first screening of TIFF. I met up with the boys as we settled down for the third Midnight Madness screening of the year, a wonderful teen movie featuring your common teen staples; drugs, booze, guns, breasts, sex, and lots and lots of blood. Is it any surprise that All The Boys Love Mandy Lane?

Mandy Lane is the object of every young man’s desire at her school. A desirable creature made all the more desirable by her inclination to lead a pure lifestyle and abstain from common teenage vices. You want what you can’t have and it drives the male teenage population around her mad. A weekend away at a classmates’ Texas ranch appears to be the perfect opportunity to crack that nut and be the first to get with Mandy. Jostling for position begins and the game is on. Unfortunately another game is being played and someone lurks in the shadows, quickly eliminating the competition. Is someone taking their affection for the lovely Mandy Lane too far?

Continue Reading "FANTASIA: All The Boys Love Mandy Lane Review"...

My repeated reliance on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Rouge seminar address “In Search of New Genres and Directions for Asian Cinema” belies not so much laziness on my part as the fact that Hsiao-hsien’s suggestion of the potential values (and pitfalls) of using “local elements … firmly rooted in local culture"—specifically when creating horror genre films—remains not only salient advice for East Asian and Southeast Asian filmmakers but a great handle for understanding genre films emerging from these foreign territories.  If said genre films can draw upon the culturally-specific wealth of their respective countries in combination with an expression of national anxieties, then you have the makings of an authentic piece of horror genre that might meet an effective U.S. reception.

This is the precarious challenge successfully endeavored by Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad with his long-awaited “horror musical” Susuk (co-directed with Naeim Ghalili, from an original story by Rajesh Nair).  As far as I’m concerned, any film coming from the acerbic articulate vision of Amir Muhammad is a cause for celebration and I am flattered beyond belief that Amir forwarded a copy of Susuk for my review.  Amir remains one of my favorite filmmakers—let alone personalities—since we met some years back at the San Francisco International Film Festival.  His wit is as sharp as a keris.  With Amir, truth definitely is often said in jest.  When we first spoke about Susuk and why he elected to take on the horror genre, he asserted: “It wasn’t my idea to do a horror film.  I was approached by the production company.  ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life!’ I said.  But actually, I have: all my other movies had been ‘festival favorites’, which is a euphemism for ‘flop.’ So I figured on laughing to the bank for a change.  Susuk is a practice in Indonesia and Malaysia.  Since it’s unIslamic, of course it’s taboo.  No other local film had been made on it.  So it fit well with my motto: It’s not important to be the best, but it’s important to be the first.”

Continue Reading "REVIEW of SUSUK"...

Now, while I’m not one of those fans out there who have anointed Spanish zombie flick [REC] one of the greatest horror films ever - seriously, the hyperbole on this one gets kind of silly - I do rather enjoy it.  It’s a taut, lean and mean little picture, very well executed.  And so it has of course had a remake prepared for the US market as quickly as humanly possible.  That remake is Quarantine, it comes from the team behind The Poughkeepsie Tapes and we’ve got the trailer in the Twitch Player below the break.  Watch and discuss amongst yourselves.

Continue Reading "Full Trailer For [REC] Remake, QUARANTINE"...

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity. (Isaiah 53:2-3).

“Now I was assigned to The Unknown, to a star known as the horror man of films, a man who literally made the lights tremble on the marquee—Mr. Lon Chaney.  Here was the most tense, exciting individual I’d ever met, a man mesmerized into this part.  Between pictures when you met him on the lot you saw a grave, mild-mannered man with laughing black eyes who seldom laughed, but when he did, his laughter was irresistible.  When he worked, it was as if God were working, he had such profound concentration.  It was then I became aware for the first time of the difference between standing in front of a camera, and acting.  Lon Chaney’s concentration, the complete absorption he gave to his character, filled all of us with such awe we never even considered addressing him with the usual pleasantries until he became aware of and addressed us.  He was armless in this picture—his arms strapped to his sides—and he learned to eat, even to hold a cigarette using his feet and toes.  He was in a world of his own, a world in which he’d had those arms amputated for love of a gypsy girl who abhors men’s arms.  And when he returns to the circus, he finds her—me—in the arms of the strong man!  Mr. Chaney could have unstrapped his arms between scenes.  He did not.  He kept them strapped one day for five hours, enduring such numbness, such torture, that when we got to the scene, he was able to convey not just realism but such emotional agony that it was shocking … it was fascinating."—Joan Crawford, from her autobiography A Portrait Of Joan (Doubleday & Company, Inc.  Garden City, New York.  1962, p. 30.)

Continue Reading "2008 SFSFF13—REVIEW of The Unknown"...

[My thanks to regular Twitch reader and Film Junkies head honcho Justin Decloux for the following review of Frank Hennenlotter’s Bad Biology]

After a 15 years hiatus, granddaddy exploitation director Frank Hennelotter is back to bring us a sexually centred package that promises to be filled with all the laughs and shock we’d expect from the man who brought us the out-there masterpieces “Basket Case” and “Frankenhooker”. Will we be covered in goo? Gag uncontrollably? Tell all our friends that we we’ve been scared for life?

Not quite.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA:  BAD BIOLOGY Review"...

Salivate and prepare to be completely blown away by the first half of the Sitges 2008 program!

With a furious drum beat and TNT Jackson kick to the face and Braveheart battle roar, Sitges 2008, announced one amazing lineup today and even better… it’s only half the titles and events! Between their highlights and focus of key science fiction films of the past and new titles playing, this could be a fantastic film festival for the ages. The kind where you have a grandson that has a grandson that has a grandson that tells people as bragging rights that their distant relative Frank was at Sitges 2008. Sitges this year seems to be rolling out all the stops to outdo everything they have ever done before and It only makes me wonder if festival director Angel Sala morphed into James Cagney screaming ”Top of the World” as he drew down the curtains with a furious display of festival fireworks to announce the Sitges 2008 films and events earlier today in Barcelona. As Mr. Sala drove off into the streets of Barcelona immediately after the conference on perhaps his BATPOD, we are left to only wonder how amazing the unannounced second half will be.

Sitges now in its 41st edition kicks off on October 2nd and runs through the 12th. This year they will have an expansive highlighted focus with special guests and planned events for the 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 40th anniversary of George A. Romero’s, Night of the Living Dead and also on the 75th anniversary of King Kong (highly appropriate with the Kong icon being so well connected with the festival). If your a fan of these films, then your in for a real treat with what they have in store! The Nosferatu Award this year will be going to Italian maestro Umberto Lenzi. Of special note this year is the fact that the Méliès d’Or award by the EFFFF (European Federation of Fantastic Film Festivals) will be handed out at Sitges via special guests and members of Monty Python.

Let us now quickly mention just some of the titles announced today: Vinyan, Martyrs, Surveillance, Let the Right One in, Tokyo!, Crows-Episode 0, The Good The Bad and the Weird, The Chaser, Blindness, JCVD, The Monster X strikes Back: Attack on the G8 Summit, Transsiberian, Synecdoche, New York and retrospective screenings of Barbarella, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Planet of the Apes, Forbidden Planet, Logan’s Run and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Whew, just saying that lineup in one breath feels like an incredible cinematic rush.

If your a fan of cinema this year certainly delivers. The Sitges film festival sits about 30 minutes southwest from Barcelona and is right along the Mediterranean coast. The main movie theater the Melia is something of cinema goer legend, as it boasts a giant screen and sound system that will forever leave you spoiled and wishing you had a local theater that was just half as good. It’s a movie theater where you fully experience a movie, when bullets fly in a Johnnie To movie, you feel like bullets are flying past your head! Despite being a smaller coastal town there is plenty of affordable hotel and apartment sublets available from anywhere from 50-80 Euro a night. The overall atmosphere of the festival is very communal and very laid back. Festival goers can easily mingle with each other and stars without all the fuss.

FULL PRESS RELEASE AFTER THE LINK BUMP.

Continue Reading "Sitges 2008 - This Could Be One for the Ages!"...

[My thanks to regular Twitch reader Alain Chouinard for this review of Christopher Denham’s Home Movie.  Caught this one with the lady-friend whilst in Montreal and it absolutely freaked her out ...]

As a twisted dark comedy/drama shot as a home movie in the vein of recent “reality” horror films like [REC], Home Movie explores the gradual destruction of the Poe family as it is confronted with the extreme ruthlessness of its two ten-year-old children, Jack and Emily (Austin and Amber Williams). Faced with this inexplicable evil as well, psychologist Clare (Cady McClain) and Lutheran minister David (Adrian Pasdar) helplessly document the irrational chaos produced by their children with their video camera while simultaneously attempting to contain and define it with the tools of their trade: religion and psychotherapy.

Continue Reading "FANTASIA:  HOME MOVIE Review"...