Well, I guess my plan to do daily updates for Fantasporto this year did not pan out very well. The festival is not over yet, but I had to return home yesterday. Very sad to be missing the Vampires’ Ball closing party, but I had a really good time again at Fantasporto, seeing a pretty wide range of films and meeting a whole bunch of interesting folks.
One of my favorite films was one of the most mainstream, The Holding — the story of a dysfunctional, all-female farming family, facing all sorts of challenges, when a mysterious stranger shows up one day. Vincent Regan, who plays the stranger, is really good.
The Spanish supernatural comedy Game of Werewolves was quite amusing. I’m quite surprised that it has not really been distributed, even in Spain, as it is a pretty mainstream, funny film. The part with the fingers and the sacrifice was especially good.
One film you might have heard about is The Bunny Game, a super-low-budget bit of “torture porn.” It is the story of a drug-addicted prostitute who gets kidnapped and tortured in the back of a truck. Really, that’s it — black-and-white torture while a teeth-rattling industrial-noise soundtrack blasts incessantly. It is about as extreme as cinema gets, but not in a good way. Some people have compared it Serbian Film, but I thought Serbian Film at least had a brain and a point of view (not to mention production values). Bunny Game, though, is more like something Alex would have been forced to watch during his reprogramming in Clockwork Orange.
The HP Lovecraft film, Whisperer in the Darkness, was also really bad. Schlocky and dull, without a hint of wit or creativity. Imagine HP Lovecraft as re-interpreted by Guy Maddin (that is not a compliment).
Most of the other films that I did not like were mostly bad because of budgets and other constraints, so I do not want to bash them. Most at least had the seeds of good ideas, interesting moments, or other redeeming features — perhaps not enough for a full-fledged endorsement, but not terrible either. I’m sure I’m forgetting some other good films, too, but that’s all for now.
