Fantasia Festival
Fantasia Review: Incredible but True
Let’s be honest, there are very few of us who don’t have a midlife crisis in one way or another. For most people it might entail buying a completely new wardrobe or a sudden interest in grime music, but others take it to the nth degree. Almost having the equivalent of a nervous breakdown, leaving …
Fantasia Review – Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin
There are few directors who have been so overlooked, misunderstood and derided as Jean Rollin. While he was classed as part of the Euro cult movement, the Frenchman didn’t easily fit into any genre or box. His work has often been dismissed as simply sexploitation or even pornography. In fairness, under the pseudonyms of Michel …
Fantasia Festival Review: Legally Declared Dead
Ever since the principle of insurance was conceived, there have been people willing to try and exploit the system. In America alone, the insurance industry is worth over a trillion dollars and employs almost three million people. Whilst there’s a huge workforce tasked with sales and customer service, there’s also a large number of investigators …
Fantasia Festival Review – Jesters: The Game Changers
South Korean cinema has built up a reputation, across Europe and North America, for exciting and exhilarating film-making. If you’re after a creepy child in an atmospheric horror or a madcap detective hunting down a killer, then there’s nowhere better to look. However, whilst they may not translate as easily, Korea has produced some great …
Fantasia Festival Review: Me and Me
There’s a tendency with filmmakers to want to tie up loose ends. Even if the story has been intentionally vague, they often eventually crack and shoehorn explanations in at the end. Where directors hold firm and, for example, leave their endings open, they can be pressured by producers or studios to dot all the I’s …
Fantasia Festival Review: Bring Me Home
Is there anything which causes more anxiety for parents than the fear of losing a child? Whilst this can often lead to overly protective or cosseted behaviour, the miniscule chance that something bad will happen can become all-absorbing. The trauma caused by the disappearance of a son or daughter is hard to quantify, but it’s …
Fantasia Festival Review: Wildland
Blood is thicker than water and families have to stick together. You can’t choose the clan you’re born into but sometimes it can provide you with a safety net when all else fails. That’s not to say that everyone likes their relatives. The fact you come from the same lineage doesn’t mean you have anything …
Fantasia Festival Review: Minor Premise
Hollywood loves a science fiction film, with an emphasis on the latter and little adult thought given to the former. These films are almost always loud, brash and more than a little ridiculous, but even LA will struggle to surpass Will Smith punching an alien. However, there are a small cohort of intelligent independent sci-fi …
Fantasia Festival Review: Undergods
In the current climate in Europe, it almost already feels like we’re living in some sort of dystopian future. Politics has taken a seemingly uncertifiable lurch to the right. Societies have never been more polarised. Governments practice divide and rule. Everything has to be black and white. Global pandemic, Brexit, climate crisis, freak weather conditions, …
Fantasia Festival Review: Sanzaru
Asia is full of ghosts. Of spirits and demons of centuries past and unhappiness long forgotten. Migration has, in some ways, spread these myths, legends and traditions far from those shores. These often wash-up on the coast of America. The New World has its own spectres, most of which were created by the ‘colonisation’ of …