Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Fantasy Filmfest Berlin 2006 (Horror, SciFi, Martial Arts, Anime, Suspense, Thriller, etc.)

16:40 / 31.07.06

Once a year we have the wonderful Fantasy Filmfest and I go and enjoy some movies (it is often the only chance ever to see them on the silver screen).

Last year, I wrote, scattered in the movie forum, about some festival pics I had watched (The Descent, Kaala, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Ghost in the Shell 2 and Casshern for example).

This time, I thought, it´s a good idea to put all my impressions in one thread, and you can join in (I´ll try not to spoil the twists and plot points!).

Many of these movies are European and world premieres and the festival is very reliable (20 year anniversary this year!), I am looking forward to these seventeen movies:

- Severance (UK 2006, world premiere, Christopher Smith)
- Somniac (Spain 2005, german premiere, Isidro Ortiz)
- Minotaur (UK Gr Lx Fr Sp 2005, geman premiere, Jonathan English)
- The Method (Argentinia Spain Italy 2005, German premiere, Marcelo Piñeyro)
- Shadowless Sword (South Korea 2005, world premiere, Kim Young-jun)
- Renaissance (France 2006, german premiere, Christian Volckman)

- The Marsh (Canada 2006, European Premiere, Jordan Barker)
- Right At Your Door (USA 2006, German Premiere, Chris Gorak)
- A Scanner Darkly (USA 2006, Richard Linklater)
- The Ice Harvest (USA 2005, German Premiere, Harold Ramis !!)
- In 3 Tagen Bist Du Tot (Austria 2006, German Premiere, Andreas Prochaska)
- Brick (USA 2005, German Premiere, Rian Johnson)

- Sam´s Lake (SKorea US Can 2006, European Premiere, Andrew Erin)
- Frostbiten (Sweden 2006, Anders Banke)
- Them (France 2006, European Premiere, David Moreau & Xavier Palud)
- Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children (Japan 2005, German Premiere, Tetsuya Nomura & Takeshi Nozue)
- The Science of Sleep (France 2006, Michel Gondry)

You might already have seen some of these. If so, you can of course already start joining the discussion. But the festival is 09 - 16 august, so it will be a couple of days before my first reviews appear.

If you like these movies and you have the time and money you can come and enjoy the festival yourself (next year I guess). Almost every movie is in it´s original language with english subtitles. The Festival is also in Hamburg and Munich at different times.

20:13 / 09.08.06

Severance (UK 2006, world premiere, Christopher Smith)

Right. What a movie! No comedy can ever be a match for a good Splatter movie. The house was packed (over 600 seats), and we were laughing all the way.

Six members of an international arms manufacturer have a weekend for bonding and paintball shooting in the former Eastern Block. Only they picked the wrong house. And are surrounded by thugs that have firsthand active and passive experience of their company´s weapons. Hilarity ensues, even before it gets bloody, and when the violence starts it´s not even funny anymore!

I don´t know how to describe some of the best scenes without spoiling it. Hm, well, one of their bazookas misfires by doing exactly what it´s supposed to do and we see, that even very very old weapons can be trusted to do exactly what is expected of them.

The characters are very nice and although the violence is often very grim you really feel for them and shout hooray everytime they manage to just survive another encounter. And their deaths are really sad, but sometimes funny too.

See this, at a packed theatre if at all possible. It´s worth every drop of blood.

Whisky Priestess

09:21 / 10.08.06

Mist, you've just reviewed a British film positively. Are you sure?

Be interested to read your thoughts on A Scanner Darkly, when you've seen it. I am tempted by PKD, repelled by Keanu Reeves and at the moment I don't know which way to swing.

20:55 / 10.08.06

Yes, I´m sure WP. Are British films supposed to be that bad?

And I will see ASD on saturday along with two other movies, and four tomorrow.

Today I saw Somniac (Spain 2005, Isidro Ortiz).

It is the same genre, same kind of movie as dark city and especially existenz. They even use the classic Matrix scene with someone awakening and someone else leaning over them and saying "Welcome to the real world."

Somniac is a solid movie with believable actors.

Story:
A brilliant and beautiful Amélie lookalike scientist gets hired by her old university to work alongside her old flame (his mother, the old boss, committed suicide, they tell her) as the boss of a secret project. During sleep, they pass data from a computer to a monkey, important breakthroughs are on the horizon!

But she gets suspicious, has eerie dreams and visions and soon, more people "committ suicide". Her research leads her into danger and suspenseful twists.

Even though I´ve seen such movies a couple of times, this movie pulls innovative rabbits out of its sleeve until the end. These taboobreaking scientists know how to have a good time and fry some brains along the way...

If you ever get this on dvd, buy or rent it!

21:30 / 11.08.06

Finally home after seeing four movies, three in a row and having a headache now. The next days it´ll be only two or three movies a day and none on sunday.

Let´s start with the two I didn´t like that much (although both were not that bad).

At 13.00 I saw Minotaur (UK Gr Lx Fr Sp 2005, , Jonathan English).

Solid B movie with Rutger Hauer (for a couple of minutes at the beginning) and "candyman" Tony Todd as a fumes sniffing prince who wants his sister to "bear his seed" and hides the minotaur, his brother, in the basement, a labyrinth of rocky caves.

The main actor was a bit boring, he let himself be caught by the prince´s henchmen because a year before, his love was also caught and put into the labyrinth as revenge for his village having done a bad deed to the prince. And now he wants to rescue her. Will he succeed? Do we care?

Most of the movie is the actors running around in the cave getting killed (you should be able to guess how) by the minotaur. The monster doesn´t look like much, but that´s ok, since a b movie doesn´t have a big budget for effects.

If you like conan like fantasy without camp and tongue in cheek, you can rent this. It has the quality of a middle of the road fantasy tv series pilot episode.

21:40 / 11.08.06

The last movie I saw this evening was Renaissance (France 2006, Christian Volckman)

Now, as often with french movies, it was visually stunning. Computer generated comic style black and white futuristic Paris of 2034, where the pseudo-wannabe film noir story takes place.

This film noir felt forced. It had all the necessary ingredients:
Our hero searches for the missing sister (!), everyone is suspect, he has to hand in his badge, gets beaten up, lots of deaths shortly before and after he reaches plot babbling characters, tragic fates, etc.

Maybe I didn´t like it that much because after eight hours of sitting in comfy chairs in the dark I almost fell asleep and the flashing of the screen didn´t agree with that.

But I think, it´s more the flatness of the characters and the hammy plot. And as I overheard from people next to me the end made absolutely no sense at all not only to me.

The look reminded me of the trinity animatrix episode, which also was film noir like. Hm. Also it may have had a lot in common with sin city. I don´t know though, never having read the comic or seen the movie. So make up your own mind, when you rent it on DVD, as I would not advise you to pay for this to see it on the big screen. If you like such visuals, do it though.

Really jarring especially at the beginning btw: it takes place in Paris, yet everyone talks this crisp hermione british english.

As we all only found out with the end credits the main actor was daniel (david?) craig, whom I had never heard of before he always appeared on the internet tabloids with his newest 007 mishaps and ian holm.

21:51 / 11.08.06

Now to the two really good and exciting movies of today:

The Method (Argentinia Spain Italy 2005, Marcelo Piñeyro)

Wow! After Somnniac another great spanish movie. Makes me very excited for tomorrow when I will see yet another one from our iberian moviemakers.

Story: seven people have a job interview in one room, while outside in the streets of Madrid the demonstration against globalism escalates.

Those seven people are hard as nails and will go through a lot to make this interview. In the end of course only one of them will get this job and ze doesn´t look happy about it. Not at all. Although noone dies (that´s no spoiler, this movie is "realistic", nothing over the top, it has the feel of a "this could really happen" play), noone walks away unscarred inside.

The actors are very good. And they deliver the message without forcing it down our throats:
People today will let themselves be humiliated, put under inhuman pressure and be faced with decisions, that feed their cruel and base parts, only for a job. Just for prestige and money.

For a movie that is essentially seven people talking in a room, this really delivers. Well done!

21:59 / 11.08.06

Shadowless Sword (South Korea 2005, world premiere, Kim Young-jun)

Oh Yes! Anyone who ever liked at least one martial arts movie owes it to themselves and to good moviemaking to see this!

The two main actors, especially the actress, are really good. It´s just as exciting to see those two interact as seeing them fighting. The "evil" couple again is cast perfect, and although they are the bad ones, they are human and not onedimensional.

The fighting is superb. Mainly swords. Swords against any kind of weapons before medieval times (it´s about 926 a.d.). Sometimes the sword is thrown for a moment swooshes like a stainless steel boomerang and then it´s heads off, arms off and ... people exploding in a cloud of blood and smoke!

A bit distracting are some of the evil fighters. With the dreadlocks, the flashy clothes and the mascara, they looked as if they were on their way to a Jack Sparrow lookalike contest.

The story is not that important: she is his bodyguard, he is the last of the royal bloodline and has to get to the army. The best part of the plot is how everyone is connected to each other and that really gives flesh to the main phrase: A sword is not for fighting, but for protecting what you love.

11:13 / 12.08.06

I'm liking these reviews, Mist. Keep it up!

19:55 / 12.08.06

Thanks, Triplets!

Today was a purely american movie day. One canadian and two us.

To prevent to much scrolling let´s start with

A Scanner Darkly (USA 2006, Richard Linklater)

Nice one! Worth seeing at the movie theatre, form and content work very well.

As you might know, this movie is about Philip K. Dick´s drug experiences, that he and his friends went through. And at the end, we see a list of people who PKD lost to the drugs.

Which is important: This is not one of the cool drug movies like Spun or Fear & Loathing. Here, you see people, that have long ago stopped living and are now only using. Maybe that´s why the actors were mostly in their fourties, to underscore that they´re not party teenage pill poppers, but that this is not about being cool, it has become their way of life.

And what actors would be better suited than Keanu Reeves, who always acts as if stoned, Woody Harrelson (ditto), Wynona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.

Reeves and Ryder are their usual selves, Harrelson is a non entity and sometimes comedic relief. Downey really works here! Crazy as Depp´s Hunter Thompson but obviously dangerous and insane. I don´t know how actors, that have always been straight, could have pulled this of.

The movie stays really close to the book, and has its best scene executed wonderfully: the overdosed guy lying paralysed on his bed while an alien being reads him his sins for all eternity ("after one hundred years, they had reached the sixth grade. Where he had discovered masturbation").

And it also delivers PKD´s vision, of a man who is torn, almost split, as he has to spy on himself. Reeves slides into the situation, doesn´t know how to handle it, and then the drug takes care of his situation. It´s kind of funny watching Keanu Reeves constantly swallowing red pills.

So this is one time, where Philip K. Dick can rest and doesn´t have to spin in his grtave. No total recall here!

20:45 / 12.08.06

Right At Your Door (USA 2006, Chris Gorak)

See what happens, Larry? This is what happens, when you kick Jack Bauer out of CTU!

Three dirty bombs detonate in Downtown LA and in Beverly Hills. Except for a smoky skyline and a quick shoot of a severed arm in a cabrio, we see nothing of the "grounds zero" areas.

The movie takes place mostly in the home of a young couple. He can´t leave the house, because the fallout has contaminated the outside (everything is covered in white dust). And he can´t let his returned wife enter because the radio tells him she is highly toxic. She does not approve.

This feels like a stage play. It´s mostly about the recent consciousness of USAmericans of "terrorists, they want to attack us!", which I can´t really sympathise with after sixty years of the US terrorizing much smaller countries all over the world.

The actors aren´t all that. For example, the wife, being pretty sure, that she is going to die shortly, stays quite calm. I never got the impression that she really is afraid, she seemed just upset as if she´s been robbed of her handbag. The husband is not believable at all. For example, if he loves her so much, why won´t he let her die in her own house?

The only saving grace is the way the authorities are portrayed. As has been demonstrated in the last years, it´s the authorities that do the terrorists dirty work. That the citizens of the land of the free (and in Europe as well) would so willingly give up so many of their rights would have been unthinkable less than five years ago. The authorities here tell people to stay calm, and that help is on the way. But of course, it´s all about restoring order, not about helping the victims, which is made very clear very cruelly throughout the movie and especially at the end. For these scenes alone, this film is worth renting.

20:58 / 12.08.06

The Marsh (Canada 2006, Jordan Barker)

Now this movie is a well done suspense movie. And it has Forest Whitaker as a paranormal investigator!

An author of illustrated children´s books has nightmares and uses them as inspiration for her work. She discovers a house on the internet that looks like the house of her dreams so she rents it. And at night it gets spooky.

She makes friends with the local newspaper editor and with mentioned investigator and together they try to uncover the mysteries about the ghosts. The ghosts will not stand for that and start killing of the village people.

Of course, in the end, the mystery gets revealed, and it surprises me that after decades of such movies, screenwriters can still think of fresh ideas to titillate and surprise the viewer. This movie is all rotting meat and no fat.

The main actress is cast well as a woman that has been haunted by childhood horrors, she can only face in her work. And Whitaker somehow makes this movie comfy, even when the ghosts are being scary.

If you like suspenseful horror movies, you can watch this at the theatre, where the shock effects will work much better than on the tv.

19:05 / 14.08.06

The Ice Harvest (USA 2005, Harold Ramis)

Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack are ripping off their boss, the mob-kingpin of wichita falls, kansas. They have his 2 million dollars and now only have to lay low in a few of their boss´s strip bars on christmas eve for a couple of hours, and then they can split. And of course, everything goes wrong, and the body count goes up.

This movie is a lot like the bruce willis movie, where he plays a gangster and his dentist neighbour is supposed to rat him out for the reward. But! This movie, although having a lot of laughs, is a lot darker.

The first half being so sidesplitting funny and the last half being so grim, and that this works, I had only seen with Goodfellas before.

Especially Thornton is believable as a stone cold asshole, who will stop at nothing to see this through. He was so evil, (and his skin was so taut) that he was a sam neil double! And when john cusack looked very down, he resembled snape with a new haircut.

Because of the strip vlubs, there´s lots of naked women, so this movie will probably be rated R in the US. There´s also lots of violent deaths by the way.

So, if you like Miller´s crossing, Fargo or the mentioned bruce willis movie, see this at the theatre!

19:16 / 14.08.06

In 3 Tagen Bist Du Tot (Austria 2006, Andreas Prochaska)

This movie isn´t much. Maybe worth seeing on tv, if you like the teens get killed genre.

And really irritating: the teenagers really speak austrian! To the audience´s ears, this sounded very silly and sometimes got laughs where they were not intended.

The movie felt like one made by a film student, not like something that should find its way into the theatres.

Story: the teens get a sms "you´re dead in 3 days", then get slaughtered, false leads, they have a dark secret, and someone knows what they did one winter, and at the end the killer is dead, and some teen(s?) survive.

19:40 / 14.08.06

Brick (USA 2005, Rian Johnson)

Oh boy, this movie got such hype. No wonder, it could not follow through.

Except for an adult here and there, all roles are played by teenagers. It´s supposed to be film noir, but a teenage pimp strutting around with a duckhead cane is silly. And when he sits there while his mum is handing out cookies, at least I can´t buy it, that this guy is selling heroin by the pound.

Most unbelievable is the lead (who looks like the guy from another teenage movie: 10 things I hate about you). He can beat up the main jock of the school. Really? He can hold his own against the all-muscle right hand of the pimp? he gets beaten up five times a day and can still walk and talk and think clearly?

This movie tries too much and fails. It´s like the Peanuts got lost in a film noir. Charlie Brown as Marlowe, the red haired girl his missing girlfriend, linus his smart friend (that he often phones with), peppermint patty as smart girl and only snoopy missing. His favourite hang out is a wall, he only needed the orange black sweater and a football (oh yeah, lots of scenes are on a football field). Also the mostly missing adults (every street every sidewalk is empty) again amplify the peanuts atmosphere.

It also reminded me of the series "the three investigators". We got justus jonas and bob andrews, and only peter shaw is missing.

Someone wanted to make this a cool hip movie and failed. This is like a high school tv series with guns! And although drugs were so important to the plot, we don´t see anyone getting high or looking as if they ever do. Drugs as a mcguffin, that´s original.

Still, worth seeing as a solid failure on DVD.

17:51 / 15.08.06

Sam´s Lake (SKorea US Can 2006, European Premiere, Andrew Erin)

Haven´t seen it. I woke up ten minutes before it started. That´s 8 € well spent...

18:17 / 15.08.06

Don´t worry, it´ll all be over soon. Dawn is just a month away...

Frostbite (Sweden 2006, Anders Banke)

Simply one of the best vampire movies ever.

It starts in winter 1944, german and scandinavian soldiers, cut off from their unit, hide in a hut. The fireside is still hot, finally some sleep and warmth. At night, one soldier awakes startled and asks his fellows: if door and windows of the hut were snowed in, how did the inhabitants leave the hut? Well d´uh, they haven´t...

Jump to present Sweden. A scientist and her daughter move to a backwater town, where she can work alongside a brilliant genetic genius, who has made some interesting discoveries concerning blood...

A young and bored doctor nicks some of the genius´ pills, and takes one. Soon he can hear and see very well and can talk to dogs. He meets his girlfriend´s parents for the first time, and does not really agree with the father being a priest and having a lot of crucifixes on the wall. And then the mother has cooked some spiced food...

The pills get nicked from him by the party girl, that has made friends with the new in town scientist´s daughter, whom she invites to a party, where the pills end up in the punch...

Meanwhile (hehe), the new doctor and the scientist get to know each other better. Frankenstein? Fucking amateur...

This movie is the real deal! I hope, it gets international marketing, you just have to see this for yourself. It has some of the best scares and laughs ever in the vampire genre. Leave it to a people with months of night each year to come up with this jewel. And look out for the garden gnomes...

Whisky Priestess

21:34 / 15.08.06

I'm really appreciating this, Mist. There's so much shite out there it's nice to know what's worth digging out at the more obscure cinemas if/when they ever get a UK release.

22:20 / 15.08.06

Thank you, Whisky!

I´m certain, some of these movies will be at regular theatres and not only obscure cinemas.

In the above reviews there are some well known actors, that might help convince theatres to play those movies. And in recent years, many of the movies screened at the festival got really well known later on, for example Memento, Final Fantasy, Boondock Saints and Cube.

19:07 / 16.08.06

It´s finished, no more movies for the next weeks please!

The Science of Sleep (France 2006, Michel Gondry)

This movie is playing right now, I skipped it, because I developed "airplane legs" while watching the prior movie. I will see this when it is released regurlarly as it will surely be.

19:19 / 16.08.06

Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children (Japan 2005, Tetsuya Nomura & Takeshi Nozue)

This movie is one big mess. The story is nonexistant, The characters are just plastic puppets fighting with swords larger than themselves and somehow this has been seen so many times before.

Many scenes are ripped right from other movies. People shooting each other while falling from a big building? Riding on fast motorbikes on a highway, jumping around and fighting with swords? I´m sure Matrix stole this scenes from Japanese movies in the first place, but that only makes these scenes even more unoriginal.

Like Final Fantasy, Casshern and Akira, the "story" is larger than life, and our heroes must help the earth recuperate its life essence so that humanity can live in harmony with nature again. The characters have names like Cloudo, Jenova (!!) and Sephiroth. They are constantly shouting for their mother, which is supposed to reside in a metallic shoebox. If you have played the games, you´ll might understand what´s going on?

Some scenes were nice, because of their ridiculousness: a red dog with feathers telling our heroes: "Some children still suffer from geostigma.", and a hero asking one of the children, where in town he can buy a phone (since he lost his cell phone while fighting).

I sniffed around imdb.com a couple of minutes ago, and these snippets were not surprising after having seen this eye candy:

- According to Director Tetsuya Nomura in the DVD Commentary, the original movie was only supposed to be twenty minutes.

- The creators of the film had no prior knowledge of how to make a movie, so it was based on their knowledge of in-game movies.

It was like a 90ies image comic come to life. If you like these over the top fight scenes (that often did look spectacular on the screen), watch it on DVD.

19:42 / 16.08.06

Them (France 2006, David Moreau & Xavier Palud)

This movie´s first half an hour is quite slow, but then is nonstop playing cat and mouse between the nice french couple and their hunters.

He´s a writer and she´s a teacher and they live just outside of Bukarest in a big nice house. Why they have such a horrific and spooky attic, I don´t know, but only this and that the teacher was running around with a bright and shiny white shirt, that must have made her visible for a hundred meters were the only things bothering me.

The movie plays with all the prejudices and fears of eastern europe that have been floating around western european minds. And when the nature of the hunters is revealed, it really is disturbing and gave me a weird feeling of "could this be true?" It kind of aims at our bad conscience of being so well off compared to such poor countries as Moldavia, Romania and Bulgaria.

The couple being hunted is pretty much the story. The quality of the movie lies in the creepy pictures and especially the sounds (just because of these I don´t recommend watching this alone at night) and that it held my interest despite the couple being very bland and not fleshed out at all as characters.

The festival guide puts this on the same level as haute tension/High Tension (another recent french shocker), which I hadn´t seen (somebody had ruined the ending for me). So if you liked that movie, this might be for you too.

I think, it´s good enough for being seen on the big screen, and it is at least worth a DVD rental.

***

That was my last review, more in a year possibly. And thank you for reading all this, I hope you now have got enough interest to see one or two of these (if not, you will definitely miss out!), and feel free to post your opinions of the movies, once you´ve seen them too, here, so we can compare etc. I do wish we could chat longer, but I´m having an old friend over for some coke zero, so...

Ta ta!