Austin’s best-known film festival may be SXSW, but Fantastic Fest might be its best. Created by the Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, it offers the best in genre filmmaking: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, and so on. This year’s fest is a slightly muted affair since actors and writers are on strike, and you wouldn’t know it from the crowd, the sort that wear “Music by John Carpenter” baseball hats, or have tattoos of Michael Myers as a sloth. We are at Fantastic Fest, where we’re reviewing the gnarliest movies so they’re on your radar before anyone else.
Baby Assassins 2
Chisato and Mahiro joined a gym, then forgot about it. That is the modest setup for Baby Assassins 2, an action film that is also a buoyant comedy. Akari Takaishi and Saori Izawa play the assassins, respectively, and they’re more like twenty-something slackers who happen to be capable of florid, kinetic violence. They are desperate because they forgot about their gym membership, so they owe almost four million yen (about $27,000) in back dues. A bank robbery gone wrong means they get kicked out of the killer’s guild where they work – there are strict rules of behavior – and a pair of even goofier boy assassins hope to replace them.
There is an affable, spastic sense to the comedy of Baby Assassins 2. Takaishi and Izawa have natural chemistry, and their banter smooths over the languid middle section of the film, a kind of highlight reel for Gen Z angst. It weirdly lacks the action you might expect, but when the final showdown starts, director Yugo Sakamoto practically invents a new kind of action choreography. It is tightly controlled, of course, yet the actors move with a looseness that suggests their every move is improvised. It is a great mix of form and substance that weirdly creates suspense because none of the actors look like they’re on rails.
And if that’s not enough, when there is a brief fight scene where our heroes are wearing goofy panda and tiger mascot costumes, it takes a heart of stone not to be delighted by them.
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The Toxic Avenger
Macon Blair loves Troma, the production company known for its low budgets and copious gore. In his remake of The Toxic Avenger, the company’s flagship film, he adds a budget while honoring its lowbrow sophistication.
Peter Dinklage is the Avenger, a janitor who falls into waste and wants revenge on the chemical conglomerate that wronged him. There is little CGI here, and the putrid green makeup on Dinklage (as the Avenger) is so good you can barely see, let alone imagine, the actor underneath. The hero’s preferred weapon is a toxic mop, one that is capable of gruesome dismemberment (in an early scene, the mop helps him slug off someone’s jaw). This is not his only superpower: his piss is a powerful acid, which is useful after his capture. The captor and nemesis is the chemical company’s CEO (Kevin Bacon), who chews scenery with zeal, while his underling (Elijah Wood) is the unholy mix of Gollum and Tim Burton’s riff on Penguin. The SAG strike may forbid actors from promoting their films, but Wood – an Austin resident – was on hand at the world premiere, a lovefest for Troma and its founder Lloyd Kaufman.
There is not a lot to The Toxic Avenger beyond its loyalty to the Troma brand. This film is not trying to win hearts and minds, to its credit, and its defiance of good taste only adds to its credibility. There is an energy and zeal here that smooths over the rough spots you might normally find in an unabashed gorefest. Blair may have cast big-name actors, including Jacob Tremblay as the Avenger’s son and Taylour Paige as his sidekick, but crucially none of them – led by Blair’s example – behave that this material is beneath them.
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The Other Laurens
Something is lost in translation with The Other Laurens, since its French title is the more lyrical “L’autre Laurens.” You might think the film is about several women named Lauren, except director Claude Schmitz goes for something quite different. His film, a character-driven neo noir, is about flawed people in a situation that no one fully understands.
Laurens is a surname, not a Christian name, and refers to twin brothers Francois and Gabriel. Francois died under mysterious circumstances, and it is up to Gabriel (Olivier Rabourdin), who works as a private detective, to pick up the pieces. His mother is in hospice care, a concern that ultimately proves ancillary because his niece Jade (Louise Leroy) suspects foul play. This puts Gabriel in a tangled web of human trafficking and motorcycles, where somehow Francois pulls the strings beyond the grave.
In the press notes and news about The Other Laurens, the suggestion is this film is on par with The Long Goodbye or The Big Lebowski. The comparison is generous because Rabourdin, despite having a shaggy charm, is no Elliot Gould or Jeff Bridges. He is more of a sad sack, a loser who sleepwalks through a plot that Schmitz never deigns to explain fully. Instead, this is more of a character-driven thriller where the shootouts and twists are perfunctory, so the big monologues – that are frequently compelling – are the centerpiece.
At any major film festival, even Cannes where The Other Laurens had its premiere, you’re bound to see films that do not have legs beyond the festival circuit. This one certainly qualifies, and not just because (for American audiences, anyway) it has the weirdest, most gratuitous 9/11 subplot since that disastrous Robert Pattison movie. Don’t worry, I can’t remember the name of it, either.
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Property
The Brazilian thriller Property bridges the gap between John Carpenter and Michael Haneke. A home invasion thriller with a decidedly populist streak, the moral lines between “haves” and “have nots” constantly shifts, and not just because there is a random aspect to its violence and on-screen cruelty.
Disturbing smartphone footage opens the film. We see a man holding a gun to a woman’s temple, belting out demands before a sniper summarily executes him. That woman is Teresa (Malu Galli), who now has post-traumatic stress. Her husband Roberto (Tavinho Teixeira) tries to be patient, but mostly he reacts with “solutions,” like a trip to his country estate and armor-proofing the car. That visit to the estate is ill-timed, since the indentured servants there just found out the farm is closing so Roberto can open a luxury hotel. Left with nothing to lose, they attack Roberto while Teresa makes her way into the car, which is sort of like a panic room with wheels. The trouble is she cannot use the passphrase to start the damn thing.
The director Daniel Bandeira wastes no time in turning the screws. He shows Teresa’s terror, although he spends more time with the reluctant insurrectionists, who debate how to best handle the situation. Squabbles give way to violence, leading to tough situations where betrayals come easy and everyone must compromise themselves. What makes Property so compelling is the inexorable sense of its plot logic. After spending an entire film trying to get Teresa out of the car, probably to kill her, they realize the best course of action is to move the vehicle instead. There leads to some macabre imagery, like a decapitated horse’s body and a severed hand hanging off of a door handle.
It is the sort of film that may alienate the arthouse crowd – apparently, there were walkouts at its Berlin premiere – while it is not quite gnarly enough for the diehard thriller fans. By meeting it on its own level, in other words, its inevitable final moments are the best kind of grim punchline.
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The Origin
Scottish filmmaker Andrew Cumming makes full use of the craggy, stunning Highland landscapes in his horror film The Origin. There is not a huge budget available to him, and yet Cumming uses the tools available to him to create suspense out of next to nothing.
The film is set 45,000 years ago, a period where humans were hunting-gatherer cave-dwellers whose biggest technological advancements were fire and wooden spears. Adem (Chuku Modu) leads a small group, hoping to find food and safety, because Ave (Iola Evans) is pregnant with his child. All those efforts disappear in an instant, shortly after some creature abducts Adem’s son Heron (Luna Mwezi) from the campfire.
Adem leads a desperate search for the boy, only to discover the creature they’re searching for is more cunning and deadly than he could imagine. The Origin is the sort of horror film that uses its limited resources to its advantage: you will not care about the lack of gore or special effects when Adem and his companions quietly stalk through the forest at night, desperate for any advantage, and the sounds of the creature are downright ghastly. When the gore does come, it is effective: the creature rips apart someone, removing their jaw and leaving only viscera alongside a trail of teeth.
It would be a shame to spoil the exact nature of the creature in The Origin, except to say it is more intellectually provocative than Prey or The Northman, two recent films that mirror Cummings’ ambition and scope. Maybe the ending is a letdown for the most hardcore horror purists, but for those who enjoy atmosphere and effective sound design for its own sake, it will leave us thinking about the potential for a people – not so unlike us – who barely overcome their basest instincts.
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