Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my first day of Fantastic Fest activities to report on! Fun day, let’s get started!
VAN DIEMEN’S LAND is was the original name the Europeans used for the island of Tasmania and serves as the setting for this cannibal tale.
The flick opens with a British soldier eating some meat… macro-lens style, gross close up of this dude champing away and slurping up the remains of his meal. It’s more disgusting than the actual human flesh eating we see later, but I guess anything is gross that close up. I’m sure Natalie Portman’s nipple would look gross if you zoomed in far enough.
The year is 1822 and the British are using this land, the farthest plot of land under British rule, as a penal colony for its more violent repeat offender prisoners. The prisoners are forced into hard labor and strict punishment for any rule breaking.
A group of eight men plan an escape that for some reason involves me seeing a cock and the whole movie is their journey through the brush as their situation becomes more and more desperate.
Apparently this true life story is notable because it’s the fastest turn to cannibalism in the history books… of any party that got lost and hungry, that is. They escaped with some food and still it was only 3 or 4 days into their escape that they turned cannibal. These guys didn’t fuck around. If their stomachs were rumbling for more than an hour I guess it’s time to bring out old axey and pick who’s going to be dinner.
If you imagine Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s CANNIBAL: THE MUSICAL, take away 98% of the comedy, half the enjoyment and give Trey and Matt a better camera you get something like VAN DIEMAN’S LAND.
It’s not a bad movie. In fact all the actors are really good, especially Oscar Redding who plays the quiet, but potentially most vicious guy of the group. The attention to character work is very impressive and detailed… but God this movie takes it’s sweet time to go anywhere.
The photography is really professional and, at times, bleakly beautiful and I’m sure the script is very accurate to what actually happened, but that doesn’t make it particularly entertaining.
Director Jonathan Auf Der Heide didn’t want to make an exploitation cannibal flick, but a poetic historically accurate tale. I can respect that, but I will say the film would have benefited from a little more exploitation. Not a lot, not enough to push it over the taste line, but enough to make it a little less of a chore to sit through.
One of the most interesting aspects are the trust/distrust issues that pop up as one by one the group is eaten. The early kills are shown to be slow and somewhat brutal deaths, but I never got to the point where I felt the deaths paid off the time invested in the characters. It’s not that I didn’t like the characters, just that I didn’t feel the impact of many of their deaths.
Unfortunately, I felt the movie was all build up with no pay-off. It’s very pretty, the performances are damn good, but the pacing is too deliberate and the tension is never kicked up to the next level. As a low budget first feature I give Auf Der Heide a lot of credit for pulling off a movie that is as well acted and professionally done as this is. It’s just not a movie I feel was wholly successful.
GENTLEMEN BRONCOS is the new flick from Jared Hess about a young sci-fi fantasy writer (Michael Angarano) from Smalltown, Everywhere USA who visits a writing seminar and his idol (Jemaine Clement) is the guest of honor. Clement is judging a writing competition and out of complete desperation steals one of Angarano’s stories.
When it comes to both NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and NACHO LIBRE I find that I really like them both, but don’t love them. I like the quirky world that spews out of Jared and his wife Jerusha’s heads, but I got to Napoleon after the buzz went far off the deep end. Nacho was a lot of fun, too, but it’s not one I’ve found myself itching to revisit.
I find my feelings on the Hess’ new film is very much the same. There are things in this movie that are better than anything they’ve ever done. Most of those things involve Sam Rockwell who is always dependable, but the dude turns it up to 11 here.
He plays the main character, Bronco, in the visual representation of Angarano’s story. We see Bronco’s story played out two different ways… one is Angarano’s imagination which has Bronco as a bearded southern hunk of masculinity. The other is Clement’s imagination, an effeminate and primped nancy. Rockwell plays both to the hilt.
What makes this fantasy world we see work is just how fucking out there and bad both versions of the story are. There are missile firing deer, gonad stealing clones and evil Cyclops army. Ridiculous, but Hess shoots it fittingly cheap which completely sells it.
If the whole movie had been Sam Rockwell as Bronco (or Brutus, which is Clement’s cunning name change) then we’d have a minor masterpiece on our hands, but Rockwell is only a small part of the film.
That’s not to say the rest of the movie is worthless. I quite liked Angarano in the lead. He plays Ben as the perfect straight man… an innocent kid with a crazy mom (American Pie’s MILF Jennifer Coolidge) and a big heart, but surrounded by some truly horrible people.
Clement is pretty great as Chevalier, giving the character an awkward arrogance that I couldn’t help but enjoy. If you’re familiar with his great work on FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS or EAGLE VS. SHARK then you know what you’re getting. He’s a slimier version of his version of himself on FOTC.
Adding to the douche pile is Halley Feiffer and Nacho Libre’s Hector Jimenez. Feiffer is a really adorable girl who, like everyone else in this story, wants to take advantage of the gullible Angarano. She produces little video productions with Jimenez whose teeth are just as fucked up as they were in Libre.
Jimenez’s over the top douchebag director character will be the line in this movie, I think. If you are entertained by how quirkily bizarre he is then you’ll like this movie. If he grates on you then it’s probably a lost cause.
I liked him, so I liked the movie.
I do have to say that BRONCOS is probably Hess’ most down to earth film, though. I believe Angarano could exist. The quirk is more realistic if that makes any sense… except in the fantasy elements, but that’s a given.
Overall, count me in the “liked it” category.
I caught Paranormal Activity’s midnight showing to wrap up my Day 1 of Fantastic Fest.
Up front, the film’s executive producer Steven Schneider worked with me on my film, The Home, for about 6 months. He’s not attached to the film anymore, but I still wrestled with even covering PARANORMAL ACTIVITY here.
If I believed my opinion was tainted for the positive or negative on this movie I wouldn’t weigh in publicly, but while I like Steven a lot and we parted ways on very good terms I never got to know him well.
So, that’s up front. You can decide if I’m being fair or biased, but you know where I’m coming from at the very least.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is a good example of the hype machine building up expectation to an unrealistic level. I don’t mean that in any sort of quality context mind you. I was surprised by how well done the movie was for being such a low budget home-made flick.
Where the hype comes in is the scare factor. The movie is tense and often very creepy, but the scares aren’t as hardcore as I was led to believe. I’m reminded of another film that came out to a ton of hype about how it was to make you shit yourself it was so goddamn freaky. It was called OPEN WATER and was a low budget flick about two divers who are accidentally left at sea in shark-infested waters.
Paranormal Activity is a much, much better movie than Open Water turned out to be, but the hype on the scares is about the same.
I was talking with CHUD’s Devin Faraci after the movie he said that the perfect way to watch this movie and have it truly work to scare the bejeezus out of you is to watch it alone at home in the dark.
I absolutely agree with that, but there is something to the communal aspect of watching a tense, startling horror movie that can’t be denied. While I never jumped out of my seat, I did find myself crossing my arms and slouching down every time they cut back to the nighttime stationary camera, subconsciously making myself smaller, I guess.
For those who don’t know much about the movie I’d suggest keeping it that way. Go in expecting a different kind of horror movie and that’s it. If you want to know a little more before making up your mind or if your Paranormal Activity cherry has been taken from you already feel free to keep reading.
Even though it is told from the perspective of a video camera, which is getting to become an extremely overused gimmick, director Oren Peli focuses on atmosphere, sound design and lighting to deliver the tension. There’s not so many jump scares as our leads, Katie and Micah, are tormented by a demon in the night.
In fact this being is represented in some very imaginative ways, which I won’t ruin here, and there are at least two scenes that are masterfully executed and had me staring wide-eyed.
It’s an extremely well-thought out movie with the biggest of surprises being that the two leads, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, are actually really good actors. I would have pegged this $11,000 (pre-reshoots and studio pick-up) movie to be headed by, at best, talented non-actors, but Katie and Micah are genuinely good actors who sell the torment.
Really I only have two gripes with the film… one, that it never got under my skin like I was expecting from the hype. I was tense, I was creeped out, but it didn’t dig in if you know what I mean. Which might be unfair because there have only ever been a handful of films that ever got that far and I love horror as a genre, but that’s where my expectations were for this one. It’s a smart awareness-driver of a campaign, but it might promise a movie that can’t deliver.
The second gripe I have is the one obvious use of CG in the film. You’ll know it when you see it. I know I get pegged as anti-CGI which isn’t true. I love well done CGI, but what they do with it in this movie is the one shot of cheese and unfortunately it’s the shot we leave the movie on. The sad thing is before the addition of this CG the shot is creepier.
Anyway, that’s where I stand on the movie. A good, solid, creepy, well-executed movie, just being overhyped.
Okay, tomorrow brings ZOMBIELAND, two secret screenings and a midnight flick called SMASH CUT!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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