Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Monki’s busy covering video games for us these days, but he’s always been a big contributor when there’s a festival in Austin, and Fantastic Fest seems to be a great opportunity for him to mainline some movies. Check this out:

Greetings humans, Monki here stepping back across the tracks to the movie side of Ain’t It Cool. I’ve been hitting up Fantastic Fest as much as I’ve been able to the last couple of days, leaving work and heading right for the Drafthouse South Lamar. I caught TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING on Thursday, (and met R Lee Ermey and drooled over Jordanna Brewster), saw TIDELAND and GAMERZ on Friday, caught SEVERANCE and APOCALYPTO on Saturday. Tonight though I only saw one film and this was the first film that really drove me to write up something for the site. The movie that drove me to be less lazy, THE LIVING AND THE DEAD.

Real quick before I jump into the review, I’ll give one sentence or less reviews of everything else.

TCM:TB – Loads of gore and lots of fun.
TIDELAND – This movie felt the same to me as would going to a family reunion and your racist grandmother started taking off her clothes and touching you, in other words: awkward.
GAMERZ – For the inner dork in all of us, perfect casting and a great movie.
SEVERANCE – Incredibly well put together film with a perfect balance of comedy, horror, and weapon wielding hookers.
APOCALYPTO – A movie that I can imagine will turn out great, I’ll have to see the completed film when it’s cut and clean.

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD is a painful movie. In the schedule it is listed as a horror, but really this movie is a psychological tragedy. The movie starts with the father of the house, Donald, has to leave his estate to work for money to help his bed-ridden wife and her cancer treatments. He leaves his wife and mentally challenged son behind, expecting the nurse to come by and assist with his wife the next morning. His leaving, however, triggers a downward spiral of events that will leave you cringing in pain and fear as the son turns.

The son James, played incredibly well by Leo Bill, is kept in check by his medication. Of course as soon as his father leaves, he quits his meds and starts attempting to take over the man-of-the-house role. He manages to keep the nurse away from the estate and proceeds to tender to his mother’s needs as he sees fit. His mother slowly becomes more and more fearful of her offspring as his spiral collides with her ability to survive.

I liked this movie a lot. It does have a few faults as it gets a bit long towards the end, but overall the tone it sets towards the beginning of the film is enough to linger throughout. This is not truly a “horror” movie by normal standards but to say the house the three family members is not haunted by the end of the movie would be an error. As James’ progression of insanity peaks the audience can only sit and watch as his inner demons manifest through his actions.

If you get a chance to see this, do so. This doesn’t fit into the traditional “horror” mold, but the feelings that this picture evokes would be in line with anything else under that classification.

-Monki