2015 FANTASIA FESTIVAL: Capone reviews TURBO KID and JU-ON: THE FINAL CURSE!!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Montreal here, once again covering a few days in the life of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. Today’s reviews come from my Day 3 of 5, and what still amazes and delights me is just how diverse the selections are this year; I love it. So let’s dive in…


TURBO KID



Right off the bat, you know there’s something special about the odd little, hyper-violent, sci-fi adventure film TURBO KID, when a title car informs us that the post-apocalyptic world in which it’s set is 1997. With as much of a single wink to the audience, the film plays like a long-lost, recently unearthed work from the 1980s—one of those movies that was too violent for kids, but that wouldn’t stop under 17ers from sneaking in in droves, likely after buying a ticket to something their parents would approve of…not that I would know anything about that.

The hero of this futuristic tale is The Kid (Munro Chambers), a loner who lives on the blasted-out wasteland, collecting junk that he can trade for water and issues of comic books of his favorite adventurer Turbo Rider, who, like himself, pedals an old-school BMX bike like he was born to it. After one particularly harrowed day, he discovers a strange young woman named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) talking to a long-dead corpse, who she said was once her traveling companion, and now she would like the Kid to be her new buddy. She slaps a tracking device on his wrist that can’t be removed, and these two become largely inseparable. Apple is a perpetually happy, smiling, pink-haired sprite whose alarmingly positive outlook on things and playful spirit seems sadly out of place in this environment, but she still manages to brighten the day and save the Kid from constant loneliness, for a time.

Adding substantially to the film’s ’80s vibe is the appearance of Michael Ironside as as the evil Zeus, whose costume appears to have be pieced together from a shopping trip through a scarp metal dealer. His right-hand man (equipped with a buzzsaw on said hand that sometimes shoots its saw out into people’s chests) is named Skeletron, and if any of this is sounding remarkably like a certain Fury Road-set actioner from a couple months ago, I’m fairly certain that’s deliberate, even though this film was made long before that one was released. Zeus kidnaps Apple, and while searching for her the Kid stumbles upon an abandoned craft that appears to include the dead body of the actual, in-costume Turbo Rider (some I’m guessing the comic books were more of an illustrated biography?) The Kid peals off the costume (which includes a highly destructive, turbocharged armband) and sets off to find his friend.

TURBO KID also has something of a Western element to it with the character of Frederic (Aaron Jeffrey), who has had people close to him killed by Zeus and his band of thugs. Naturally, Frederic and the Kid run into each other to do battle with Zeus in a series of explosively bloody and hilarious exchanges. For a film that mimics stories that are light on plot and character development and heavy on gore and stunts, TURBO KID finds ways to unleash a few surprises along the way about all of its main characters. Written and directed by the collective of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, the movie uses copious amounts of charm and humor to win us over, even if the humor is a bit too broad at times.

TURBO KID works best as an exercise in style, using nostalgia as its foundation, but never relying on it as its only means of becoming a total crowd pleaser. Even when I was young, I recognized these lower-budget sci-fi entires for what they were: films piggybacking off the more successful films of the time (the original STAR WARS trilogy, the Indiana Jones and Mad Max movies). Most of them were appallingly bad works, but sometimes they’d have one or two original ideas that made them stand out from the pack. TURBO KID feels like a collection of those cool moments, and as a result it’s a highly watchable, absolutely entertaining that gets a lot of mileage out of that mountain bike. My strongest recommendation is to see the film with a crowd; I can’t imagine this being as much fun to watch sitting home alone. You can actually feel the energy in the room surge when a guys guts get pulled out of him via the gears of a bike. You’ve been encouraged/warned.


JU-ON: THE FINAL CURSE



Last year when I attended Fantasia Festival, I saw JU-ON: THE BEGINNING OF THE END, bringing back director Masayuki Ochiai to his J-horror roots to show us exactly where the violent curse from the first films originated, and exactly how the young pale boy Toshio and his always-screaming mother with the hair that seems to have a life of its own ended up dead and haunting those who make the mistake of stepping foot in their home. Following on the heals of the events from BEGINNING, this latest and supposedly last entry, JU-ON: THE FINAL CURSE, has us track the movements of Mai, the sister of the schoolteacher who went looking for her missing student Toshio and vanished.

The JU-ON movies really didn’t need to be explored to this exhaustive amount of detail, especially when it has become increasingly more impossible to follow the pretzel logic and plot of exactly when the curse began and how many people have disappeared (usually to reappear as a ghost to lure in unsuspecting victims) since it began. But as far as I can tell, the people we don’t want to get hurt are Mai and her boyfriend Sota, while anyone we just assume is going to be scared to death.

The problem with these last two JU-ON films is that they don’t really introduce anything new into the mix. The little kid is still creepy, in his white diaper and pitch-black eyes, and mom with her eerie clucking noises and terrifyingly contorted mouth. These things were new 15 years ago; they are downright old school today. Director Ochiai’s pacing is identical from scene to seen, and now matter how outrageous one of these encounters is, if the intended victim doesn’t actually die, they act like they just imagined it. Maybe these latest entries are meant to be funnier, but I don’t think so. They just seem sad and dated and so rarely scary as they turn into exercises in beating a dead horse into a meaty pulp. I’ve stuck with the JU-ON films in the name of being a completist, but I hope they truly have finished with little Tosio and family, and are ready to move onto something far more interesting and maybe even terrifying.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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