Monsters of Film [Aardvarchaeology]

Turbo Kid — see this movie!

Encouraged by my first film festival last year, I’ve signed up for two this year. This past week it’s been the genre festival Monsters of Film, which leans towards horror but has a lot of other stuff too (but very few monster flicks, actually). I saw 5½ films in five days. Two get my special recommendation:

• Turbo Kid. Fun over-the-top 80s superhero-comics nostalgia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with BMX-riding road warriors.
• Remake, Remix, Rip-off. Documentary about popular low budget Turkish movie-making in the 50s to the 90s. Voluminous interviews intercut with clips of period films, no voiceover.

Three others were also well worth watching:

• Sensoria. A woman is in bad mental shape after a miscarriage and a divorce. She moves into a haunted apartment and quietly goes nuts.
• Cherry Tree. English kitchen-sink school story about teen pregnancy gets hijacked by luridly baroque Satanist cult, calling to mind the X-files episode where the Parent-Teacher Association is a witch coven.
• Spring. Bereaved young Californian goes to Italy and gets involved with a pretty girl who turns out to have serious problems of an X-files nature. Drawn-out biotechnobabble ensues, leaving nothing unexplained.

I walked out of the shorts anthology México Bárbaro halfway through when the raping and child necrophilia started. Bleagh. There are a lot of things in horror that will gross you out and depress you without scaring or intriguing you. Some of the other shorts in the anthology were OK though.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1GZCnA4

Turbo Kid — see this movie!

Encouraged by my first film festival last year, I’ve signed up for two this year. This past week it’s been the genre festival Monsters of Film, which leans towards horror but has a lot of other stuff too (but very few monster flicks, actually). I saw 5½ films in five days. Two get my special recommendation:

• Turbo Kid. Fun over-the-top 80s superhero-comics nostalgia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with BMX-riding road warriors.
• Remake, Remix, Rip-off. Documentary about popular low budget Turkish movie-making in the 50s to the 90s. Voluminous interviews intercut with clips of period films, no voiceover.

Three others were also well worth watching:

• Sensoria. A woman is in bad mental shape after a miscarriage and a divorce. She moves into a haunted apartment and quietly goes nuts.
• Cherry Tree. English kitchen-sink school story about teen pregnancy gets hijacked by luridly baroque Satanist cult, calling to mind the X-files episode where the Parent-Teacher Association is a witch coven.
• Spring. Bereaved young Californian goes to Italy and gets involved with a pretty girl who turns out to have serious problems of an X-files nature. Drawn-out biotechnobabble ensues, leaving nothing unexplained.

I walked out of the shorts anthology México Bárbaro halfway through when the raping and child necrophilia started. Bleagh. There are a lot of things in horror that will gross you out and depress you without scaring or intriguing you. Some of the other shorts in the anthology were OK though.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1GZCnA4