Wednesday, June 10, 2020

I Heart Fantasia

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My beloved Fantasia Film Festival out of Montreal has announced that 2020's edition, running from August 20th through September 2nd, will be, by necessity given you know the world and whatnot, going exclusively online for this year's edition. That comes with one big caveat for yours truly and I imagine a lot of you reading this, too -- it's only going to be available across Canada. So if you were thinking about heading Due North and becoming Mr. or Mrs. Justin Trudeau now's the time (actually 2016 was the time) for this fest will prove a sweet bonus to all that. (Swoon.) Anyway since MNPP does have some Canadian readers and I live for what Fantasia does every year I will share some of their first announcement of titles -- it's, per usual, kicking ass. Especially...

... since they're premiering the new flick from Neil Marshall! The director of The Descent has mostly been doing TV like Game of Thrones as of late, and since we are one hundred percent pretending last year's Hellboy movie, which I couldn't even finish, never happened, this one, called The Reckoning, marks his triumphant return to Cinema... or so we hope. Even better it's about The Plague! The Black Plague, to be specific. I posted about it back when it was announced last year -- it's about an accused witch (Charlotte Kirk) becoming a witch witch, and co-stars Joe Anderson, an actor I like very much and find severely under-used.

Other highlights -- the second film from Japanese director Shinichiro Ueda following up his wonderful worldwide zombie sensation One Cut of the Dead (reviewed here), called Special Actors; a horror movie about fracking (!!) called Unearth that stars Buffy's Marc Blucas and (drum-roll please) Adrienne Barbeau; a documentary about Tiny Tim (the terrifying ukulele-strumming singer, not the Dickens character); a haunted house flick from Germany called Sleep that stars Toni Erdmann's great Sandra Hüller; a junkie-nurse thriller called 12 Hour Shift that stars our beloved Angela Bettis... point being I recommend you check out the entire list here! This is only the first wave of titles and I already wanna see like a dozen things. I Heart Fantasia -- every year it feels beamed straight outta my brain. See all of our coverage from previous years at this link.


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