NYFF & Nightstream's a Wrap!

The two film festivals that've been happily devouring all of my time for the past few weeks have just come to their respective closes -- I've now seen all I'm gonna see from the 2020 editions of the New York Film Festival and the Nightstream Fest (which is what this year's Brooklyn Horror Fest morphed into thanks to the pandemic) and written all I am probably going to write from them as well. I've got this year's NewFest starting tomorrow, after all! So before that takes over, let's look back, with quick easy links to all of my reviews in case you missed them.

NYFF

Beginning -- reviewed here 

Fauna -- reviewed here

French Exit -- reviewed here

Hopper/Welles -- reviewed here

The Human Voice -- reviewed here

Lovers Rock -- reviewed here

Malmkrog -- reviewed here

Mangrove -- reviewed here

Red White and Blue -- reviewed here

Tragic Jungle -- reviewed here

Undine -- reviewed here

Films I watched at NYFF but didn't review -- MLK/FBI, The Monopoly of Violence, Her Socialist Smile, Stump the Guesser; Isabella; Night of the Kings; Days; American Utopia; Nomadland; The Salt of Tears; Zero For Conduct; Flowers of Shanghai; Swimming Out Til the Sea Turns Blue; I Carry You With Me; The Woman Who Ran; Notturno; Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris

Nightstream Fest

Bloody Hell -- reviewed here

Deadline -- reviewed here

Hunted -- reviewed here

Lapsis -- reviewed here

Lucky -- reviewed here

The Queen of Black Magic -- reviewed here

Rose Plays Julie -- reviewed here

Films I watched for Nightstream but didn't review: It Cuts Deep; Dinner in America; Darkness; Survival Skills; The Doorman; Shock Value: The Movie—How Dan O'Bannon and Some USC Outsiders Helped Invent Modern Horror

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If you want my quick thoughts on any of those titles that I didn't review ask here in the comments and I'll share some! I'm especially annoyed that I didn't get the chance to write about Nomadland and Days and I Carry You With Me (all stunning) out of NYFF, and Dinner in America from Nightstream which was great fun, and which deservedly won the Audience Award.

Uhh Kyle Gallner in DINNER IN AMERICA made me feel some stuff, you guys... pic.twitter.com/txaR45bV1A

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 11, 2020

The Nightstream Cometh

I'm feeling a little dull-brained today (more than usual, even) so I'm taking advantage of this coinciding with all this Fall Festival News to simply, happily, barf up the news of them instead of being my usual daringly creative self -- I might apologize but this is probably preferable reading material to at least sixty to seventy percent of you, and that's me being extra kind to my ego. And with that! I don't know if you'd heard but five of the annual regional genre festivals scattered across this beautiful country of ours -- those being the Boston Underground, the North Bend, the Overlook, Popcorn Frights, and our ol' pals at the Brooklyn Horror Fest -- have teamed up Voltron like for the 2020 season turned virtual, to present us with the Nightstream Festival, a massive online horror fest that will run October 8th thru the 11th.

Nightstream will feature almost forty films, including several world and North American premieres; it will feature a bunch of online conversations with filmmakers including one with Nia Dacosta on her forthcoming Candyman sequel slash re-do and one with Mary f'ing Harron on the 20th anniversary of her masterpiece American Psycho. There is a party hosted by Peaches Christ! There's something called "Dinner With The Masters Of Horror" that'll feature Mick Garris, Joe Dante, Mike Flanagan, and more. If you dig horror this is a four-day place to get diggin'.

Anyway today Nightstream announced their whole line-up and as I did earlier today with NYC's big queer-movie-palooza NewFest I will now highlight a couple of films from the enormous slate that immediately popped out at me. Well this being a horror movie fest they did more than just pop out -- they scooped out my eyeballs with hot spoons, they did! The Opening Night film, for instance...

... is called Run and stars Sarah Paulson and no, it is not a big-screen remake of that recent HBO series starring Domhnall Gleeson's beautiful ginger hair. It's the new movie from the director of Searching with John Cho, and is about a teenage girl (no Sarah paulson does not play the teenage girl; Paulson's range is good but not that good -- she's played by newcomer Kiera Allen) who's trapped in a wheelchair who starts to notice weird shit happening around her house. The movie is premiering on Hulu on November 20th, but why wait? Watch it at the start of October, I say!

Nightstream is also screening as their Closing Night picture the latest French nuttery from Rubber and Deerskin director Quentin Dupieux called Mandibles, which is unfortunately not an adaptation of Lionel Shriver's dystopian family drama but is (and I retract my "unfortunately" after reading this description) a comedy about two friends who discover a gigantic housefly in the trunk of their car and figure out how to monetize the thing. Sounds like a Quentin Dupieux movie to me.

Other highlights -- the new movie from Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura called The Doorman starring Ruby Rose; Jackie director Pablo Larraín's dance-epic Ema; Mickey Reese's truly wackadoo flick Climate of the Hunter, which I reviewed out of Nashville last year and which is a one-of-a-kind load of fun; there's a rural horror flick called Honeydew that stars Steven Spielberg's surprisingly hot son Sawyer...

(I guess those are the Kate Capshaw genes.) There's the new flick from Persepolis director and artist Vincent Paronnaud; there's a movie called Jumbo that stars Portrait of a Lady on Fire star Noémie Merlant and the description of which sounds like might be a movie entirely about a big dick? 

"Merlant gives a fearless performance as a shy amusement park worker whose life changes when a new star attraction shows up and immediately enthralls her with  “his” magnificent machinery in this fantastical and heartfelt debut from writer/director Zoe Wittock."

Right? Anyway I am only cracking the surface of everything 

that they've got planned, check it all out on their site! 

Nightstream Fest: Rose Plays Julie

There are dark conversations I have been avoiding having with my own mother for decades regarding my own childhood, webs of abuse and family secrets that occasionally try to peek their feral fangs out of shadowy places only to be reshuffled to another time, another place -- the older you get the less abundant those hiding places become, and you wonder if those conversations will ever be had; should ever be had. Maybe it's better just to die with all that bullshit unsaid.

That same kind of darkness washes like black sea foam over Joe Lawlor & Christine Molloy's film Rose Plays Julie, which screened as part of the Nightstream Festival this weekend, clinging to it like a ragged coat -- the sort of damp heavy fabric that could pull you back under if you let it. We meet Rose (Ann Skelly) standing on a sea shore, looking out towards a distant lighthouse -- later we see the same image but as a photo someone took. The film repeats this pattern -- experience seconded and memorialized; actions become objects in our hands that we can burn up if we so desire. If only living were so simple.

Rose, we discover, is in search of her birth parents, and suddenly there's Mom (a terrific Orla Brady), an actress in a bad movie that Rose is watching. This sets Rose off on a journey of discovery and, eventually, revenge -- it turns out where she came from was a box of secrets probably better left undisturbed. But for whom? Who's better off leaving the past the past, its horrors unmolested? Maybe the people who get off for past crimes by our self-protective avoidance don't have that coming -- maybe stirring that shit up is righteousness after all.

That Rose Plays Leslie wrestles with these ideas of forgiveness and its flip-side is a small miracle -- that it does so so thoughtfully, quietly, and with honest earnest purity of purpose, is a bigger miracle indeed. Brady and Skelly are each hypnotic in their ways as wounded creatures nudging their half-buried personhoods out of their premature graves, suddenly fervently aware of strength in numbers as they find themselves faced with somebody to pass these batons of abuse back and forth with from across their now intertwining paths. There's hope, lightness, in unburden. 

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Check out all of my reviews from the Nightstream Festival at this link here -- all of the films are still available to rent through Midnight tonight and I recommend you check out all you can! 

Icy Fingers Up & Down My Spine

Centipedes. Why did it have to be centipedes? Okay so that's not exactly what Indiana Jones says -- although he should have said that in Temple of Doom when it is indeed centipedes -- but it's what I sure as fuck said as so many centipedes skittered this way and that with their thousands of utterly repulsive legs in the new Indonesian horror flick The Queen of Black Magic, which is streaming as part of the Nightstream festival and which will be hitting Shudder soon. I just can't with the centipedes, man! 

Out of the many fears inflicted upon the horror movie watching community there are only a couple that really truly get to me, and The Queen of Black Magic has the two main worst ones -- bugs and self-mutilation -- crammed up her diabolical lady sleeves. Quite literally, as the flick revels in making its characters self-mutilate because they have centipedes up their fucking sleeves. See how this movie has me using foul language in a movie review? That's how emphatic I am about how truly grossed out this movie made me. And I loved every goddamn minute.

I suppose I should set it all up. Director Kimo Stamboel, with a story by director-writer Joko Anwar (who himself just gave us the terrific gem Impetigore earlier this year), invites us to meet four men and their families who are all converging on the same orphanage in the middle of nowhere where they all grew up. Well three of the men are converging and one's already there at the orphanage, where he still lives and works as an adults -- Maman and his wife Siti have invited his old friends Hanif, Jefri, and Anton to come see their old care-giver Mr. Bandi, who's on the verge of death.

Slowly, shit unravels. Well slowly at first, and then real fucking fast all at once. There are, as there always are in these movies, most terrible secrets buried beneath the floorboards (or in this case the cement), and the vengeance of the done-wrong is coming for all parties involved. And Stamboel's film feels in its way like a substantial summation, an all-but-the-kitchen-sink re-telling, of creaky old tales that came before, in the same way that Poltergeist reimagined the Haunted House story for the Suburban Generation -- The Queen of Black Magic is riding on a wave of real good Indonesian Horror and it feels like a statement piece. A "here's everything we got coming at you, packaged up big and loud and scary."

And it is all of those things! It's a hoot and a holler and it made all of my nerve-endings twitch. I was scratching at the balls of my feet and literally covering my eyes. Closing the windows. Pulling the blankets up over my damned fool head. It's not really anything you haven't seen before, but it's everything you have seen before strapped ass-first onto a top-notch rollercoaster from hell and you're coming along for the horror. The creepy-crawlies have got your number and are knocking on the door with this one, my friends.

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The Queen of Black Magic, like most of the films I've reviewed over the past few days, is still streaming online as part the Nightstream Festival -- you can check the list here! Everything is still available through the 14th, so quick run and hurry, see what you can before they vanish. This one will be on Shudder at some point in the near future -- I don't have an exact date but I'll make sure to share when it's available cuz man is this movie some fun.

Nightstream: Name Above Title

Wordless, only an hour long, and with far, far, far more style than substance, I will still heartily recommend Name Above Title to you, and actually for all of those exact reasons. Starring the too-handsome-to-be-real former male model turned actor Matthieu Charneau (see more here) as a horned-up bestached sociopathic serial-killer wielding my single favorite killing weapon of the past oh let's say dozen years, Carlos Conceição's film plays more like a series of stunningly realized still lifes captured in Academy ratio -- piled high polaroid frames of our Summery Discontent; Instagram selfies spelling out our Doom. It's all very Knife+Heart and y'all know I love Knife+Heart. In that vein it's got flashes of giallo but its last act spins into something more early Almodovarian, maybe a dash of Bidgood for good measure -- whatever its recipe this situates Conceição as a great big gay one to watch.

Name Above Title streamed as part of the Nightstream Festival.

Nightstream Fest: Lucky in 175 Words or Less

Putting the "gory" in "allegory" Lucky stars Brea Grant as a woman whose catalogue-ready home -- this is some real Nancy Meyers shit here, with the throw pillows and accents -- gets invaded every single night by a masked man come to kill her. Also written by Grant (and directed by Natasha Kermani) I'm hesitant to call Lucky an exaggerated fable about the ways that women are taught to live in constant fear because I imagine to some women Lucky reads like a straight documentary -- my experience watching it as a 6'3" man who's never had to fear a parking garage is going to be very different from any given woman's. But I think it's safe to safe the gaslighting and terrorizing is turned up to a horror-movie-appropriate 11 in order to get the point through the thick skulls of boys like me who don't live this day in and out, and as such it's an effective experience (although a little on the nose at points). I certainly understood why parking garages are scary by its end!

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Lucky is streaming as part of the ongoing 

Nightstream Fest, go check it out here!

Shudder will be dropping this in 2021.

Nightstream: Hunted in 200 Words or Less

When Shudder properly releases Hunted next year you're going to see a lot of clever critics saying, "... And the hunter becomes the Hunted!!!!!!" and yes, this is me just wanting to get there first. Written and directed by Vincent Paronnaud, best known for the Persepolis movie, Hunted couldn't feel further from that film, although he does sneak in an early animated sequence -- it stars Lucie Debay as Eve (and yes, as with most female movie characters named Eve the name Means Something), a young working woman who through a series of increasingly unfortunate circumstances finds herself stuffed in a homicidal madman's trunk. 

Sounds like something you've seen before, right? Well Paronnaud has got some wicked tricks up his sleeve, and Hunted is hella scary, gorgeously filmed, and even if it you can feel it now and then straining for it still manages to tap into something primal, dark, beastly. Arieh Worthalter makes for a hell of a villain -- repulsive but magnetic, pathetic but eminently watchable, and Debay matches him beat for fierce beat. You know a movie's working when my anxiousness can be heard down the block and I might've woken the neighbors with this one.

Hunted is streaming this weekend for the Nightstream Festival
over here, and will be released by Shudder next year.

Nightstream Fest: Bloody Hell

As part of this here ongoing Nightstream Festival  I watched an online panel (which featured our pal Final Girl Stacie Ponder!) that was on the subject of "Camp Horror" -- meaning Camp by way of Susan Sontag, not Jason Voorhees. And the panel got me thinking about a few things... not all of them being Stacie's Movie Shelves... one of them being: what would Straight Dude Camp be? The origin of Camp is mainly queer, specifically with regards to Gay Men; on the panel Stacie talked about her idea of Dyke Camp, and how that's a little different. But the riddle of Straight Dude Camp only riddled me for about two-point-five seconds, because I have seen Road House, and I have seen Road House many, many times. It's Big Muscles and Bigger Violence, a la any Schwarzenegger joint.

Bloody Hell isn't exactly that -- we're probably too self-aware in 2020 to go back to that place again -- but it made me think of that at times, and for that I thank it. I love me some Big Muscles and Bigger Violence, and Bloody Hell's got those thing sin spades. It stars Ben O'Toole and Ben O'Toole's carved-from-marble torso, both of whom are trussed up like Robert Conrad in Wild Wild West for half the film, and if I haven't sold you by now then I don't know my audience. 

O'Toole plays Rex (see -- Rex is totally a Schwarzenegger character name) as a former Marine who in our opening scene thwarts a bank robbery in spectacularly violent fashion. Unfortunately for all hunked-up action-stars it's not the 80s anymore and violence is now freighted down with repercussions, and so Rex is sent to prison for his spectacular vigilantism. His case sparks a big public debate though, turning him into a media sensation, and so when he gets out of jail several years later the first thing he sees is his own face on the tabloid rag in a checkout line at the grocery store.

In a touch that feels lovingly borrowed from the Evil Dead movies -- which gave us Bruce Campbell as the hyper-aware action-figure of Ash, which is probably even closer to what Bloody Hell is gunning for than the earlier references -- Rex has a slight hint of a split personality, in that he sees himself outside himself and has conversations with this second self. Basically it's an excuse to give Rex somebody to talk to since he spends a good chunk of the film chained up in the basement of a Finnish serial killing family, but we're getting ahead of ourselves there. O'Toole is a big actor, and this gives him twice the maneuverability.

Okay, now's the time for the Finnish serial killing family. I won't spoil the fun of the A to B to Finnish serial killing family, but suffice to say that Rex ends up in Finland and in their basement trussed up like Thanksgiving, and must summon all the power of his crazy abdominals to get himself out of this situation. It involves kicking children in the face, romancing the local blonde pretty girl, an extremely juicy leg stump, and a scene I refuse to believe wasn't inspired by the jaw-dropping finale of my beloved 1981 slasher Just Before Dawn. Bloody Hell is a lot -- a lot of fun, a lot of gore, a lot of large rampaging pustules, a lot of that v-line that guys who're really in shape have... it's a lot!

Nightstream Fest: "Lapsis"

I think I speak for most of us when I say we are all a lil' bit Sisyphus in 2020, shackled as we are to ridiculous tasks which we don't fully comprehend and yet which nevertheless have no end. We've gotten miles off the plain old dirt, the concept of one plus one -- now pi runs on for literal ever and if you can understand what your computer's actually doing half the time I say good on ya; I'm blind as a bat. Flummoxed without a second to spare and not a whit to show for it -- I need nine days a week and even then no promises.

Writer-director Noah Hutton's new science-fiction myth film Lapsis, screening during the Nightstream Festival this weekend, introduces an ace allegory to set this feeling against -- in a world just a smidge in the future we meet Ray (Dean Imperial), a Gandolfini-adjacent middle-aged spread of a man who needs to scam up some money quick to help out his sick little brother. Even though he's a practicing Luddite he hears some get-rich-quick promises attached to the new techno-gig called "cabling," which has real live people literally dragging next-gen communication cables through the woods, from one gigantic magnetic cube to another miles away. Set up like an interactive game, a sort of Pokemon Godot, the longer course you chart with your wire through nowhere the more cash you make. There are even officious little robots you're expected to chase and compete with. It's an adventure!

Ray doesn't understand any of this and neither do we -- it is patently absurd. And yet, and yet, it seems just about perfect. It's a brilliant visualization of what existence feels like now -- we amass ludicrous tasks running towards preposterous goals, robot voices cheering us on, no idea how any of this is monetized or what it means, stuck in an infinite loop with nothing of substance to show for it in the end. Ray drags his spool of electric cables through the woods, a trail behind him as far as the eye can see, criss-crossing past others doing the same -- this web of wires covers everything, a hum in the air, and for what? Nobody knows.

That's the first half of Lapsis and the first half of Lapsis is very good, and very smart. The character of Ray turns out to be kinder and more complicated than he seems at first glance, and for that I was glad -- he easily could've slid into caricature but Imperial keeps him grounded and funny, even as the world exposing its insanity. Sadly the film's second half starts throwing too much at itself to see what will stick -- the workers are revolutionizing, there are hidden codes in kiddie videos and surprise daughter reveals; it's too much and the beautiful simplicity of its early ideas get lost among the last act chaos. I'd almost tuned out entirely by the time self-help tea ingredients were being hijacked. But before the machinery clunks and coughs and sputters out Lapsis hums, it hums real well.

The Nighstream Returns!

While waiting in line at my NYFF screening this morning I was complaining to my pal Joe (hi Joe!) about how I've been too busy with film festivals to get myself into the Scary Movie Mode that the month of October demands -- I'm really looking forward to being able to binge some spooktaculars soon! Maybe even find some horror movies I've never seen before? Those feel increasingly rare, especially of true quality, but there are always new movies to watch, and there are two horror film festivals in the next couple of weeks that just might be able to deliver what I'm looking for. I already told you about this year's Brooklyn Horror Fest, which runs from October 14th through 21st -- check out that post here -- but before that one, starting this Thursday the 10th and running until Sunday the 13th, is the second edition of the virtual-based Nightstream Festival! 

Check out this year's line-up here. Nightstream popped up last year when we couldn't have in-person fests, as a conglomeration of several local horror fests from around the country (including the Brooklyn one), and it kicked ass -- you can see my previous coverage here. And this year's line-up looks just as fun -- I've seen and reviewed several of the movies that they's screening previously from earlier-in-the-year fests, so here are a couple of links:

Kier-La Janisse's epic doc Woodlands Dark and 

Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, reviewed here

Alien on Stage, reviewed here

King Car, reviewed here

Poser, reviewed here

After Blue, reviewed here

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, reviewed here

Those are all terrific movies! Other movies they're screening which I have seen but not reviewed and yet still recommend -- Mickey Reece's Agnes, Andrew Gaynard's All My Friends Hate Me, Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going To The World's Fair, Samantha Aldana's Shapeless, John Adams' Hellbender, and especially especially Phil Tippet's thirty-years-in-the-making stop-motion epic Mad God, which is one of the rare beasts I felt safe pulling the word "masterpiece" out for the same year as its release. I never do that, I have a rule against it, and yet I knew on first sight that Mad God will be a part of my life forever. 

So much beauty! Anyway hopefully I'll be there this weekend digging into these titles alongside y'all -- there are a dozen that look swell that I still haven't seen myself! So stay tuned and maybe I'll review some of them for you. And go check out the line-up and buy your pass, scare yourselves silly, and do come crying to me.

Nightstream: Stanleyville in 150 Words or Less

I always appreciate a piece of art that looks out unto the world and sees one big snake-pit of absurdity staring back, and Maxwell McCabe-Lokos' Stanleyville (which just screened as part of the Nightstream Fest) sees the snake-pit and raises it by order of a circus. Like an episode of Survivor for sociopathic miscreants who've inhaled enough helium to induce a psychotic break, the film drops five strangers into a locked room and tells them if they do so-and-so one of them will win a car -- it's just the "so-and-so" where things get sticky, and before you know it -- sticky everything! Possibly dreamt up by Agatha Christie on a peyote trip, Stanleyville revels in preposterousness, and as such speaks my language. I dug, I dug.

(Oscilloscope will be releasing this movie, stay tuned for more info.)

Cute Boys in Suits and Stuff

I was half-assedly (yes it's a word if I say so) looking for a photo to accompany this post and came upon this shot of actors Christopher Abbott and Rafi Gavron on the red carpet for what I presume was Catch-22 last year or whenever the hell that thing aired -- time? What is time? Anyway Rafi, as I have mentioned recently, is one of the actors in Hulu's new adaptation of Clive Barker's Books of Blood, which is out today -- not to mention Abbott is the star of Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, which came out last week (reviewed here) -- so this picture works well enough for this post for me! (I love that they've got a "Secret" between them.)

Anyway the "point" of this post -- besides to remind you about Books of Blood -- is to tell y'all that today's another mid-week day-off for ol' Jason here as I try to play catch-up on my final batch of NYFF reviews as well as my first batch of reviews from the Nightstream Festival, which kicks off tomorrow. I wrote about that one right here if you missed it -- lots of horror goodies to talk about from there! Aaaanyway the longer this post goes on for the less of that work I am getting done, so bye.

Don't You Go Anywhere!

 

Last Friday I told y'all I would be popping on here over that weekend to share reviews and such and then, whoopsie, I didn't! I collapsed in a hole and didn't crawl out of said hole for three whole days. That was nice, but it's not possible this weekend -- the New York Film Festival is ending and the Nightstream Festival has just begun and I've already got several things scheduled for you over the next two usually-dormant days, so please do stay tuned! 

I am visualizing this post with a photo of Riz Ahmed because one, Riz Ahmed, but two -- I'm actually seeing Riz's new movie Sound of Metal (see the trailer here) this weekend via the Hamptons International Film Festival, and I'm psyched over that. A little frazzled about it because I bought the tickets not realizing it was in the middle of All This Other Stuff, but I'll manage to survive. Or not! Check back and find out whether I survive! But seriously. Stay tuned! Good stuff ahead, choo choo...

The Price is Always Right

It's October 1st tomorrow, everybody! It's the most glorious month of the year! Granted the Halloween celebrations will be different in 2020 -- we sure are using up a lot of Evil Energy in real life -- but I still plan on getting festive. For one thing I'll be covering the online genre film festival called the Nightstream Festival which I told you about the other day -- that starts on October 8th. For another our great pal Stacie Ponder of Final Girl fame begins her annual "Shocktober!" shenanigans tomorrow, stretching through the entire month, and you might wanna keep your eyes peeled for somebody familiar to you... ahem. 

And for a third thing... well this has nothing to do with Halloween, but it does have to do with tomorrow, because I'm taking tomorrow off to do another "Catch up with my NYFF viewing and reviewing duties" like I did a day last week. I would say you might see me pop up anyway at some point but I make too many empty promises -- if I do, consider it a surprise. Surprise! It's the October Mood of Choice! 

Speaking of I thought I had mentioned this when it was announced but a search tells me no, I didn't -- did y'all see that the astonishingly excellent Vincent Price Collection just got re-released onto blu-ray this last week? It had come out several years back and then went out of print, so they've upgraded it with most excellent copies of the six films included, and they are probably the best Vincent Price movies there are -- The Pit and the Pendulum! The Abominable Dr. Phibes! The Haunted Palace! The Fall of the House of Usher! TWO versions of Masque of the Red Death, including the just recently unleashed Extended Cut! And Witchfinder General to cap it all off! I plan on nestling up with these discs for half the month, I do. So should you! I mean with your own copy, in your own home -- I am not getting COVID for this.

Yes, Queen

Heads-up on a creepy-crawly horror flick coming your way (as long as you've got Shudder, and you really should have Shudder) -- on January 28th y'all can see The Queen of Black Magic, the latest wowza coming out of Indonesia, a country that's really been bringing it to the genre over the past few years. And the biggest name in Indonesian horror is attached to this one to boot -- Joko Anwar, whose flick Impetigore (written on previously here) is Indonesia's submission for the Oscars this year, wrote its script. 

The flick was directed by Kimo Stamboel, who previously was one-half of The Mo Brothers, a horror directing duo. I reviewed The Queen of Black Magic last fall when it screened as part of the Nightstream Festival -- you can read it here -- although maybe just watch the movie, then read my review. Same goes for the trailer, seen below -- as with all horror movies it's better to just go in blind, says me! You decide!

Kill Me With Content

Per usual October, my favorite month, has only been here for one day and it's already running away from me -- I've still got a million NYFF reviews to write and next week there's the Nightstream Festival and the week after there's NewFest -- but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Hulu's killer All Hallows content, which starts creeping into our homes this week. Today the anthology series Monsterland debuts, which I've only had time to watch the first episode of but which was pretty terrific -- that one stars Jonathan Tucker at his serial-killer-iest (seen above), a true kink if ever there was. You can watch the trailer below. And starting next week on Hulu is the adaptation of Clive Barker's Books of Blood series of short stories -- I posted about that previously. 

And then there's the horror flick Bad Hair, which we just got a trailer for (see that below) and which I totally recommend -- I don't know if I'll have time to properly review it given my schedule but it's a ton of fun, almost a horror comedy more than anything else but I do think it's actually genuinely creepy at times, and I don't want to diminish that. Bad Hair slithers onto Hulu on October 23rd!

New Directors Take December

One of the highlights on New York's annual cinematic schedule is the New Directors / New Films series that Film at Lincoln  Center and the Museum of Modern Art co-present every March, but like so many things in this best-put-behind-us year called 2020 this year's edition got the boot. But turns out they only kicked it down the road a spell, for today they have announced this year's line-up, which will screen virtually from December 9th through 20th. Hooray! The entire line-up, which includes 24 feature films and 10 shorts and which span the entire globe, can be seen at this link here -- tickets go on sale on November 23rd. 

What do I want to see, you ask? Well how kind of you to think of me. Per usual it's a lot to take in -- a couple of the films, like Boy's State and Babyteeth, have already been released online and so we're familiar with those, but this fest more than many, centering as it does on new voices, always challenges one to take risks, be daring with your choices. Because who the hell knows? That said here are five titles that immediately caught my eye. (Click on the film's titles to get more succinct descriptions of what the movies are actually about then what my ramblings offer, per usual.) 

Twelve Thousand (dir. Nadège Trebal) -- I know this film's leading man Arieh Worthalter from the horror film Hunted, which I reviewed just a few weeks ago when it screened at the Nightstream Fest, and that's enough to sell me. In case the fact that I have posted his photo twice in this post doesn't clue you in I like him, and this movie sounds like a real showcase -- they call it "a star-is-born performance." I suspect we'll see lots of Arieh soon. He's got a great, camera-loves-it face. (I might add this movie sounds hella horny.)

Kala azar (dir. Janis Rafa) -- A lot of the line-up this year sounds like it's set in weird science-fiction alternate-reality semi-dystopias and, uhh, that seems about right. This one from Greek filmmaker Rafa sounds especially strange, following a couple who ceremoniously cremate people's pets in a world where pets and people share equal standing. Anyway this one also sounds horny and I'm also drawn to its leading man (Dimitris Lalos) so here we are.

The Killing of Two Lovers (dir. Robert Machoian) -- I will admit this one grabbed my attention because it's an American film! And I hope you know it's not that I'm being blinded by my patriotism or anything -- it's just ND/NF really doesn't choose American films all that often, so when they do they stand out for a change! (This and the doc Boy's State are the only US films this year.) Killing is set in Utah and stars Clayne Crawford (the dude who got fired off of the Lethal Weapon TV series for being an abusive asshole, so...) as a "husband and father trying to keep it together while seething with rage during a trial separation from his wife."

Atlantis (dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych) -- Another dystopian hellscape, this time from the war-torn Ukranian region called Donbass. In the small span of their description the film is described, and I quote, as "a debut of remarkable formal precision," "urgent yet highly controlled," and "a series of distanced, compositionally rigorous frames." And if you're at all familiar with Things I Love then you know this all sounds right up my alley.

Red Moon Tide (dir. Lois Patiño) -- I was sold on that image above alone! Who doesn't want to see the movie that contains that image? My god. Of course, similarly to what I just said about Atlantis above, this film is described as "a series of exquisitely composed tableaux that turn images of everyday lives into the mythical" and so, again, I say hello me. 

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There are several others that I hope to see as well so please do check out their entire line-up at the link. Like, they have Aneil Karia's film Surge starring Ben Whishaw listed, but I didn't include it here because I'm not entirely sure it's actually not a mistake? On the "yes" side it was part of their line-up when ND/NF was originally announced back in March, but on the "no" side it's not included in the formal press release they sent out today. Could it be a slip-up? I don't know. But obviously "anything starring Ben Whishaw" is always worth seeing so if that is actually screening, it's on the list too.

 

Good Morning, World

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Alright guys let’s not beat around the bush.... it’s my damn birthdayyyyyyyyyy! Goodbye 32 hello 33. I’m coming for ya. #happy #birthday #happybirthday #celebrate #celebration #party #old #fun #what #the #hell

A post shared by Kyle Gallner (@kylegface) on Oct 22, 2019 at 8:41am PDT

The actor Kyle Gallner posted the above video on his birthday one year ago today, but I'm sharing it today, on his birthday 2020-style, because it only recently came to my attention -- thanks to the crazy fun film Dinner in America which I watched for the Nightstream Festival a week or two ago...

... that I love him. Oh I'd loved him on Veronica Mars back in the day, but that was... in a different way than I am speaking of now. Where has my mind been all this time? I have been missing the eff out. I really recommend taking a deep dive into his Instagram, which is all tank tops and babies and puppies and him being crazy adorable. Just spend the whole day there. You got something better to do? Yeah I thought so. Happy birthday, Kyle!

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Little preview of a Photoshoot I did.

A post shared by Kyle Gallner (@kylegface) on Feb 23, 2016 at 9:52am PST