(click through to trailer)
More recession Fantastic Festival! Since I was dealing with movies of, you know, reasonable length today, I was able to catch two of them. Good and bad news both follow.
The House of the Devil is a fantastic new flick by Mr. Ti West, who is apparently the director of Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. Way to go Ti. My respect for you has skyrocketed. Now, The House of the Devil is great for a lot of reasons, which I’ll get into when I actually review it, but one reason it’s great is because it’s essentially a 1980s found object. If Fantastic Festival had been feeling saucy, they could’ve marketed this as a restored copy of some obscure midnight flick from 1983 and I would probably have bought it. Excepting the casting of a couple actors I actually recognized, the film never breaks character. Best 1980s flick of the year.
Mandrill, which is also a kind of primate, wasn’t nearly as good. I think people seemed to dig it, and the geek world’s all abuzz about Marko Zaror, future action hero, but I could not dig it. It’s homagey in its own right, this time it’s 1970s action flicks, but fails to really transcend its reference point. The action here is kind of incredible, and I appreciate what they were trying to do, but the whole experience fell flat for me. I’ll be sure to enumerate my complaints when I write it up for actually tomorrow.
As per the last few days, keep an eye out and I will update this post with a link once reviews are up.
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