Filmmakers help three children to realize their imaginary fairy tale characters; one is a giant clown with a child’s head.
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2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART TWO
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Montréal 2025
No, I am not with the German wedding party, but it was kind of you to think so.
7/23: Every Heavy Thing
Mickey Reece drops a Brian De Palma-worthy sex-and-tech thriller on his hapless protagonist, Joe, an ad-man for a local newspaper. Stylish neon saturation, flickering screens, dangerous conversations, and an ever-rising body count steadily drip drip drip, pooling at Joe’s feet like so much stylish 1980s chic. Except Joe wants nothing at all to do with this nonsense surrounding him, and attempts valiantly to shrug off the machinations in order to lead his own, normal, hum-drum movie life. Reece once more plays around with genre (previous dissimilar genre outings include biopic and soap opera), and the fun he’s having with this project plays out in the final product. Joe’s determined passivity is relatable, and by the end you’ll agree with his friends: this reluctant hero is, for sure, “almost cool.”
The House With Laughing Windows
City dweller Stefano arrives in a remote Italian village to restore a painting in the local church. Hired by a fellow who is as diminutive as he is well-dressed, art guy checks in to the local hotel, only to be kicked out later and obliged to spend his nights at a semi-ruined old mansion. Quietly odd characters abound, hot chicks bed the outsider, and the cult of the artist whose work Stefano is restoring becomes more than a little menacing. But all told, I wish director Pupi Avati had gone full throttle. There’s danger: I want more; there’s violence: I want more; there’s atmosphere: I want more. As it stands, this movie will primarily appeal to dyed-in-the-wool giallo fans. Me, well, I am somewhat ashamed to admit there were stretches when the lull of the film score and the darkness of the theater almost tipped me into sleep.
Things That Go Bump in the East (Shorts Anthology)
“Magai-Gami” – dir. by Norihiro Niwatsukino
This must be a dry-run for a feature; but then again, sometimes that stretches things too thinly. Regardless, Norihiro’s little horror here is a creepy joy. Two young women visit a prohibited forest to encounter the titular entities for the purposes of Internet fame. A demon of hundreds of hands stares down one of Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART TWO
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987)
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DIRECTED BY: David Wheatley
FEATURING: Caroline Milmoe, Tom Bell, Kilian McKenna, Patricia Kerrigan, Lorcan Cranitch
PLOT: An orphaned girl is sent to live with her brooding uncle, a toymaker who makes elaborate marionette shows to cow and terrorize the members of his household.
COMMENTS: You have to hand it to the Brits; they just do coming-of-age stories a little bit differently. Here in the States, our budding young women are coping with love and loss at the hands of farm equipment or bee stings. But across the pond, the full flower of the newly mature female is as likely to coincide with psychic revenge upon a distant father or the wholesale collapse of civilization. It’s a whole other ballgame over there.
Our heroine, Melanie, is coming into adulthood and knows it. Ogling her own youthful, unblemished form in the mirror and comparing it to Boticelli’s Venus, she observes, “Physically, I’ve reached my peak. From now on, I can only deteriorate.” It’s a charmingly lofty and pretentious declaration that highlights her actual immaturity, given her comfortable home and the security of her parents’ oversight. Naturally, it takes their demise in a plane crash (over the Grand Canyon, an appropriately yonic piece of symbolism) to make her realize just how unprepared she is for the adult world. She and her younger siblings are promptly shipped off to a cramped London flat where her foul-tempered Uncle Philip sells handcrafted dolls and wind-up toys in the front and holds oppressive court in the back, demanding total subservience from his mute wife Margaret and her brothers Finn and Francie. Philip is a petty dictator, issuing his cruelties through rigid house rules and cutting remarks. He’s the sort specifically designed to foster rebellion in the young people he despises, and given that Melanie is just starting to come into her own, their collision is inevitable.
The use of the word “magic” in the title implies a fairy tale element that isn’t really the story’s focus. The toys in his shop promise a level of enchantment that Philip is quick to stifle. His peculiar passion is for puppets, which he brings to life as the expression of his cynical view of humanity. That’s where we see the line between childhood and adulthood, between toys as best companions and toys as childish things to be put away. That dichotomy is the story’s pivot point, as Philip repeatedly denigrates Melanie until he finally comes up with a use for her: to play the lead in a re-enactment of the Greek myth in which Zeus rapes Leda under the guise of a swan. When Melanie comes face-to-face with the mechanical bird, it’s the crucial moment when she has to decide if she is interacting with a toy or with the malevolent soul giving it life.
Screenwriter Angela Carter, adapting her own book, has been seen ‘round these parts before—specifically, her reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves. Magic Toyshop similarly explores notions of burgeoning sexuality, both in Melanie’s unsteady flirtation with the roguish Finn and in the strange abuse heaped upon her by Uncle Philip. It’s a powerful simile (far too overt to be a metaphor), although one that is undercut by its sudden and unsatisfactory resolution. Yes, we get the revolution we expect, but with no follow-through. Melanie, who once declared that she had peaked and could only deteriorate, now looks at the flames consuming her world and says, “Everything is lost now.” It’s as though Carter refused to countenance an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after, but can hardly see a world in which anyone lives at all.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE LIVING AND THE DEAD (2006)
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DIRECTED BY: Simon Rumley
FEATURING: Leo Bill, Roger Lloyd Pack, Kate Fahy
PLOT: The once-noble Brocklebank family struggles to cope with father Donald’s failing finances, mother Nancy’s terminal illness, and adult son James’ crippling paranoid schizophrenia.
COMMENTS: Horror makes its bones on the power of surprise, but one particular strain of horror that often goes overlooked is the kind without surprise at all, where the outcome of an action can be seen from miles away and the emotional trigger is the dreadful sense of inevitability. You know you’re going to see something deeply unsettling, and that something unfolds steadily, irrevocably, and awfully. The Living and the Dead is all in on that kind of horror, the slow-motion trainwreck where you’re always aware that bad things are going to happen, and all that’s left is to hammer out the details.
The run-down country estate where we set our scene is the kind of place that must have been a Downton Abbey-style hub of activity a century ago but is now threadbare and barely functional owing to the occupants’ flailing attempts to manage the upkeep on their own. This would be enough plot to fill your standard British class drama, with matriarch Nancy’s chronic illness as a complicating factor. But The Living and the Dead has the additional wild card of James, an adult in appearance but possessing the mind and haphazard body control of a petulant 8-year old. He constantly demands a level of responsibility and respect that he can never merit, and it’s obvious that his beleaguered parents have yielded him some control—most notably, access to his own medication—out of sheer overwork and desperation. And this is where you immediately start to see the terrible pieces falling into place. Lloyd Pack’s David is a doting father tempered with British restraint and propriety, but as the sole member of the household with relatively good physical and mental health, he has more on his shoulders than he can reasonably bear. Meanwhile, Fahy’s sickly mom surely knows that she is not safe in James’ company but is literally powerless to overrule him. So we march toward the seemingly inevitable outcome, dreading the destination we know we must reach.
Bill commits in full, emphasizing James’ unmanageability and highlighting the nobility of Donald’s stalwart support. Without a trace of humor or sentimentality, the performance earns our pity while exposing the horror of the situation. Rumley accentuates the discomfort by using Requiem for a Dream-style techniques—bursts of fast-forward speed runs, shaky camera and double exposures, cacophonous soundtracking—to heighten the paranoia, confusion, and instability in James’ head. The director also slips in a crucial bit of misdirection late in the second act, stepping inside one of James’ delusions and blurring the line between reality and hallucination. James’ world is the peak of weirdness in The Living and the Dead, and it sets up the stark, unhappy drama of the film’s more grounded final scenes.
Rumley has said that he drew inspiration from his own mother’s terminal illness. If this is the dark metaphor for that experience, it was a gut-wrenching ordeal indeed. What proves weirdest about The Living and the Dead isn’t the characters or their circumstances, but the fact that we’re given a glimpse inside them, one which we already know we want to avoid. Rumley crafts a reminder that decline and death come for us all, as well as a warning that sometimes there’s an unpredictable pain that comes first.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by BlueYonder. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
56*. TOMMY (1975)
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“The Old Testament teems with prophecies of the Messiah, but nowhere is it intimated that that Messiah is to stand as a God to be worshiped. He is to bring peace on earth, to build up the waste places–to comfort the broken-hearted, but nowhere is he spoken of as a deity.”—Olympia Brown
DIRECTED BY: Ken Russell
FEATURING: Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Robert Powell, Tina Turner, Jack Nicholson, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Barry Winch
PLOT: Tommy witnesses the murder of his WWII fighter-pilot father at the hands of his mother and step-father, who demand silence. The boy obliges, becoming wholly unresponsive to stimuli, aside from touch. When Tommy happens upon a pinball machine in a junkyard, he soon rockets to fame and messianic adulation from rebellious youths countrywide.
BACKGROUND:
- The Who’s Tommy hit number two on the UK charts, going Gold within four months. Ken Russell did not care much for the music, but was intrigued by the ideas explored in the double album.
- Russell’s Tommy was a box-office smash, garnering two Academy Award nominations (for Best Actress and Best Score).
- George Lucas was slated to direct Tommy but opted instead to develop his own film, American Graffiti.
- Every pinball machine featured in the film predates the original album’s release date of 1969.
- Elton John refused the role of “Pinball Wizard” until he was promised the oversized Doc Marten boots worn by the character.
- Mick Jagger, Tiny Tim, and David Bowie were considered for the role of the Acid Queen before Tina Turner was signed on.
- Every actor performs their own vocals—some more capably than others.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: At the height of his powers—and that would include the year of Tommy‘s release—Ken Russell made nothing but indelible images. But for stylistic and thematic reasons (not to mention sheer poetic excess), Tommy’s ordeal as he is installed within a syringe-imbued iron maiden during Tina Turner’s blow-out performance takes at least as much of the cake as any of the other wonders blaring on the screen.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Chrome-twinkling sex drug and rock ‘n’ roll body cage; a flood of beans fit for a queen
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Who provide the blaring wall of sound, Ken Russell’s crew manifest the blazing visuals, and a crack squad of heavy-hitter, top-of-their-game actors provide impressively calibrated bombastic characters, making for an audio-visual adventure that giddily drags you through a bonanza of immoderation. All somehow within the bounds of a “PG” rating.
Trailer for Tommy (1975)
COMMENTS: When you have a narrative that is as flimsy as it is outlandish, one way to make it work is cover it with lights, champagne, Continue reading 56*. TOMMY (1975)