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2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM

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Montréal 2026

I briefly met a Danish fellow and complimented him on his film; he in turn complimented me on my jacket.

7/16: Kung Fu

Opening night, late night. Following my descent into Refn’s dreamscape, I took in a new kung fu comedy by Giddens Ko. An eight-century-old master of an esoteric martial art convinces two teenage losers to become his disciples, hoping to unlock their strength to aid him in his fight against his nemesis. Kung Fu delivers plenty of kung fu, as well as plenty of laughs in the first half (cheesy wuxia-style flashbacks with knock-off screen legends, and more snakes than I could count—for training, you see). The second half goes dark, as underlying causes come to the fore. While the stars are the fighting threesome (excuse me, foursome:the  young, non-loser contemporary of the losers is a vivacious hoot),the  nebulous Government Man steals every scene he’s in, providing an unanticipated menace.

7/17: Tunnels: Sun in the Dark

Chuyen Bui Thac walks a fine line (crawls a narrow passage?) with Tunnels, set within and above a circuit of rooms and tunnels inhabited by a couple dozen Viet-Cong fighters. The arrival of a clandestine intelligence group coinciding with the appearance of an eager outsider triggers tension. It was thrilling to experience the claustrophobia and comradery, as weapon and survival skills were on display (the outsider, in particular, showed an eagerness that bordered on death wish: watching him remove the explosive element of a failed bomb by heating the casing over a fire was… tensely amusing). Kudos to the director for his deft storytelling, and in particular for giving the Yankee soldiers far more fair a shake than expected. War is hell, and Chuyen Bui Thac makes it clear that none of these poor souls should have had to be caught up in its evil.

Trauma Or, Monsters All

Going for broke, ties together three of his earlier movies (Habit, Depraved, and Blackout) in the story of a young woman recently moved to Talbot Falls, NY, hoping for a quiet environment in which to work on her historical book about George Washington Carver (“You know, the peanut guy.”) When she observes strange activity by a neighbor’s Continue reading 2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DOGRA MAGRA (1988)

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ドグラ・マグラ

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DIRECTED BY: Toshio Matsumoto

FEATURING: Yôji Matsuda, Shijaku Katsura, , Eri Misawa

PLOT: Waking in a sparse cell, a young man tries to piece together the reason for his confinement, assisted—and thwarted—by adversarial psychologists.

Still from Dogra Magra (1988)

 

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: From the get-go, the viewer is in for disorientation and dismay, spiked with foetal philosophizing and sinister slides.

COMMENTS: Conspiracy, by its nature, is insidious—lurking in the background until the moment of impact. Consider the conspiracies of history: events from over a millennia ago, aging and festering, awaiting their catalyst. The conspiracies of society can blossom into a nefarious constellation of constraints and crucibles. And perhaps most perfidious of all, there is the conspiracy of the mind, wherein the dark elements of the subconscious band together to wreak havoc on waking life.

So imagine all these conspiracies themselves colluding, and you can glimpse the terrible fate of Ichirô Kure (Yôji Matsuda). He awakens to a blurry yellow light, rising from the floor in troubled wonder, unable to remember his name, his past, or even his face. Enter an older gentleman, going by the name Professor Wakabayashi, who shares with the young man a tale set 1100 years prior. This dark narrative of a mad artist who wishes to capture decomposition, a fixation beginning with the corpse of his murdered bride, is related by one Professor Masaki, hissing out from a phonographic record from beyond the grave.

Or is Masaki actually dead? Director Toshio Matsumoto depicts his protagonist’s madness with seamless aplomb, but that by no means makes things any clearer. Poisoned flashbacks shudder coherency, as do imagined encounters that appear all too real. Kure is a brilliant student, or was, who had begun groundbreaking research of the mind—we observe him lecturing to a gallery peopled by asylum inmates, with none other than Professor Masaki joining the growing chaos chanting an “Ahodara Sutra” (or “Fool’s Prayer”) as he traipses merrily through the classroom. Or maybe Kure is just lecturing to himself in his cell. As with the cryptic prenatal visions, little is clear aside from these facts: Kure’s mother was killed; Kure’s fiancée was killed; and the two professors observing the fellow gravely overstepped their ethical bounds.

Intriguingly for a film engrossed by narrative slight-of-hand and the malleability of memory, the truth can be found in the film within-the-film. Professor Masaki records the wards of his care, all undergoing a “freedom” regiment akin to the inmates chronicled in Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” A chance encounter with a janitor leads to a projector in an abandoned storage room, its information triggering a cyclonic hallucination. The elements swirl and bombard the pitiable Ichirô Kure, as the three agents of conspiracy crash down together on his consciousness.

He awakens to a blurry yellow light.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[A] puzzling work that blends reality with fantasy. I expected a horror movie of sorts. While that classification does kind of work, labelling it as such doesn’t do the film any favors. This is one of those movies that defies genre classification.” — Bret Oswald, Irish Film Critic

Dogra Magra

Dogra Magra

  • A man wakes in an asylum with no memory. Dr Wakabayashi helps him to recall his past in which he killed his bride on their wedding day

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS (1971)

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Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou

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DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka

PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.

Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”

Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.

We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.

There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal psychedelic experience like no other… Many of the bizarre, dreamlike sequences that act as short interludes or scenes of escapism for the adolescent at the heart of the film elicit the traits of a Jodorowsky film.”–Tom Bielby, Film Bantha

(This movie was nominated for review by Adam. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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CAPSULE: EGG (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Yukihiko Tsutsumi

FEATURING: Inuko Inuyama, Hye- yeong Jo, Megumi Ujiie

PLOT: A girl finds herself tormented by the image of a hatching egg whenever she closes her eyes.

Still from Egg (2005)

COMMENTS: A violent confrontation while introducing a narrative is a tried and tested way to grab the audience’s attention. This method is applied in Egg, and along with erratic editing, rough cuts, many close-ups and zoom-ins, it creates a certain tension. This will be a wild ride, as the story follows a young girl attempting to come to terms with a highly disturbing situation.

The plot revolves around the daily routine of a seemingly ordinary young woman. She has friends, works a nonsensical futuristic job (as in out of the popular TV show ” Severance”), and tries to live a normal life. However, whenever she closes her eyes, her inner world appears, and inside this world is an egg ready to hatch. Tsutsumi’s experience as a visual artist and music video director comes in handy here as he creates an oppressive, eerie, otherworldly inner landscape, with some truly grotesque monsters later on.

Our protagonist’s situation develops into a double confrontation: on the one hand, with the creature lurking inside the egg, and on the other, with a familial legacy of similar cases. The danger represented by the creature transforms into something concrete and physical, as it becomes apparent it doesn’t exist only in her mind, but inside her lower abdomen, as well. And like any baby, it attempts to get out, albeit in a messier than usual way. Light body horror is part of the deal here, but nothing too gruesome. Instead, the film works mostly as a suspense survival thriller, with rich allegorical undertones.

Underneath the lore and imagery is a commentary on female physiology, the nature of pregnancy, and the acceptance (or not) of this seemingly unavoidable reality. In this context, Egg also works as a coming-of-age tale. Early on, a doctor our heroine consults suggests she is still a child, at least mentally, hinting at an upcoming transformation. The use of body horror to comment on themes of pregnancy and female physiology brings to mind the work of , especially Evolution (2015).

Some light comedic elements are expressed here, mostly through exaggerated acting, but they remain underdeveloped. Ultimately Egg is not a black comedy as much as a deeply and earnestly symbolic J-horror with feminist implications, essential for fans of the art-house and the bizarre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:  

“…a bizarre tale and quite unlike anything else out there, but nevertheless a rather enjoyable one – Niina Doherty, HorrorNews.Net 

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CAPSULE: EXIT 8 (2025)

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Exit 8 is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Genki Kawamura

FEATURING: Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kôchi, Naru Asanuma

PLOT: An expectant father finds himself trapped in a seemingly never-ending subway corridor.

Still from Exit 8 (2025)

COMMENTS: In recent years, an increasing number of movies and TV shows have attempted to adapt video games. At the same time, there is a trend inside the indie gaming landscape of making psychological horror adventures set in liminal spaces, transitional places with an unsettling vibe. The 2023 game “Exit 8” by Kotake Create is an iconic short game of this subgenre. 2 years later, collaborating with the original work’s creator, Genki Kawamura translates this piece for the cinematic medium.

The backstory becomes apparent from the beginning, with the setup explaining our main character and his anxieties as an expectant father. The protagonist is then trapped inside a unique one-way subway labyrinth where he needs to spot “anomalies” and then immediately change his direction if he wants to escape. This begins a surreal odyssey not dissimilar from space-bending cinematic tales in the vein of ’s The Incident (2014) or ’s Vivarium (2019).

We can also trace aesthetic influences from video games, and not only from the eponymous game this work is based upon. For starters, there is a segment early on where POV shots recall the first-person perspective of the original game and many other survival horror titles. The “Silent Hill” game franchise is a clear influence. As in that series, the supernatural anomalies our hero encounters are a distorted reflection of his scarred psyche, bringing narrative depth and character development to the table. The original “Exit 8” game had nothing like that.

Another change from the original is the introduction of secondary characters. Our hero encounters other trapped souls inside this endless corridor, each with his or her own identity and backstory. While one person’s journey was enough to sustain the short experience of the original game, more characters are necessary for a meaningful feature-length experience.

From a technical perspective, this work is astonishing. The environments are the perfect recreation of the original game’s virtual spaces, with uncannily vibrant reflected light. There are also great body horror effects that will entertain fans of the weird and grotesque. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” underlines our protagonist’s inner conflicts and his transformative journey.

In the end, it is better to approach this movie as a stand-alone piece rather than an adaptation. It offers something completely different from the work that inspired it, using its predecessor’s simple formula as a metaphor for insecurities, anxieties, and existential angst, creating a unique narrative in the process.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film mines tension from the absurdity of the Lost Man’s confinement, and in ways that recall Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, perhaps the granddaddy of escape-room horror. To that end, Kawamura at times pushes the original game’s subtle eeriness into full-on scares, introducing spooky apparitions and a horde of mutated creatures that would feel at home in Silent Hill.”–Mark Hanson, Slant (contemporaneous)