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Capsules

2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM NOM NOM

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Montréal 2026

An ace of diamonds signed by a cartoonist rests alongside its fifty-one unadorned companions.

7/30: Recluse

Henry Chaisson goes full tilt 1980s BBC spook story here, with his slow pacing matching the gloomy atmospherics. A sound engineer (a profession seemingly irrelevant to the goings-on) must return home to attend to her dying father, a famously troubled artist who suffers a nasty gasoline burn at the film’s beginning. The lead is, appropriately, a cipher, with costars carrying various degrees of mysterious weight (shouts-out to Fantasia regulars and ). If you can slip into the measured nature of the game, Recluse is a satisfying little spooker.

The Leader

Alternately funny, sinister, and unbelievable, The Leader chronicles the rise and devastating fall of Marshall Applewhite and his “Heaven’s Gate” cult. Members are harvested from the dejected and hopeless masses and molded into a helpless existence. positively shines in Michael Gallagher’s docudrama, but the real gem is Vera Farmiga as co-founder Bonnie Lu Nettles. Here down to earth seriousness gives weight to the experience, making Bonnie’s death in 1985 a preemptive death knell. Well-crafted and very unsettling.

Never After Dark

After the serious let-down of The Mouths, Dave Boyle’s J-Horror restored my faith in the phenomenon. There’s the expected blue-cold darkness, and a ghostly fellow with slashed mouth hunting for something at certain hours of the day, but there’s also warmth and fun. Airi is a ghost hunter with a sidekick in the form of her deceased older sister (appearing in mirrors as a young girl, having died many years prior) and a disinclination toward live people (her semi-flirtations with a new client’s skeptic son are delightfully awkward). Her rig to visit the other realm is a doozy, involving a zoetrope, a candle, and a receptacle to burn a lock of hair, and the mid-century Continue reading 2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM NOM NOM →

List Candidates

CAPSULE: BATHORY (2008)

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AKA Bathory: Countess of Blood

DIRECTED BY:  Juraj Jakubisk

FEATURING: , Karel Roden, Vincent Regan, Hans Matheson, Deana Horváthová,

PLOT:  Fictionalized chronicle of the life, loves, and political struggles of the infamous 17th century Hungarian countess.


WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Clashing cross-genre elements and facts interposed with fiction and fantasy create an oddball portrait of an already bizarre historical figure and her horrific crimes. If not tedious, the end effect is certainly weird.

COMMENTS: Bathory is a dreamy, odd mix of historical fact, fiction, speculation, and whimsy surrounding the life of notorious sexual serial murderess, Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory de Ecsed (1560 – 1614).

At 141 minutes running time, this cut of the film is condensed from a three part TV miniseries. It’s a Slovakian film produced in the Czech Republic about Hungarian history, with British actors, and the mixed production values, uneven tone and ambiguous, confusing story make for an unusual, entertaining, but disjointed viewing experience. The sets and costumes are colorful and imaginative, yet in places smack of a television budget.

Relying heavily on speculation and fancy, Bathory‘s plot combines elements of mystery, thriller, historical drama, and Renaissance steampunk adventure. Part of the movie focuses on the Countess’s personal life, her youth, her marriage to a Hapsburg dynasty heir, and fictionalized romance with painter Merisi Caravaggio (who in real life, never traveled to Northern Hungary.) The story also surveys the politics of Bathory’s dynasty, the Hapsburg empire, their battles with the Turks, and the interplay of power posturings between Bathory and her Hapsburg in-laws. This comprehensive coverage is fine for a TV miniseries, but becomes tedious and complicated in a feature-length movie, especially given the film’s sojourn into fiction.

While some of the political and historical plot points in the film are accurate, others are not, and the remainder of the picture features a murky, often conflicted depiction of Countess Bathory which attempts alternate explanations for the gruesome legends about her. This aspect of the movie is deliberately ambiguous.

Bodies of mutilated teenage girls indeed pile up, girls are found captive in the dungeons of Csejte Castle, and Bathory is seen murdering a couple of servants. Conversely, it is indicated that conspirators drugged the Countess with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and her Gypsy mystic soothsayer, a secret Hapsburg confederate, had Elizabeth so brainwashed with suspicious medicinal potions and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that Bathory had no clear conception of reality. In other words, the filmmakers seem to be saying of her dreadful transgressions, “it wasn’t her fault.”

Bathory’s infamous bath of blood (drawn from her victims) turns out to be an innocent aquatic suspension of scarlet herbs. Or was the herb bath just a decoy to fool spies? The film hedges as if the producers are too timid to take a firm stance, yet they raise the question of whether long established historical facts are in actuality nothing more than trumped-up charges.

The Hapsburgs are depicted as doing their best to blame a string of mutilation killings on Bathory for political reasons, while fostering exaggerated Continue reading CAPSULE: BATHORY (2008) →