Fantastic Fest – The Pleasurecraft

September 22, 2010

Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

How could you go wrong with something named Fantastic Fest? Well, OK, if you really loved The English Patient or Lost in Translation, you might not appreciate the jackhammer nuance of Fantastic Fest fare. If The Remains of the Day is your idea of two hours well-spent, then it’s unlikely your taste is going to dovetail with the festival that brought you The Human Centipede – a movie that, if nothing else, shockingly proves the saying, “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.” It also makes a fairly strong case for 1) remembering to renew your OnStar subscription and 2) the decline of Western civilization. (It’s probably used as an al Qaeda recruitment film too.) As disturbing as The Human Centipede is (the disturbing part not being so much the movie itself but the fact that it actually got funded, filmed, and distributed), it’s not a particularly inventive film. It is, however, an incredibly ballsy one – and perhaps a sobering look at what’s coming down the pike in the horror genre. Expect to see titles like The Human Toilet, Donkey Show Snuff Gallery, and Babies in a Blender, all filmed in 3-D with spectacular computer-generated graphics. Think Grand Theft Auto quality with lots of chain saws, wood chippers, and other dangerous power implements ripping through human flesh in an impressive cascade of urine, feces, and blood. Who wouldn’t want to see that? If you let your imagination run wild, it may just run wild enough to make it into your local cineplex. If you’re really lucky, your imagination might even end up being a video game … or vice versa. Think that’s crazy? Well crazy has already happened plenty of times: Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, BloodRayne, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, Super Mario Bros. The list goes on and on, and, interestingly, no film based on a video game has ever scored higher than 43% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. Critics can be so critical. In comparison, The English Patient rocks an 83%, and The Remains of the Day nearly pegs it at 97%. Somehow James Ivory managed to pull that off without stitching Emma Thompson’s lips to Anthony Hopkins’ keister … well, maybe in a metaphorical sense. The Remains of the Day is its own kind of genre film – that being tedious British films about repressed Victorian values – but fortunately Fantastic Fest doesn’t dabble in that kind of fare. If there is a staid English butler in a Fantastic Fest film, he probably has a full crawl space and is a secret sorcerer, a robot from the future, or a badass martial artist who can plunge his hand into your chest cavity and pull out your still-beating heart. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? It gets even cooler than that – albeit in a slightly nerdy way. Fantastic Fest has more than 170 official screenings, parties, and events: everything from film debates finished off by actual boxing matches to live karaoke, dance parties, video-game competitions, and even an off-site, cow-on-a-spit barbecue complete with knife-throwing and bullwhip demonstrations. This year, during the first four days, Fantastic Fest has transformed the HighBall ballroom into a makeshift arcade that features 29 different games by cutting-edge game developers. Everyone knows that video games are like flypaper for nerds, so if you’re on the prowl for some nerd loving, you’ll definitely want to work that room.

September 16, 2008

There are a variety of ways the apocalypse could go down: We could be smashed … by a giant asteroid. We could particle accelerate ourselves into a black hole. We could catch a nasty virus, fry in a solar flare, or get a wobble in our axis. There is also the possibility that aliens could land and save us from the preceding calamities … or instead, they might just conquer and enslave us. You think your boss is a bitch now, wait until you get one who can chew your ass out with seven scaly heads full of razor-sharp teeth and slimy, acrid smelling saliva. You’ll be praying for the days when you got dressed down by a menopausal state worker with a bead-blinged ID lanyard and wicked coffee breath. If the apocalypse does occur, it’s not going to arrive with a whimper. By definition it’s going to involve shock and awe; people running through the streets screaming, fire and brimstone. Otherwise it’s not really an apocalypse; it’s just a shitty turn of events. If a couple of investment firms file bankruptcy and the stock market plunges, that really sucks, but it’s not the apocalypse. Unemployment? Inflation? High gas prices? All are certainly turds in the punchbowl, but to truly be apocalyptic, the situation has to deteriorate beyond measurable statistics. You can’t just nickel and dime your way to an apocalypse. President Bush has been trying to bring on the end of days for some time now but, like his father, hasn’t quite gotten the ball across the goal line. Why? Well, contrary to popular opinion, he’s not the Antichrist. Sadly, no matter what Alex Jones tries to tell you, Bush just didn’t have an Antichrist grade point average. Plus, here’s a really important point: The Antichrist would never try out for cheerleader. Pom-pom maybe, but never cheerleader. So, how will you know when the world is coming to an end? Well, that’s the kicker. You probably won’t, and that’s probably a good thing. If an asteroid the size of Hawaii slams into the Earth, you’ll probably have just enough time to say, “What was tha…?” In the Sudan, they call that mercy. Similarly, with a black hole you won’t have to worry about whether you left your iron on. You won’t have time to to be thankful that it was a black hole that did you in rather than, say, a death star. The ugly truth of the matter – the higher probability – is that somehow mankind is going to fuck things up and drag out the suffering unnecessarily. We’ll deplete the ozone or poison the oceans and air or procreate ourselves into one big, teeming, filthy, rugby scrum clusterfuck of a planet. That’s not the traditional view of the apocalypse, but it’s probably the most spot on. There probably won’t be a postgame. We won’t be tooling around the empty outback in a supercharged Ford Falcon saving little fur-vested, mulleted kids from gas hording thugs in shoulder pads. That’s a best-case scenario – a fantasy – the kind of stuff Hollywood does really well, but nature can’t seem to put together … even with an unlimited budget. This Friday you can live the fantasy right in the middle of Republic Square Park when Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest hosts a special Rolling Roadshow screening of The Road Warrior, starring a younger Mel Gibson and the even younger aforementioned kid with the even more spectacular mullet. You could be in a much worse place if the world actually does come to an end.