While most of the country was seemingly at San Diego Comic Con, the folks of the spooky kind converged on the Long Beach Convention Center for the annual official arrival of Halloween with is great, big black cat mascot and a few thousand of their brethren.
Fantasia Retro 2024
Animation buffs might end up appreciating and loving this oddity by Canadian filmmaker and animator Gerald Potterton based mainly on how it was conceived. On its own, “Tiki Tiki” is a gigantic mess of a movie that tries to fit a square peg in to a circle hole. At seventy minutes, Potterton’s film is packed with about forty minutes of filler. Most of the filler is comprised of random scenes of people dressed as monkeys, and nigh endless musical numbers. And what kind of musical numbers per se? It’s mostly funk and soul music, which when viewed in context, is absolutely awkward.
Most times Potterton almost seems to forget that this is kind of an animated movie pitting his characters as back drops for an incredibly dull story about pirates and Monchhichis.
As the new kid in town, Sam makes friends with a local group of teens who loves ghost stories and comic books.
Three generations of a family living in a fortified compound have a secret they cannot let out.
Two men go on a forest hike where it’s soon obvious that this is not a simple hike, their goals are more than sightseeing and communing with nature.
There’s a great movie desperate to be set free with Stephen Sawchuk’s “Hell is a Teenage Girl” and sadly it’s only a pretty good movie when all is said and done. There’s so much lore and back story hinted at that the movie, at fourteen minutes, barely scratches the surface of. And we’re told that protagonist Parker is blamed for her dad being the Springsboro Slasher. But why? There are a lot of “But Why?’s” that will be spouted during the short. Although it is a neat, creative (if not wholly original) short, there’s just so much more tinkering and glossing up that needs to happen before/if a feature is ever greenlit.
This year, Fantasia will be awarding their 2024 Cheval Noir career award to U.S. filmmaker Mike Flanagan. “For his imaginative and heartfelt horror visions; boundary-breaking achievements in making soulful, character-driven genre television commercially viable without compromises; and the extraordinary work he’s done in popularizing landmark authors to a new generation, While it may strike some as odd to bestow an achievement award to an artist who’s almost certainly not yet reached a mid-career place, Flanagan has been so extraordinarily prolific and consistently brilliant in his output that the filmmaker has already accomplished several lifetimes of creation.”
In honor of his stellar achievement, here are five of My Favorite Mike Flagan productions – so far. As he has a long, rewarding life of filmmaking and film curating ahead of him, I imagine this list will look different in fifteen years.