A gang on the run after their leader escapes bumps into two college students in a small town. Things go very wrong and soon one is dead and the other left for dead. As a storm comes in, the gang finds their way to a lake house where the owners do not take well to what they’ve done.
A man who was always told he was the best master of kung fu discovers that it was a reputation bought for him by his father, leading him to question his life and seek the teachings of another master to truly become the best.
Following an adventure to get to the fest, partially caused by a drunken GPS and me not realizing I was going in the wrong direction until I was way too far, I missed some of the shorts, but using the listing from the fest’s site, I was able to retrace the films and here are a few thoughts on them.
No other director was able to evoke such feelings of relentless doom and darkness like William Friedkin. “Cruising” is a bold movie from a director that no other studio would touch in this day and age. It’s a movie from a time that’s pretty ancient but also very relevant in modern times. Friedkin squares his lens on the unending darkness and bleak landscape that is New York City, side stepping any and all gloss in favor of unflinching realism. There’s so much to this New York City that’s still so familiar from seedy undergrounds, sub cultures, corrupt police, and a hopelessly broken justice system.
A filmmaker shooting his last film, his masterpiece, is followed by a documentary crew as he works on his horror film all done with practical effects, a bit too practical even.
It’s pretty good to see at least one studio investing in transforming vampires in to relentless monsters once again after so many years where vampires have been watered down and overly fetishized. The vampires in André Øvredal’s interpretation of “The Last Voyage of The Demeter” as well as—well—Dracula in general, are not empathetic, alluring figures. They’re blank, cold and vicious monsters controlled by Dracula who is reduced to his most primal state for this re-visiting of one of the most haunting chapters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
That’s the thing about this trend with movies based around telling the story of these milestone products: We either get a movie that should just cut the middle man and be a documentary (“Air”), or we get something so completely sensationalized/fabricated that it’s not even really worth watching anymore (“Flamin’ Hot”). With director Jon S. Baird’s “Tetris” I tuned in to see a movie about the creation and acquisition of the iconic video game. Instead what I got was a pretty vanilla espionage thriller about the KGB, spies, terrorists, politics, and warring companies fighting over contracts and whatnot. Exciting…