Vampire Cleanup Department (Gao geung jing dou fu) (2017) [Fantasia International Film Festival 2017]

The Vampire Cleanup Department is a task force that deals with Goeng Si, Chinese vampires, while being disguised as a regular trash and cleanup department.  Not long after Tim Cheung joins his uncle on the force, he meets with a sweet vampire named Summer who changes how he wants to do things.

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Teen Wolf (1985): Collector’s Edition [Blu-Ray]

Before it became a homoerotic horror series on MTV, “Teen Wolf” was the epitome of eighties cheese that mixed a teen coming of age comedy with horror tropes. The idea of being a werewolf is of course a metaphor for puberty, as Michael J. Fox takes a baffling but oddly fun turn in his career after the success of “Back to the Future.” The 1985 “Teen Wolf” hasn’t aged very well, but it’s still a fun novelty of the decade where almost nothing was off limits it meant possibly drawing a laugh. Surely, the idea of a werewolf becoming a star basketball player is absurd, but not offensive as a comedy based around a corpse, or a college student wearing black face. But I digress.

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The Bye Bye Man (2017)

It’s “The Bye Bye Man,” or as I call it “Honey, We Ripped Off Slenderman.” In all honesty, “The Bye Bye Man” actually looks like a weak Senator Palpatine cosplayer who died from toxic poisoning from his face make up and became a demon who likes to rip off his shtick from The Babadook, Freddy Krueger, and your every day mime. I’ve experienced scarier stories in young adult sections at public libraries, and could come up with a monster ten times more imposing, and with a name that doesn’t automatically inspire me to chortle under my breath. A movie this bad could only inspire me to gather my thoughts of bewilderment in an itemized list.

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Tragedy Girls (2017) [Fantasia International Film Festival 2017]

Did you see “Scream 4”? Do you remember the finale and surprise reveal, as well as the reasoning for the murderer’s devious deeds? Well, then you’ve seen “Tragedy Girls.” It feels a lot like Tyler MacIntyre loved the finale to “Scream 4” so much that he took that one twenty minute explanation, and transformed it in to a ninety minute movie that presents glimmers of brilliance, but stumbles quite often. While many will liken “Tragedy Girls” to “Heathers,” it’s actually about as smug and annoyingly self-satisfied as films like “Detention” and “Easy A.”

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68 Kill (2017) [Fantasia International Film Festival 2017]

A man living in an abusive relationship is put through the ringer and finds his inner strength to survive and move on following a wild and crazy night and day.

Based on the novel by Bryan Smith, written and directed by Trent Haaga, 68 Kill is an insane ride filled by crazy, lunatic characters.  The whole thing seems completely nuts and ludicrous but it works.  Somehow, Haaga took all the most ridiculous characters and situations and makes them work in a sort of white-trash opera.  Here all the characters do dumb things for dumb reasons and they almost all are assholes and lunatics, yet the film is crazy fun to watch and has a story that moves at a good, fast pace and leads to a satisfactory ending.  Haaga took all of the most unlikely elements to make one of those film that should not work yet does so beautifully.

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