Fantastic Fest 2022 Round Up
Another Fantastic Fest has come and gone and here are a few of the the best of the fest. Keep an eye on BGH to learn when you can look forward to seeing these and other fine films.
A Wounded Dawn
Like a fine wine, old school film techniques age gracefully while being adopted liberally amongst today’s filmmakers and A Wounded Fawn is no exception. Utilizing grainy aesthetics that soften the color palette of each frame, Travis Stevens’ third feature oozes a dreamlike vision of horror pinning serial killer (a delightfully deranged Josh Ruben) against prey (an elegant Sarah Lind putting in a fantastic performance). What begins as a fairly straightforward cat and mouse thriller facade quickly dissolves into a trippy cosmic horror nightmare that feels like it could have been made decades ago while still feeling fresh and modern. Its ambitions may prove too bold and alienating for some, but its themes are rich and Steven’s shows once again that he’s not afraid to get weird and veer away from the mainstream. (Luke Crum)
The Elderly
After his wife’s inexplicable suicide, an elderly man moves in with his son, who is already dealing with strife between his pregnant new wife and Lena, his teenage daughter. Lena is convinced something strange is afoot with her grandfather, not to mention the rest of Madrid’s older population. Whatever it is, it might be related to the oppressive heatwave and the old folks’s new-found obsession with cobbled-together circuit boards. The Elderly is a bit of a slow burn before culminating in an almost Fulci-like finale. It nods at ideas like elder abuse, dementia and the horrors of aging, but never really tackles them in a coherent way and wraps everything up with a twist that is both expected and also doesn’t really answer any questions. (John Shelton)
Country Gold
Genre fest mainstay Mickey Reese returns with a black and white fantasy movie about a mid-90s run-in between a legally distinct Garth Brooks-type character (played by Reese himself) meeting his hero, George Jones on the night before Jones is going to be cryogenically frozen (for the record, the real George Jones died 20 years after the setting of this movie and, as far as we know, is buried in Nashville). Country Gold is a surreal, sweet, and funny hangout movie about generations, legacy, and that time George Jones was an assassin for the CIA. (JS)
Chop and Steele
Since the early 2000s, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have been digging through thrift stores and garage sales to find the weirdest, most ephemeral VHS tapes, which they then curate into a live tour called the Found Footage Festival. As S-tier pranksters, they have also frequently appeared on unsuspecting and poorly researched local news morning shows as the strongmen characters Chop and Steele, performing feats of strength like stomping wicker baskets. Eventually they find themselves in legal trouble when a humorless media conglomerate doesn’t like their bit and hits them with multiple lawsuits, which they fight the only way they know how: urinating on stage on national TV in front of Howie Mandell. (JS)
Lynch/Oz
A fascinating documentary about David Lynch’s obsession with The Wizard of Oz and the many references to it included in his movies. Split into six video essays narrated by critic Amy Nicholson and filmmakers Rodney Ascher, Karyn Kusama, Benson & Moorhead, David Lowery, and John Waters, the very narrow scope of the doc proves to be a deep dive into a relatively shallow pool that will probably lose all but the most dedicated Lynch fans as each new narrator inevitably circles around the same points a previous narrator has already brought up. (JS)
Shin Ultraman
Full disclosure, I went into this movie with no prior history with Ultraman other than maybe being able to vaguely identify him as some giant kaiju maybe-robot who might have fought Godzilla at some point. Seasoned Ultraman afficiandos will be able to tell you that Ultraman is to Japan what Superman is to the US and has anchored a decades-long tv and film franchise that began in the 1960s and never really stopped. Shin Ultraman is the second installment of Hideaki Anno’s reboots of classic Japanese series, following Shin Godzilla and preceeding 2023’s Shin Kamen Rider. It’s also a complete blast, from the giant monster battles, to the extremely manga-esque dutch angles to the groovy 60s tv score funk. It’s weird experiencing second-hand nostalgia for something I have no experience with, but Shin Ultraman instantly made me a fan. (JS)
A Life on the Farm
Charles Carson was a farmer in rural Somerset, England who got his hands on a camcorder sometime in the 1980s and 1990s and began to create home-made documentaries that he would distribute to people around the village. Years later, Carson finally found his audience when VHS collectors and fans of outsider art found the tapes and began trading them. This documentary serves double duty in sharing some of the bizarre scenes Carson filmed (most notoriously, documenting every moment of his parent’s death on camera and then wheeling their corpses around the farm to say goodbye to the animals) while also telling his story of a unlikely artist determined to express himself in a place without many creative outlets. (JS)
Piggy
Winner of Best Horror Movie at Fantastic Fest, Piggy plays like a modern spin on Carrie, with telekinesis replaced with a serial killer. Sara is a depressed, overweight teenager who is viciously mocked and bullied by her classmates. After her bullies go missing and she has a chance encounter with a stranger, Sara finds that their fate is in her hands. With the power dynamics upset, she has to choose between mercy or revenge. (JS)