Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 28, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
By this point in my travels to Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival, the city has started to feel like a second home. The streets, the sights—they all seem cozily familiar as I arrive, even though it’s been two years since I’ve been up for a Fantasia (OK, there was that trip this past winter to act in the short Cold Blonded Murders, but anyway…). The only difference is that in New York, where I live, there isn’t a fest to hold a candle to Fantasia, and with 24 months’ worth of features to choose from, the organizers have put together a lineup of movies so varied and extensive, it takes two venues to hold ’em.
With the fest’s previous showcase, the Cinema Imperial, still shuttered (snif) for renovations, Fantasia has moved to the Concordia Hall Theater and the smaller J.A. de Sève auditorium across the street. As usual, once I arrive in town on Saturday with my traveling companions (Fango scribe Matthew Kiernan, Criterion’s Marc Walkow and filmmaker Scooter McCrae, here for the premiere of his Sixteen Tongues), we’ve barely checked into our hotel before we rush over to the Hall to see the new venue.
There we’re greeted by Fantasia veterans Pierre Corbeil and Mitch Davis, as well as fest guests including Eli Roth, director of Cabin Fever (which enjoyed a hugely successful screening the night before), Eric Valette, here from France for showings of his Malefique (I hear it’s great, but I’m going to miss it. Drat!), Australian Dalibor Backovic, whose short Entombed will be playing as part of the “Small Gauge Trauma” collection, and Evan Katz, here to report for the Creature Corner website and also the writer/producer of the upcoming shocker Home Sick, starring Bill Moseley. All of these guys are the type of enthusiastic and knowledgeable filmmakers the genre needs more of, and all of their movies promise to deliver the same alternative to mainstream Hollywood fare that Fantasia itself offers (along with the odd studio title like the much-anticipated Jeepers Creepers 2).
The first movie we see this weekend, Undead (pictured above) from twin Aussie filmmakers Michael and Peter Spierig, has rode into Montreal on a wave of hype that made it a must-see for our group (it’s one of the two features showing here that inspired our weekend jaunt). The setting is a small town that becomes the unfortunate recipient of a meteor shower that transforms most of the populace into zombies, and also heralds fallings of acid rain as well as a series of alien abductions. The opening 20 minutes, which set up the comic-gory tone, are raucously entertaining, and the final 10 or 15 contain some marvelous, spooky imagery. Unfortunately, the hour or so in between drags, as the survivors bicker their way across ground previously well-trod by Peter Jackson, George Romero and Sam Raimi. Lions Gate has picked up the U.S. rights, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but… they’d do well to cut about 15 or 20 minutes, which might tighten the film into a more consistently satisfying shocker.
No such length problems beset the next film on the bill, Ryuhei (Versus) Kitamura’s Aragami. This is one of a pair of films made under the Duel Productions banner, which posed to two filmmakers the challenge of shooting a movie set in one location and focusing on two characters locked in mortal combat. The other resulting film, Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 2LDK, also screens tonight, and having previously seen it at a Japanese fest in New York, I can say that Kitamura easily wins this duel. 2LDK, in which a pair of young aspiring actresses vying for the same part take their competition to apocalyptic levels, starts out amusing but becomes strident and pointless the bloodier it becomes. Aragami, on the other hand, unfolds as a more brooding period piece about a wandering samurai who comes upon a disused temple, whose occupant may be the incarnation of a demon seeking to steal the samurai’s soul. Poles apart from the extravagantly bloody Versus, Aragami (which carries a Canadian G rating!) is a mostly psychological confrontation with flashes of swordplay, and succeeds as an absorbing study of good and evil.
Having already seen the midnight feature, Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, we decide to explore Montreal’s always provocative nightlife, stopping along the way to pay our respects to the Imperial. On Sunday, I spend the afternoon with my Cold Blonded cohort, local actress Isabelle Stephen, and her pal Kitty before heading back to the Hall for the first of two must-see features. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan is one of several classics from the Shaw Brothers canon restored by Celestial Films and showing at the fest. The new 35mm print looks gorgeous, as befits this lush tale that transposes martial-arts revenge conventions into a brothel setting, as the title character wreaks vengeance upon a quartet of men who have assaulted her. Despite the lurid subject matter, the film is actually rather chaste for the most part up to about the 70-minute mark, only to explode into startlingly gory mayhem in the last reel, as if a different director had taken over at this point from helmer Chu Yuan. Throughout, it’s righteously entertaining and makes me want to see more of the Shaw movies being showcased here.
But the one feature I’m most looking forward to is Stuart Gordon’s King of the Ants, which has yet to snag a U.S. distributor. And once I’ve viewed it, I must say it’s easy to see why: This is Gordon’s most extreme film yet, sporting heavy-duty sex and violence without any of the distancing fantasy or black humor of his previous work. The central character is a housepainter named Crawley (Chris McKenna), who’s hired by a couple of low-rent thugs to tail a man and eventually kill him, only for his employers to welsh on the payment and request in no uncertain terms for him to leave town. When Crawley presses the issue, he’s brutalized by the thugs but survives his ordeal, and returns to wreak terrible vengeance.
Some have criticized King for featuring an unsympathetic protagonist, or for not offering insight into why he kills. But Gordon, working from a script by Charles Higson (based on his own novel), isn’t after this kind of character examination. Crawley is a blank slate at the film’s start, and through his actions we—and he—come to see that he is a killer—that being an “exterminator” is his talent in life. It’s a nihilistic vision that is punched across with unflinching direction and strong acting throughout, with George Wendt (using his bulk for effective menace instead of humor), Daniel Baldwin, Kari Wuhrer and especially McKenna delivering uncompromising performances. There’s no way in hell a studio will touch this one without trimming the extreme elements that give the movie its power; here’s hoping a daring indie like Lions Gate or Vitagraph gives this one the theatrical exposure it deserves.
