Pulp Features

The 2003 Festival van de Fantastiche Film (FFF) ran from 10th to 16th April in Amsterdam. The main location was the Filmmuseum Cinerama with a secondary location at the Melkweg, which also provided the Festival Café.

Two countries dominated this year’s festival – Japan and Spain. Japan, of course, has always had anime which at its best can provide a beautiful and often hallucinatory experience. More recently, we have also seen a renaissance of Japanese horror, starting with Ring. In the case of Spain, following Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre Los Ojos, the country has seen an explosion in fantastic film making.

Of course, a retrospective dedicated to Jesus Franco also helps.

The festival is split into several parts.

The Main Programme of the festival comprised 21 titles – including the Night of Terror - all of which were shown in the Filmmusem Cinerama. These are the films that compete for the Silver Scream Award (voted for by the public) and the Silver Méliés.

The Anime Programme takes a look at the unique genre of Japanese animation and shows some of the best fantastic anime of recent years, including Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.

The Jesús Franco Retrospective takes shows a selection of the 150 films that comprise the oeuvre of Jesús Franco.

Completely ignored by mainstream audiences and critics, yet with a devoted following and a far better name within the industry than his reputation would suggest, Jesús Franco has been bringing his often dark and personal visions to the silver screen for five decades. This retrospective is dedicated to bringing him the attention he deserves.

The European Fantastic Shorts programme was split into two showings which attempted to bring the best European short films to an appreciative audience.

The Children’s programme. For those that weren’t convinced, Harry Potter has decisively demonstrated the power of the fairy tale and this programme goes to show that children’s fantasy is a rich and vibrant genre.

The awards and the winners

The Silver Scream award is presented to the director of the most popular film, as voted by the audience. This year’s winner was Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s enchanting tale of a 10 year old girl who wanders into a world of gods and monsters.

The Silver Méliés for best European fantastic film is voted for by the jury. The winner of the Silver Méliés goes on to compete for the Golden Méliés at the final Méliés affiliated festival of the season.

And then there is the Lifetime Achievement award, presented for services to fantastic film. This year Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Films has joined the ranks of Wes Craven, Dario Argento and Paul Verhoeven in accepting the award.

Troma Films, ‘the last of the independents’, has consistently shocked, outraged and delighted – admittedly small – audiences with a unique mix of blood, sex, social satire, anarchy and provocation.

Over the course of almost thirty years, Troma gone beyond being just a production company and now also encompasses an attitude and a way of doing things that encompasses the entire filmmaking process from conception to distribution.

Through Tromadance, Troma has also become a philosophy of supporting the small independent filmmaker, rocking the boat and scorning the bland safeness that makes up much of Hollywood’s output.

The award was presented by porn start and occasional cohort, Ron Jeremy and, in a funny and often insightful acceptance speech, Kaufman called for seeking peace through the dropping of celluloid bombs.

The award was followed by a showing of Apocalypse Soon: The Making of Citizen Toxie.

Some of the Films

Since I needed a break, I took some time off work and caught a few of the films. My main intention was to catch some of the better films that aren’t going to be released for a while, if at all.

However, I started with The Castle of Fu Manchu.

The film is an amazing collection of plot contrivances - one convenient coincidence after another, topped off with an ethical debate that completely ignores the idea that cutting the heart out of a live donor might not be entirely ethical.

It’s a terrible, terrible film and one that really needs a few beers to endure.

Ju-On: The Grudge
Ju-On (The Grudge) has to count as one of the most mind-numbingly terrifying cinematic experiences I’ve endured in a long time.

The film revolves around a haunted house and the repercussions of a violent death which we see in the opening sequence.

Rika, a care centre volunteer visits the home of one of the outpatients to check on her condition. Here she finds the house is a mess and the old is woman practically comatose. While cleaning the place up, she hears a noise upstairs and, on investigation, finds a boy in a wardrobe that has been tapes shut. Releasing the boy starts a chain of events, passing the Ju-On curse to everyone who comes into contact with the house.

The rest of the story is told as a series of non-linear, self-contained yet interconnected vignettes each of which expands the story and deepens the horror.

And with no relief, the tension is continually ratcheted up keeping you on the edge of your seat throughout. If only all horror films were half as good as this one.

Deathwatch
British horror film set in the trenches of World War I. Another haunting, although this is more of a ‘haunted trench’ story in which a group of British soldiers get lost in the fog of battle and stumble on a German trench.

The trench is poorly defended - with most of the Germans being already dead - and is easily captured.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just Germans in the trench…

Well acted throughout - with special kudos going to Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis as the superbly deranged Quinn – the film ticks along in a reasonably linear fashion. The real star of this film, though, is the trench – murky, muddy and dangerous; there could be anything in there, and often is.

It’s a solid, if very linear, film but lacked any real scares and failed to engage on anything other than a superficial level.

28 Days Later
A group of animal rights activists break into a laboratory and manage to release a rage virus…

28 days later, Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a deserted hospital…

The opening scenes of Danny Boyles much anticipated zombie film reminded me a lot of Day of the Triffids with the solitary figure of Jim wandering through the deserted streets of London trying to work out what has happened.

The sense of emptiness, achieved through snatched and grainy shots of deserted landmarks, is both stunning and harrowing.

Before long, he meets the zombies. These are not your common or garden shufflers; infected by the rage virus they are both fast and angry.

Eventually a group of four survivors gather in a tower block. The Britishness of the film comes across very strongly here – rather than collecting an arsenal and going on the warpath, these survivors are reduced to trying to collect rainwater in plastic buckets and living off whatever is still edible – chocolate.

However, plots must progress and, in this case one of the survivors, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) has managed to pick up a radio broadcast from a military unit calling on survivors to head to a blockade near Manchester. This sounds like their last best hope so they pack and go …

On the surface, 28 Days Later is a new take on the zombie genre – the zombies are fast, agile and angry – but the core of the film goes right back to the roots laid down by Romero in trying to use the horror genre to make a social statement.

Unfortunately, while Dawn of the Dead was a brilliant satire on consumerism, 28 Days Later lays it all on a little bit too thick so that, instead of exploring the way people try to survive – and the extremes they are willing to go to – in a desperate situation, the film starts to become a parody of itself with the soldiers becoming increasingly unbelievable as the one-note villains.

That said, who knows how any of us would react in a situation as desperate as this.

The Eye
Mun who has been blind since the age of two, receives a cornea transplant. The operation is a success, her sight slowly starts to come back and she can finally see her surroundings.

Unfortunately, it’s not just her physical surroundings that she can see.

Yep, Mun can see dead people.

What follows is a pretty classic ghost story overlaid with a stunning visual style and an incredible score that keeps the tension mounting and dives the story confidently through the minor holes in the plot.

It’s a truly stunning film.

My Little Eye
Five people – three me and two women – sign up for a Big Brother style psychological experiment. If they spend six months together in a house in the middle of nowhere, they win $1 million.

The catch is that if one of them leaves the house they all lose. And, of course, the house is fully wired with webcams – every aspect of their lives in the house is filmed from multiple angles.

The film itself starts in the final month of the experiment, and tensions are clearly frayed when things start to get really weird.

Director, Marc Evans certainly combines form and content effectively, certainly in the first part of the film, with grainy images and green-tinted night scenes effectively giving the film a very Big Brother feel.

And, as things start to go awry, the film also makes a few points about the audience, not only of reality TV but also of this film that are worth taking away with you.

Dark Water
Things aren’t going too well for Yoshimi Matsubara, recently divorced and looking for a job and home so she can support her 5 year old chid, Ikuko. And to make matters worse, her ex husband is trying to gain custody of Ikuko, bringing up her earlier mental instability as cause for concern.

Beggars can’t be choosers and Yoshimi ends up renting an apartment in an aging, and not very well maintained, tower block.

On moving in, she notices a dripping water stain on the ceiling which she reports to the apartment supervisor – and elderly and uninterested man who promises to make a note of it.

Yoshimi also manages to get herself a job. Unfortunately this proves to be something of a double edged sword as the pressures of trying to keep everything together mean that Yoshimi rarely manages to get to the kindergarten in time, leaving Ikuko standing alone in the rain as the other children leave with their mothers.

And things can only get worse as the stain on the ceiling keeps growing, a red bag keeps reappearing and Yoshimi starts to catch glimpses of another little girl…

Dark Water is another ghost story, directed by Hideo Nakata and based on a novel by Koji Susuki – both of whom were also responsible for Ring. But this film isn’t a patch on Ring.

The location of the ghost’s physical remains are pretty obvious, to say the least and, although it tackles an interesting theme – that of parental responsibility – the story has a less coherent feel than either Ring or the other Asian films I’ve seen this week.

Whereas Ring’s Sadako was indiscriminately vengeful, Dark Water’s ghost appears to be more discriminating in that she has lain silent for two years, yet there is no real sense to Yoshimi being the target of the ghost’s attention – she is effectively being punished for failing to cope with her new single parent status.

Certainly the film has plenty of creepy images, just glanced from the corner of the eye, and some highly effective jumps. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t hang together as well as it could.

House of 1000 Corpses
House of 1000 Corpses has been described as “The Film That Some People Didn’t Want You to See.”

There is a very good reason for not seeing this film. It’s boring. In fact it goes beyond boring into a place that is so mind numbingly dull that watching paint dry is a thrill ride of epic proportions in comparison.

Rob Zombie’s tribute to 70s horror films and roadside attractions has no humour, no suspense and not a single character with which the audience can identify.

What it does have is four unbelievably unlikeable teenagers in a car who, even before the obvious clichés are established, are kidnapped by a bunch of rednecks who, because they’re rednecks, proceed to torture and kill said teenagers.

It also has an unbelievable number of gimmicky negative shots and cuts to a black and white Halloween show, ostensibly being shown at the same time as the kids go missing. It’s a move that screams “look at me, I’m a director” and jerks you right out of the film ensuring that nothing that happens on the screen will scare you, disturb you or keep you awake.

Feed on comments to this Post