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Toronto After Dark 2012: Inbred Review (Kirk Haviland)

Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2012

Inbred (2012)

Starring Jo Hartley, Seamus O’Neill, James Doherty, James Burrows and Nadine Rose Mulkerrin

Written by Alex Chandon and Paul Shrimpton

Directed by Alex Chandon

From the UK we get our next Toronto After Dark 2012 selection, Inbred. Taking direct influence from films like Deliverance, Alex Chandon brings us one of the most un-repentantly, vile and crude films since perhaps A Serbian Film. But is there actual story worth watching amongst the blood splatter and septic tank contents?

Inbred starts with two social workers, the overly eager Jeff (Doherty) and the more jovial Kate (Hartley), along with their four charges arriving in the small town of Mortlake. The four young offenders have been taken out to the countryside for a weekend of character-building. After meeting the tavern owner Jim (O’Neill) and the eccentrically creepy townsfolk inside “The Dirty Hole,” the group decides the smarter move is to stick to themselves and ignore the people surrounding them. But after a minor incident with pack of particularly hostile locals, the group finds themselves in the middle of a rapidly escalating, blood-soaked, warped nightmare. It seems that the villagers of Mortlake like to amuse themselves by staging a circus-like performance in which the unwilling stars are bound, tortured and killed in ways involving farm equipment, animals and good old-fashioned blunt objects. But this time the prey fights back.

Inbred is a terrible mess from beginning to end. Not being able to decide if it wants to be a horror-comedy, thriller, deliverance style drama or torture porn, the film decides it will dabble in all of them and ends up a muddled disaster. The script is made up with familiar set pieces and generically stereotypical characters, especially in the young delinquents. The motivations and story arcs are lazy and uninspired. The only actor that manages to escape here is O’Neill as the maniacal Jim. His performance here screams and begs for a better movie to surround it. Outside of O’Neill, most of this cast is either passable at best, as in Hartley, or severely amateurish. The young group of locals that spin the story out of control are particularly uninspired. The film does manage to provide one fascinating setting in that of the bloody circus style show used to dispatch the outsiders who wander into town. The concept is excellent and the actualization is passable, but far from good enough to make the film work. I will also give kudos to some of the behind the scene crew because the set design and location work very well. But of course this film is all about the kill scenes which are so laughably over the top and ridiculously unrealistic that when the film still tries to return to a darker tone to deliver scares it does not work.

Ultimately Inbred is a anomaly, a film I dislike immensely at a festival I love. I know there is much praise out there for this film and this review may be in a minority, and if this film works for you I am truly happy. Inbred is a strong non-recommend.

Till Next Time,

Movie Junkie TO

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CONTEST: Win a copy of Wrong Turn 5:Bloodlines on Blu-Ray

We have another contest here at Entertainment Maven: two copies of Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines on Blu-Ray to give away to two lucky winners. This time, the kind people at Fox Home Entertainment have provided us with the Blu-Rays and here’s how you win a copy. Try not to take any wrong turns along the way.

Please note that the contest is only open to individuals who are at least 18 years of age and who live in Canada or the US. Only one entry per person. Winners will be chosen at random from a pool of entrants who have completed the following steps. The contest will close at 11:59pm on Sunday, October 28th, 2012.

1. ‘Like’ our Facebook page by clicking this link and then ‘like’, or by going directly to www.entertainmentmaven.com and clicking ‘Like’

2. Follow us on Twitter @entertainmaven

3. E-mail us at entertainmentmaven@gmail.com, putting Wrong Turn as the subject, and tell us your full name, shipping address (no PO boxes please) and the most important way (in your opinion) to survive a horror movie from the Wrong Turn Horror Movie Survival Guide.

Winners will be contacted at the e-mail address used to enter the contest.

Toronto After Dark Short Film Roundup Part 1 (Matt Hodgson)

The 2012 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival is entering day 5 and the half-way point. We’ll have plenty of feature film reviews that will be coming at you over the coming days, but this year we also thought it would be a good idea to feature the wonderful short films of the festival. One Canadian short film precedes each of the features, while nine International shorts were grouped together for a short film slot this past weekend. We’re going to try to cover each short in a segment called the Short Film Roundup. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: While I may be a huge movie fan, sometimes ideas and concepts within movies are less obvious to me and more obvious to others. I do a good deal of reflecting after features and generally arrive at a satisfactory conclusion regarding the intent of the filmmakers, however that gets flipped on its head with short films, especially when I watch nine of them back-to-back. I apologize to the filmmakers in advance if I missed what you were trying to say.

Synopses in Italics and from http://www.torontoafterdark.com

Caterwaul

Ian Samuels, 13 min, USA, 2012

A fisherman’s painful recovery from a tragic loss manifests itself in the intimate relationship he initiates with a lobster in this intimate, beautiful portrait.

This was the first film of the International programme, and it’s easily one of the best. The brief synopsis sounds ridiculous, but this short is an incredibly emotional one to watch, with only one or two instances of humour. I think the relationship between the old fisherman and his arthropod is an allegory for a different loss, loss and grief that occurred earlier in his life. Caterwaul is beautiful, touching and features some wonderful practical effects. This one is going to be tough to beat in my books.

Decapoda Shock

Javier Chillon, 9 min, Spain, 2011

An astronaut-turned-lobster-freak returns to Earth in search of his family and the life the government has stolen from him.

As this short starts on the red sand of Mars, audiences may expect to be in for a very serious sci-fi piece. Even more so when our lone astronaut gets clipped by a martian crab, his space suit now compromised. Also he may now be infected as we see blood oozing from the tiny tear in his suit. But this short takes a turn for the ridiculous as our astronaut returns to earth – as a giant crab. We follow this crab-man as he learns about his condition, seeks out his family, and tries to exact revenge on a government who set him up. If crab-man revenge is your cup of tea then Decapoda Shock will not disappoint. I wasn’t on board with the humour immediately, but as the short went on I became invested in the humour and our hero’s mission. This short may have set a record for highest body count racked up by a crab-man. Can anyone confirm this?

Dialogue

Josh Johnson, 1 minute, USA, 2012

Why is there a vagina there?

Dialogue tells a very brief story about a young man with a vagina on his arm. Unfortunately for the vagina it speaks a foreign language and has trouble communicating the painful existence that is its reality. A truly terrifying concept, hopefully this short doesn’t create a new phobia for the medical books. Short, funny, and to the point, Dialogue was successful at what it set out to do: tell the story of a guy with a vagina on his arm.

Odokuro

Aurelio Voltaire, 6 min, USA, 2011

Under the auspicious direction of TAD short film favorite Voltaire, Gary Numan narrates the reanimated exploits of a Sumartran Rat Monkey and its battle against all forms of media.

Odokuro looks like a very ambitious stop-motion animation project. The setting is a cluttered room full of many different types of media and a skeleton that is reanimated only to wage a type of war against these objects which should be inanimate. Wonderfully creative and a joy to watch, Odokuro probably has a take home message, but I think I missed it. However, I would watch this short again in a heartbeat if only for the fantastical strangeness on display and the painstaking work that must have gone into making it.

Bobby Yeah

Robert Morgan, 23 min, UK, 2011

It isn’t that the mischievous Bobby Yeah has always got his finger on the button. It’s that he always presses it. A grotesque stop-motion wonderland of fleshy Švankmajer-inspired delights.

Bobby Yeah is easily the best short of the International programme at TAD this year. While other shorts were a lot of fun to watch, Bobby Yeah is an absolute triumph of imagination, weirdness and claymation. At the heart of this nightmarish tale is our strange preoccupation with pressing buttons in order to see what they do, particularly red buttons. Our lead character is a rabbit-like thing who would be cute if his face wasn’t splattered with blood, covered with sores, and his eyes bulging out of his head. He gets into quite a bit of trouble, but his exploits are incredible to behold. Morgan is a veritable creative force whose work looks to be almost entirely unique, something which I found very refreshing. I look forward to anything he does in the future.

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imagiNATIVE: The Tundra Book Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

imagiNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival 2012

The Tundra Book

Directed by Aleksei Vahkrushev

In choosing to organize his movie within chapters, director Alexei Vahkrushev’s The Tundra Book reminds me of Dogville, but without a sinister turn of events affecting a young stranger, obviously. Instead of that plot, we see a few Chukchi families ride their deer-run sleds into the Russian Arctic Circle. I’m still trying to figure out fully why Vahkrushev organized his movie this way, as each chapter just denotes one or two events in the tribe’s lives. But the title cards do, in their own way, deconstruct the audience’s stereotypical expectations of the shaman-worshiping, environmentalist, history-obsessed Native. ‘Spirits’ are just fur patches that the Chukchi patriarch Vukvukai keep on their person. Rituals are simple actions while the spiritual beliefs driving these said actions are internalized and not explicitly talked about. Nature isn’t an eternal living entity but an everyday constant place where the tribe survives. There is no excessive instrumental ambient soundtrack to exaggerate the purpose of the tribesmen’s actions.

We can also see this straightforward approach in Vahkrushev’s visuals. He knows that nature is beautiful and so are his subjects, and he lets these elements speak for themselves. The arctic snow sometimes glistens without glowing. He rarely uses long shots, a scope used in other films set in harsh climates, and instead focuses on its subjects and the structures in which they live. We see Vukvukai, fully aware that the camera is watching him, teaching his grandchildren in both Chukchi and Russian, or his deadpan banter with his wife and sons. We see the blushing children trying to learn from their elders or play in the snow. Even after the tribe members move to summer pastures there’s still this closeness and rawness to the brown grass and to the children fishing in the waters nearby.

The only times he would use long shots is when he wants to show the majestic herd of (rein)deer. He makes the men look small compared to the herd. Their strong bodies harness the deer that they need for their food and livelihood, the numbers of both sides prove the tribe’s adequately regenerative self-sustainability.

My Dogville comparison is strange, I admit, but both movies are about small communities facing whatever it is that’s invisibly looming from the outside. As many scenes as there are devoted to watching these children play, a chapter later in the movie shows a helicopter arriving to fly the Chukchi children into a compulsory residential school. The phrase ‘residential school’ triggers memories of national trauma here in Canada, where teachers abused First Nations children. Vukvukai and Vakhrushev’s worries are more subtle yet sincere. We automatically empathize with him, telling Vakhrushev that taking away someone’s children is always a strange concept. The former ends his monologue with exclamatory remarks about the ‘stupid law’ without being preachy about it. Movies about any way of life are always presented with that way of life being threatened, but again, Vahkrushev knows to document his subjects behaving in an instinctual way, engendering this idea that native cultures are not just a part of the past but are equally strong today.

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Toronto After Dark 2012: Grabbers Review (Robert Harding)

Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2012

Grabbers (2012)

Starring Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley, Russel Tovey, and Lalor Roddy

Directed by Jon Wright

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival crowd was out in full force for the festival opener and Toronto premiere of the Irish/UK creature feature, Grabbers. While the film has been likened to Tremors time and time again, I’d have to say that it’s a disservice to Grabbers and its fans. As much as I love the Tremors franchise (and yes the word Grabbers is similar to Graboids), this whiskey filled feature was more akin to Shaun of the Dead and Gremlins than anything else.

When bloodsucking aliens invade an island located off the coast of Ireland, it’s up to a ragtag bunch of locals to defeat them. It doesn’t look hopeful, but when the group discovers that these squid-like bloodsuckers don’t like the sweet taste of alcohol it becomes a race to see who can get drunk the fastest.

Genre films often pay tribute/homage to other films and while self-referential films and homage work really well in small amounts, it takes a well written and told story (similar to Cabin in the Woods) to pull off large-scale tributes. Without clever writing, the film can come across as predictable, unoriginal and in a worst case scenario, a blatant rip-off. While Grabbers doesn’t come across as the latter, it unfortunately does tend to be very predictable with an overwhelming sense of ‘been there, done that’.

Luckily, Grabbers also has a lot of positive things going for it. The film looks fantastic with a nice glossy luster that gives it a bigger budget appearance. I’m not one to champion the use of CG in any film, but the CG in Grabbers does a very good job of blending in with the natural surroundings and rarely looks out of place. The characters are a little cliche, but the actors do a great job portraying them. Their acting, combined with some great jokes and comedic moments help keep the film from being boring.

Grabbers is not without flaws, but thanks to some great camera work and fantastic performances from the actors it manages to be one of the better creature features to be released in quite a while. While the film feels very familiar thanks to paying homage to many well known genre films, pulling from such films as Gremlins, Alien, and Shaun of the dead, it also means that it has pulled some great material. In a sub-genre that has become littered of late with nature run amok films full of giant sharks, crocodiles and snakes, Grabbers is a nice addition that I welcome with open tentacles.

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