Today began with some sort of police chase and ended with the river on fire. And none of this had anything to do with the film festival but it makes for a hilarious story!
Sadly, we couldn’t make it for the first set of shorts, but we were able to arrive in time for the second block and the feature film. This time the journey there was a lot easier and so was parking (man did I luck out there!) and everything seemed all calm and quiet. But then as we walked the short distance to the theater we were passing a small car parked side the street when suddenly it lit up, started going “WOO-WOO! WOO-WOO!!” and flung itself around in a wild half-crazed U-turn that nearly ended in ramming into a car just minding its own business in the normal traffic pattern. UGH. I HATE the fact unmarked squad cars are a thing. Everyone on the street is suddenly on edge and then out of nowhere came a whole parade of cops, zooming back in forth crisscrossing each other in opposing directions and driving just completely feral. Pretty much all the regular traffic said, “Fuck this” and turned off onto side streets as the wooping and lights continued to barrage everyone’s senses. I have no idea who they were chasing or why or even if they were chasing someone. Maybe they were trying to flush someone out. I don’t know, but the show of force was alarming, and it was all anyone waiting outside the theater could talk about. That was quite the start of the evening! Also fitting it was a horror film festival. One could argue such a show of force and complete disregard for other traffic and people in the streets is horror enough. But I digress.
As I did with last night’s blog entry I will now give a no spoilers teaser for each film we saw.
The Weaver: A foreign film about the ultimate cougar – and not the feline kind. Bonus points for lots of gross moments.
From Beyond: Trippy World War II Steampunkery. Sorta.
Grogan’s Lodge: Possibly the most fucked up thing I have seen in a LONG while. (It’s a Kenyan film and there’s a special kind of horror that is born to colonialism and multi-generational trauma…)
Whisper in the Static: Mean Girls but with an alien static creature somehow involved. (I actually thought this one felt the most genuine because of the all-female cast. They played well into the psychology of youth.)
Beyond Video: Serving up a warm freshly wound tape of nostalgia this one’s set in a VHS rental store. It’s French and weird and what else do I have to say?
Hideous Heart: Space Madness.
Still Up There: An animated film that got super uncomfortably weird.
The Feature Film was Suitable Flesh “An erotic body-swapping horror” which I was 100% expecting to be another excuse to devolve into tentacle porn but guess what? Not a tentacle to be seen! Had a surprisingly coherent story line considering that descriptive blurb. Plus body swapping and a good old fashioned cliche of getting stuck in the madhouse.
After the films finished many in the audience took a brief stroll to the river to observe the “Fire and Water Days” – i.e. a bunch of flaming things floating about the water. And so ends my tales for tonight.