Even in this day and digital age of YouTube and GoPro, it’s still a small miracle to successfully actualize a fully fledged feature film. And it’s triple impressive when a single person takes on the bulk of the workload behind the camera. Shane Carruth is a perfect example of this trendy precedent. His achievement with Primer (2004), and the even more critically-acclaimed follow-up Upstream Color (2013), inspired a small army of young indie filmmakers to embrace a DIY approach and take the reigns on all the most crucial filmmaking elements—directing, writing, producing, shooting, and editing—all by themselves. Perry Blackshear is one such soldier. He’s done it all and more for his feature debut, tackling the sound design as well (an element almost as vital as directing in this particular case). The result is the mysteriously moody, and fantastically-titled, They Look Like People. But, when a finished film meanders with its story and characters as much as this one does, it becomes little more than an exercise in style.

The story follows Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), a shaggy drifter who just came out of a long relationship and randomly bumps into childhood friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel). He, too, is feeling the effects of a broken relationship, still holding on to his ex-girlfriend’s things in his tiny New York apartment. The two instantly rekindle their boys-will-be-boys dynamic, but it’s not long before Wyatt’s current state of mind is exposed as downright certifiable: he gets mysterious calls in the middle of the night, and voices speak to him of monsters who look just like people infecting human minds and preparing to wage war. Wyatt is convinced this must be true because it coincides with the supremely creepy flashbacks he has of his ex-girlfriend (presumably), and various other oddities he finds in Christian’s house, not least of which is a “rape-y” basement (as one girl in the film calls it) that becomes Wyatt’s workshop in preparing for battle.

As a project resting almost entirely on the shoulders of its writer-director, They Look Like People is an accomplished little psychological thriller that, more than anything else, shows a megaton of promise for Blackshear. There is a very keen sense of cinematic mood-setting and an intricately layered use of sound (the buzzing of flies, the creaking of floorboards, etc.) that form a tangible atmosphere enticing enough to raise the hairs on the back of most horror fans’ necks. And, major credit must go to the director for never over-indulging with the scares, keeping the really meaty stuff firmly lodged in the audience member’s imagination, and creating an emotionally stirring climax that could’ve devolved into something much tackier were it in another genre director’s hands.

Once we delve into the story and the characters, however, a number of issues arise. We never find out much about either Wyatt or Christian to truly feel their suffering, the editing feels purposefully rushed, which at times works to great comedic effect (“you got a second?” cut to: back-shaving), but mostly creates a disingenuously choppy storyline, and the pacing stretches one’s attention spans to its nadir. There’s a moment in a whisper room that’s a great example of how a scene can detach from a film’s plot and float in the film’s atmosphere, signifying nothing and serving only to show an audience what a whisper room is. With that in mind, They Look Like People is tough to recommend as a viewing experience, but as an experiment in cinematic mood placement it fires on all cylinders. Most importantly, it should serve to propel its clearly talented writer-director-producer-DP-editor-sound designer onto much bigger and better things.

Trevor Juras’ debut feature The Interior follows James (Patrick McFadden), a man who abruptly quits his well-paying job to go live as a hermit in a forest on the other side of the country. It’s a slow burn of a horror film, but as I said in my review Juras’ unique approach makes The Interior one of the more interesting horror debuts in recent memory. With a lengthy prelude, frequent tonal shifts, excellent cinematography and some truly intense scenes in the film’s latter half, Juras quickly establishes himself as a young filmmaker to keep an eye on.

On the day of The Interior‘s world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, I spoke with Juras about The Interior and his earlier short film The Lamp (which you can watch here). The Interior is currently seeking distribution.

How did The Interior come about?
I wanted to do a lost in the woods film for a long time, probably dating all the way back to when I first saw The Blair Witch Project. My first real serious stab at it was a few years ago when I wrote a script about a man and a woman in the woods, and it was kind of cliché. It was less of a horror film and more of a relationship film with some horror elements. That didn’t really appeal to me, so I shelved it for a while. Then I thought, “What if I tried to do something that’s just one person?” And that’s how it started.

When you were starting The Interior did you know from the beginning it was going to be a horror film?
The initial idea was to be as pure of a horror film as possible. It didn’t really turn out that way. The first 25 minutes are very different from the latter two-thirds of the film. That was a bit more of a conscious decision because so many horror films have 20, 30, 40 minutes of exposition before you get to what you’re there for. And I thought that if I’m going to have that kind of thing, then I want it to be as different, entertaining and funny as possible before I really shift gears to more of a traditional kind of horror feel.

Did you find it challenging to write about one character in solitude?
It was easier because I didn’t have to write a whole bunch of dialog. When two people are in the woods it’s probably non-stop talking and lots of conflict. With this, I was just trying to put myself in the situation, which was not too hard to do. I stayed in a log cabin for 10 days about a year ago and I’ve gone camping by myself, I have some experience being alone out in the middle of nowhere, so I just drew from that.

Both The Interior and The Lamp are disarming films in some ways since they can quickly turn into different films altogether. Are you drawn to making your films unpredictable like that?
Definitely. I don’t know how much of a conscious decision it is, but I love films where I don’t know what’s coming. Whether it’s a stylistic shift, a plot shift or a dramatic character shift, I just love not knowing what’s coming next. I kind of instinctively write from that angle.

Some sequences in The Interior reminded me of silent films.
That’s an interesting observation because I think it comes more from the lead [Patrick McFadden]. He seems like in a past life he was a silent film star. I worked with him on a couple short films, and I was aware of what his strengths are, and one of those strengths is his ability to emote very authentically without being over the top. You can really see what’s going on. He’s got a lot of drama naturally in his face, and he’s great at a kind of silent movie acting. I think a lot of it comes from him. I definitely tailored the part for him, it sort of organically came out that way.

I noticed that you had a couple of cast and crew members from The Lamp and your other shorts involved with The Interior as well. Would you say you work with a close-knit group?
It kind of turned into one. Shaina Silver-Baird, the actress from The Lamp, is in The Interior as well, along with Andrew Hayes who plays the boss. He was actually my colleague and then my actual boss. I had a day job in the casting world for a long time, and Shaina is someone I auditioned. I like working with people again because I can write a part with people specifically in mind. I didn’t do any auditioning for The Interior at all. I just assigned parts and didn’t even rehearse, they just showed up. I knew they could do it because I know them really well, and I was able to write something for them specifically, which is really fun for me.

Was it an easy shoot then?
It seemed like a pretty easy shoot. It was fast and furious, so all the stress came from how fast we had to shoot. We shot for ten days in British Columbia first, and then we shot three days in Toronto for the opening 25 minutes of the film. The three days in Toronto were pretty hectic because it’s a lot of stuff to cover in three days. We were running from location to location, sometimes three locations in one day. I’m pretty economical. I like working fast, I like having a little bit of pressure, but not to the point where I’m pulling my hair out. It really worked out, just being able to whip these shots off fast. I like just a couple takes. I don’t like to linger too long.

The cinematography is great, especially the way you shoot the forest at nighttime. How did you and the cinematographer come up with the look of the film?
Well, step one was the location. We shot on an island called Saltspring Island, which is part of a chain of islands between the mainland and Vancouver Island. I had gone there a year earlier on vacation and really fell in love with the look. It doesn’t even look real, it looks like something out of a fantasy film. And then for the nighttime shots, [cinematographer] Othello Ubalde and I were really adamant about it not looking lit. We wanted it to look as real as possible. We did have a battery-powered light out there, but we only used it for the dream sequence that happens later in the film. Other than that it’s just a high-powered flashlight. We were careful about where we were pointing it and where we had the camera sitting to sort of maximize the spread of the beam, but that’s all. We wanted to keep it really, really dark and really quiet and make it look as natural as possible. To me, that is the scariest thing. When you see a film that takes place in the woods and you can see other lights, it can look really beautiful, but it definitely doesn’t have that authentic [feeling], and that’s what we were going for.

It must be challenging in some way to make a film about someone’s largely internal conflicts. How were you able to communicate that information to viewers?
I think by virtue of it being only about one character who’s out there alone. That’s sort of the only way to go with it because he doesn’t have anyone to bounce his feelings off of or anything like that. That was probably the biggest challenge. A lot of that came together in the editing room. We shot, shot, shot, and then I had an idea of what the film was gonna be, but when I sat down in the editing room I really understood what I had and what I was doing. I find that happens a lot to me with my short films. I think I’m making one thing, and then it turns out to be something else, and almost always for the better.

You use a lot of classical music for the score.
It’s a personal preference. I love classical music. I almost think of what I do as very elaborate music videos. Often the music comes before the scene. The scene in Toronto where James sabotages his own career, [the music] came first. When I was listening to it I thought of the whole scenario, and surprisingly it came out exactly how I pictured it. I love using classical music and a big part of that is, well, it’s public domain. I have a friend who’s a world-class pianist, so he had some recordings that I used and we did a few recordings for the movie. Public domain music is some of the best music of all-time. It’s stood the test of time, and there’s so much complexity, drama and intellect in the music that I find it does a lot of heavy lifting. You throw on a piece of music like that, and you want to do justice to the music. It’s sort of the music that was in my head as I was conceiving the film.

Are you working on anything new?
Well we just finished the film over a week ago…

Really?
Yeah [Laughs]. I don’t remember the exact quote but the last 10% was like 80% of it. We did so much so quickly, and the last little bit was just agonizingly slow, just little tiny pieces that we had to get in place. I have started writing something new. I have three competing ideas, and one I like the most would be more similar to the first 25 minutes of The Interior, similar in that kind of tone. Definitely a character-driven piece. I have an idea, but as I finish writing it, it’ll probably be very different.

Do you want to avoid making something with genre elements for your next project?
We’ll see what happens. I do like genre films, but I love directors like Lars Von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson and The Coen Brothers. I really love South Korean cinema. With The Lamp, I was surprised that it played genre festivals. I didn’t expect that, I thought it was more of a drama piece. I didn’t think a festival like Toronto After Dark would be interested. I submitted it on the advice of a friend and it got accepted, but the idea that I’m working on right now doesn’t have as much of a genre feel on it. There is horror, but it’s kind of a real world horror. A society gone wrong kind of horror as opposed to a horror movie.

Sion Sono is one of my favourite directors working today, and I feel like I need to get that fact out of the way before delving into Tag, which happens to be one of six (!) Sono films coming out in 2015. Much like his fellow countryman and filmmaker Takashi Miike, Sono’s output is prolific and seemingly designed to defy all categories, whether it’s a four-hour epic about cults and upskirt photography (Love Exposure), a grim drama about the Fukushima nuclear disaster (The Land of Hope), a hip-hop gangster musical (Tokyo Tribe), or a gonzo ode to celluloid filmmaking (Why Don’t You Play in Hell?). The point is that, when it comes to Sono, it’s best to expect the unexpected. Tag is yet another insane, baffling whatsit from the cult filmmaker, and it’s amazingly just as strong, original, and entertaining as some of his strongest work.

Going into the plot is a fool’s errand, since the only sensical thing in Tag happens to be its three-part structure. The film opens with a school bus full of Japanese girls going on a trip, with the camera focusing on shy student Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) writing some poetry in her notebook. She drops her pen, and right when she bends down to pick it up a gust of wind slices the bus in half lengthwise, sending the upper torsos of everyone on the bus flying onto the street. Mitsuko survives thanks to bending down at just the right moment, but the gust of wind soon comes back to finish her off. She outruns it, winding up back in her hometown as all of her friends start heading to class for yet another school day. Was Mitsuko dreaming? Was the evil wind real?

Needless to say, things soon get crazier for Mitsuko, and revealing any more of the bloody, surreal highlights in Tag would be a disservice. This is the sort of film that’s ideal for the midnight screening crowd, with so many left turns and howlingly funny spurts of violence, it’ll be difficult not to embrace Sono’s gleeful insanity. And just when things couldn’t get stranger, Sono pulls a Buñuel and recasts his lead character with two other actresses. Mitsuko soon discovers that she’s turned into Keiko (Mariko Shinoda), a bride-to-be, and by the third act, Keiko transforms into marathon runner Izumi (Erina Mano). How these three women link together doesn’t really matter, although Sono does provide an answer by the end. Whether or not it’s a satisfactory answer is beside the point, since this is a film more about the bloody, fast-paced journey than the destination.

The only big problem with Tag that holds it back from being top-tier Sono is its lack of material. Sono wrote the screenplay himself (based off a novel by Yusuke Yamada, although Sono supposedly never read the source material until filming started), and despite running at a pretty lean 85 minutes, there’s a lot of padding. This is especially apparent in the first act, when most of Mitsuko’s scenes wind up being overlong, repetitive montages and/or chase scenes (but, to be fair, Tag pretty much is one long chase sequence). It’s a little concerning to see the film spinning its wheels so much, but Sono’s constant use of drones keep things crackling visually, and there’s always the promise of something new and crazy right around the corner. People can think whatever they want about Sono’s work, but no one can say he’s ever short on ingenuity.

But Tag isn’t just about its irrationally entertaining surface. It might be hard to track during the finale’s shift from action to horror to dystopian sci-fi, but there’s a clear message about claiming one’s own identity and freedom buried under all of the film’s eccentricities. That’s kind of expected from Sono, though, and expecting some sort of emotional resonance from a film that opens with dozens of high schoolers getting sliced in two might be asking for a little too much. Either way, I was thoroughly entertained by Tag and its hyperactive, hyper-violent story. The fact that Sono can still make something this baffling and enjoyable so many films into his career is kind of an achievement in itself.

Tag had its North American premiere on August 3rd at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit http://www.fantasiafestival.com

Even though it’s been nearly 40 years since Steve Jobs introduced the Apple II, and nearly 25 years since America Online introduced that infamous catchphrase “You’ve Got Mail,” cyber law has always lagged behind the times. This phenomenon reared its ugly head in 2010 when a gay Rutgers University student committed suicide after his roommate live-streamed his sexual encounters via a webcam. Was his roommate responsible for murder?

Of course, cyberbullying is ubiquitous, and director Seok-jae Hong takes us into the heads of a group of college-aged Internet friends who all hang out in an internet cafe in Seoul, South Korea. Things get heated when Min (Yun-Kyoung Ha), a frequent internet troll in various online communities, posts an inflammatory tweet about a military man who has recently committed suicide. Ji-woong (Yo-han Byeon) and Yong-min (Lee Ju-Seung), who know each other from their training to be police offers, take the tweet personally. Yong-min, the more hotheaded of the two, encourages Ji-woong to join the onslaught of hate tweets the group are hurling back and forth with Min. Incensed by her insensitive remarks, the group decides they’re going to head to her house for a real-life “PK” (a gamer term for “player kill”). Although the line of what is actually meant to occur is blurred (as if often the case in conflicts that begin online), presumably nobody actually intended to kill her, just humiliate her—perfect fodder for an online show one of the guys hosts. But when they get to her apartment, the young woman is already dead from an apparent suicide, and the students are appropriately horrified. Therein starts the main question of the film: Was it suicide, or was Min murdered?

Ji-woong and Yong-min decide to put their police training to good use, investigating Min’s murder for themselves. The fact that Twitter may have played a direct role in her death doesn’t seem to deter the two friends (or their gang of gamers) at all, as they decide to show large parts of their investigation on a YouTube show, a manic rendering of all the latest Internet gossip. The popularity of the show leads to online Reddit-style communities looking for Min’s killer, eventually spawning subthreads when primary suspects emerge. Yong-min convinces Ji-woong that their future careers are on the line (who is going to hire two guys who were involved with a young woman’s murder?), so when a message appears on one of the forums from a witness, they decide to meet the anonymous poster in person. This turns out to be the first of several leads that bring them closer to understanding if it’s really possible for someone as confident as Min to kill herself, or if someone else was to blame.

The film has some real things going for it. The script (also written by director Seok-jae Hong) manages to refrain from feeling overly didactic because of Hong’s apparent knowledge of the nuances of gamer culture. The script does a good job of showing how easy things can snowball, how normal these actions feel at the time, and how the cycle repeats itself because no one actually stops to connect the dots of online actions and real-life outcomes. Since a lot of the movie actually involves text overlays on the screen (showing what’s being said on Twitter or in chatrooms), it’s imperative to the film’s success that these interactions feel real, and to Hong’s credit they do. Also helpful is that the three leads (Ji-woong, Yong-min, and Min) feel fairly comfortable in surprisingly conflicted roles (at times, it’s easy to hate each character for their disregard, while at other times their naiveté feels all too relatable). The only exchange that’s a little jolted is an ex-classmate of Min’s who serves as nothing more than a conduit for a flashback about Min’s poor reaction to an in-class writing workshop, revealing that Min might not be as confident as she appears to me. It’s as close as the film comes to telling, not showing. The film’s much more confident when following the young men, who are harmless oddballs individually but vicious when unified by the exhilarating power of shared online hate.

But as spot-on as the dialogue and interactions of the group of guys are, the hunt for Min’s killer is a bit halfhearted. It follows a more generic pattern for the mystery genre, and there are some obvious plot holes too (how do the guys keep returning to Min’s apartment to shoot their little YouTube videos?). Then Ji-woong, in most regards the more reasonable one, decides to steal Min’s laptop to search for evidence. Would the police not have already confiscated it? The saving grace here is that the ending does turn out to be a bit unexpected and reinforces the major theme of the film: how insidious online harassment can be. Without consequences, it festers on and on to more extreme outcomes. It seems the script is more interested in making a point than creating a fully fleshed out story—and since that point is well worth making, it’s actually easy to forgive some of these holes. With cyberbullying becoming more like an epidemic with each passing day, Socialphobia should make for a timely addition to the discussion.

Socialphobia had its Quebec premiere on August 1st at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit http://www.fantasiafestival.com/

One lazy afternoon when I was a kid, I came across Ranald MacDougall’s 1959 film The World, the Flesh and the Devil on UHF; I’ve been a fan of post-apocalyptic films ever since. I can’t speak to whatever deep-rooted psychological reasons fuel this in me, but what I find most interesting about the sub-genre is each filmmaker’s vision of what the future will look like after a global catastrophe, whether that disaster is natural or man-made. The latest glance at what a filmmaker thinks of the world’s bleak future can be found in Orion, from writer/director Asiel Norton.

David Arquette plays the Hunter, a man wandering alone in a desolate world known as The Rust. The shell of a large parking garage where he scavenges suggests civilization once thrived not that long ago (about a century, according to opening title cards), but the rat he is forced to trap and eat is the mascot for just how far that civilization has fallen. Meanwhile, Magus (Goran Kostic), a magician, helps deliver the baby of the Virgin (Lily Cole), but Magus disposes of the child in accordance with a ritual as documented in a large tome he possesses. The Virgin is then held captive by Magus. As the Hunter wanders, he comes across the home where Magus and the Virgin live, and the magician invites the Hunter in for a meal. While there, the Virgin desperately but discreetly asks the Hunter to help her escape. One thing Magus, the Virgin, and the Hunter all know is that there is something greater at work in the universe—a destiny for the Hunter they all will help fulfill.

Orion might take place in a post-apocalyptic world, but it isn’t a post-apocalyptic film; other than some hollowed-out buildings and some props, there is no real connection to life before the catastrophe. The story (such as it is) could have just as easily taken place in ancient Europe, and one gets the sense that the century-removed, post-apocalyptic backstory/setting was a creative decision driven by the sets available for filming. An approach of using what is available might embody the spirit of independent filmmaking, and the dilapidated buildings and other “civilization used to be here” settings all look terrific, but none of that matters if the storytelling doesn’t work.

Orion‘s storytelling doesn’t work; in fact, it’s threadbare. The construct is interesting enough: a man must fulfill his destiny, and part of that destiny is rescuing the damsel in distress whom he falls in love with. There’s a bad guy that is both the obstacle to saving the girl and yet part of the greater destiny, and there is a smaller character (the Fool, played by Maren Lord), who helps the hero. It has the potential for depth and density, but instead it is a shell of a story, like an outline sketched as a placeholder for something greater.

Norton is far more interested in reveling in his own directorial style than he is in creating anything substantive. He establishes his story, dolls it up with some mysticism, some title cards with Olde Tyme font, some nudity, and some Tarot-like storytelling device, then clings to an endless series of shaky, hand-held close-ups (close-ups that ultimately undermine any action taking place during the Hunter/Magnus battles) and long scenes of the Hunter pondering his destiny. These ponderous scenes, which include clips of what the Hunter is thinking (foretelling?) are replete with pseudo-mysterious dialogue (“He’s coming. He’s me.”) delivered via voiceover and incessantly repeated at various volume levels. It feels like watching a medieval perfume commercial.

Throw in some Christian symbolism to give the tale a little spiritual heft, and Norton wants you to think he’s made something deep. He hasn’t. He’s committed a live-action RPG to film and acted as its middling game master.

The cast is fine although mostly unchallenged by the material, with the exception of Kostic as Magus. The character, while not deep, has some scenery-chewing moments and Kostic delivers. When Norton allows the camera to occasionally open up, Lyn Moncrief’s cinematography is quite nice. It also bears repeating that that the sets are very good, along with the costumes.

Another facet of post-apocalyptic films that draws me to them is the opportunity to ponder if I could survive in that creator’s imagined realm. I like to think that in most cases I would, but if ever I were faced with the choice of dying during the apocalypse or living in Asiel Norton’s future, well, tell my family I love them.

Orion made its World Premiere on August 1st at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit www.fantasiafestival.com

Calling Trevor Juras’ debut The Interior a horror film might come across as a little disingenuous, considering its genre elements show up in the film’s final stretch. As the title suggests, this is a film dealing with internal issues. James (Patrick McFadden) has a well-paying job and nice apartment in Toronto, but he’s chronically miserable. After getting called in on a Sunday, James loses it, getting himself fired and winding up with a new job as an air duct cleaner. But his new job doesn’t change things for him, so he flees to a forest in British Columbia, living as a hermit.

Juras certainly has ambition to spare, and his blending of different cinematic styles gives The Interior the honour of being one of the more interesting genre debuts in recent memory. The opening act in Toronto feels like a standard indie comedy about (yet another) white male’s arrested development, the piano-based score and aversion to dialogue feels indebted to silent films, and once the film transitions to the wilderness it goes into European arthouse territory (the title card doesn’t appear until James ends up in BC, a choice that implies this is where the film really begins). For a genre that’s criticised for its reliance on tropes and conventions, it’s always welcome to see a horror film willing to take risks.

And in this case, Juras’ risk pays off. The prelude in the city is hit and miss, with James’ sardonic attitude quickly growing stale, but things pick up considerably once he goes off to live in solitude. The cinematography by Othello J. Ubalde—also making his feature debut—takes full advantage of the forest’s ethereal beauty and intimidating vastness, and Juras nails down a sort of casual tone that makes his film’s long, wordless stretches surprisingly involving.

But once James starts noticing someone (or something) appears to be following him, Juras and Ubalde use the forest to crank up the tension considerably. Once nighttime hits everything becomes pitch black, and the image of James wandering around with nothing but his flashlight showing what’s in front of him makes it impossible not to tense up wondering what might be lurking if he were to shine his light a few feet in another direction. It’s in these later sections of the film that The Interior really works best as a fascinating character study. It’s a film following someone whose fears make him travel so far inward that he winds up coming out of the other side of reality into madness and horror. Even though some of Juras’ attempts don’t entirely work, it’s still nice to see someone actually trying to do something different. And I personally can’t wait to see what Juras tries next.

The Interior makes its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival on July 27th. To find out more about the festival, visit www.fantasiafestival.com

I’m not quite old enough to say I “grew up with” Monty Python, but I certainly became a fan of theirs in the 1980s, thanks mostly to reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS and the availability on their great films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1979) on VHS. Countless re-watches of those things and more led to memorization of scenes, bits, and lines, each countlessly recited by me and the guys at my lunch table, to the point that the legendary comedy troupe had become a considerable pop culture force in my life. I haven’t see the entirety of their collective work, but I’ve seen enough to call myself a loyal fan.

The primary narrative of the nonlinear documentary Monty Python: The Meaning of Live focuses on the historic live reunion show the troupe performed for 10 nights at the O2 Arena in London in July 2014. The show was titled Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five To Go. The “mostly” references the fact that some of the bits in the show are recorded and appear onscreen, at times in concert with the live portion. The subtitle is a little gallows humor referencing that five of the Pythons—John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin—are still with us while the sixth, Graham Chapman, passed away in 1989.

Those five surviving members fully participated in the show, which was an old-time revue consisting of a blend of new comedic material, old and new musical numbers, and classic Python sketches (with the men reprising the roles they had made famous some 30+ years prior; where necessary, the Pythons filled in for Chapman’s characters). Behind the scenes, the doc reveals the surprising reason for the reunion and captures everything from the show’s inception to its production, including Idle’s early creative process (the troupe tapped him to write all the new material for the show), table reads, dress rehearsals, promotional media appearances, backstage scrambling, etc. Parts of the show itself are also shown, although no single sketch is shown in its entirety.

The O2 shows were historic because the last time the living Pythons performed together was at the Hollywood Bowl in 1980 (that concert film—Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl—was released in 1982). The troupe had appeared together en masse in non-performing contexts since then, and they had performed in subsets since then, but only the O2 shows (originally conceived as a single performance, but eventually expanded to 10) featured full performances by the surviving five members.

This is the part of Monty Python: The Meaning of Live that is a big wet kiss to Python fans everywhere. It is glorious to see these septuagenarians perform the sketches and bits that made them famous, to do so at a comedic level that newcomers a third their ages would die to attain, and to show a spark in their eyes that belies the wrinkles around them. It’s also wonderful to watch the men interact, both onstage and off. This troupe is more than just an old comedy group; they are akin to a legendary rock band getting back together to reminisce about the past, play the greatest hits, and revel in the glory one more time.

That wet kiss, though, is pretty sloppy. The secondary narrative, the one more structured like a traditional documentary, is about an 80/20 blend of nostalgia and history, dating back to the troupe’s beginning days and running through the Hollywood Bowl performance. It’s a high-level history that covers moments in time like bullet points, albeit bullet points with hysterical pictures and video clips. It is a threadbare history of the troupe and its players, although not entirely without impact; the memories of Chapman still hurt, and they suit the presentation style particularly well.

Most striking about the Pythons’ present-day group dynamic is how positive they all are. It is clear these men recognize the history they are making and might never get the chance to make again, given their ages and individual schedules. It’s a bittersweetness that is never outwardly expressed, yet it is undeniably present. In fact, this “last great ride” vibe clearly affects the Pythons, or the filmmakers, or (I suspect) both in how their history is recalled and/or (selectively?) represented. The good old days weren’t always good, as the saying goes, but you wouldn’t know it from this doc.  There isn’t a sense that anything onscreen is disingenuous, but it’s clear that the finality of today influences the perception of yesterday.

Monty Python: The Meaning of Live caters almost exclusively to existing fans. Because of the selective history presented and the rose-colored glasses through which that history is viewed, there isn’t enough to educate a Python neophyte. Also, because the sketch clips shown from various sources are incomplete, there is no way to give a newcomer a sense of what Python was all about. The film is still entertaining and someone new to Python won’t have a bad time, but at its best, the film is a whimsical companion piece to Python’s overall body of work.

Monty Python: The Meaning of Live made its Quebec Premiere on July 26th at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

I am by no means a horror movie junkie. That said, having hit my stride as a teen in the ’80s, the era that ushered in the multiplex boom, VHS rentals, and more cable channels than anyone could possibly need (okay, we needed them all), I watched a fair share of horror movies as a kid. This included the Holy Slasher Trinity (Michael, Jason, and Freddy) on VHS, Universal and Hammer films on UHF, and every B-movie on every channel I could get my hands on, long before the MST3K guys came along. Fortunately, there were more than enough movies around that I could avoid watching those with bugs at their core. I hate bugs. It’s a thing with me. From my youth to yesterday, I deftly avoided watching bug horror. Today, the streak is over thanks to Chad Archibald’s Bite.

Casey (Elma Begovic) is a pretty 20-something bride-to-be who, not too long before her nuptials to Jared (Jordan Gray), takes a bachelorette party trip to Costa Rica with her two best friends Jill and Kirsten (Annette Wozniak and Denise Yuen, respectively). While there, three major things occur: she reveals she’s not too sure she’s ready for marriage (for several reasons), she makes some poor decisions after partying too hard, and she gets bitten by a bug while swimming.

Upon returning home, Casey decides she is going to postpone the wedding. As she musters up the courage to have that talk with Jared, she takes ill, and that illness has some serious symptoms, including a heightened sense of hearing, a festering lesion on her leg, and an inability to keep down any food. As the days pass, Casey’s physical condition worsens, and her psychological condition suffers as a result. Eventually, she wonders exactly what it was that bit her and what that bite still has in store.

The good news (at least for me) is that, while Bite has a plot driven by bugginess, there is very little about it that’s buggy. The better news is that, overall, this is a pretty good film.

I was concerned at first, as the opening minutes of Bite give the impression it is a “found footage” horror film, a tired sub-genre on its last legs. Jill films the better part of the Costa Rica trip for posterity, and their time at the resort is only ever presented through her lens, but once the girls get home, that video is used for reference or flashback purposes only. Amen to that.

Abandoning the homemade footage and moving to a traditional presentation also allows the viewer to be mesmerized by Jeff Maher’s gorgeous cinematography. Horror is a genre that trades in shadows, and getting the right look is key to setting the proper mood. From the beginning of Casey’s demise, there’s a wonderful haze that looms like a pall over the film. As her condition worsens, Maher shifts his grey/blue/green hues to mostly gold. It’s an unsettling juxtaposition between the warm color scheme and the cold events.

The film also relies on the strength of Begovic, who makes her big-screen debut here. Her performance is terrific. Casey is a character dealing with stressors at multiple levels: a mystery illness, an engagement in doubt, and a suffocating future mother-in-law (who also happens to be her landlord) to name a few. Then there is the added complication of going through a horrific physical transformation as a result of that bite. Begovic manages it all wonderfully, but it’s the physical aspects of her performance that show off her talents the most. It’s something that could easily be overplayed, but her physicality is wonderfully subtle. (What’s most noticeable is how well Begovic performs when she’s alone; she has great skill at conveying thought and emotion through simple but effective facial and body movements.)

Other than the landlord-in-law (Lawrene Denkers) being far too much the caricature, the first half of the film is truly suspenseful stuff. The set-up works, Casey’s multi-layered emotional decline is gripping, and her early physical transformation is perfectly measured. I had memories of Honeymoon and Spring while watching the first half of Bite.

That second half, though, is rough. While Maher and Begovic’s respective work shines, the screenplay unravels at a dizzying pace. Dialogue is stilted, small scenes are either unnecessary or inexplicable, and character behavior goes from straining credulity to shattering that credulity completely. Director Archibald, who co-wrote the film with Jayme Laforest, abandons everything that made the first half work so well, spending the second half making plenty of amateur horror movie mistakes. It dampens the overall film, like when a clever little twist in the second half gets lost in all the madness and gore.

Bite might suffer from a shaky second half, but don’t hold that against the entire film.  This is a very good horror movie with enough overall strength—both in the first half as a whole and in Maher and Begovic’s contributions to the second half—to make it very much worth seeking out.

Bite makes its World Premiere on July 29th at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Taking its cues from the likes of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Observance is yet another horror film to come out of Australia, where the genre seems to be having a resurgence as of late. But instead of going down the same classical and metaphorical route as recent Aussie horror triumph The Babadook, Observance prefers to keep its characters and viewers in the dark. There are some bad things rumbling around in the darkness throughout this film, although director/co-writer Joseph Sims-Dennett doesn’t really have much interest in enlightening anyone on what exactly those things are. That’s part of the danger of taking a low-key approach; play it right and people can stay terrified by what isn’t happening, but play it wrong and, well, nothing happens. Observance doesn’t land firmly on either side of those two possibilities. It lands somewhere around the middle, making it a frustrating experience as it delivers some unnerving jolts within a dull narrative.

Parker (Lindsay Farris) needs a lot of money. After a tragic incident leaves him with a broken marriage and a mountain of debt, Parker goes back into his old line of work as a private investigator. His first assignment has him observing a young woman named Tenneal (Stephanie King) in her apartment over several days, a job that sounds easy but gets progressively strange. Parker gets offered a significant amount of money to stay in an abandoned apartment across the street from Tenneal’s place, provided that he never leaves the building and contacts no one except for his superiors to report what’s happening. The apartment turns out to be a nasty, derelict place, with newspaper lining the walls and God knows what decomposing in every dark corner. Parker, thinking about the money, decides to deal with it and get the job done.

But hey, this is a horror movie, so where’s the fun in watching someone just stare at someone all day and night? It’s soon apparent that Parker should really pay more attention to the building he’s in than Tenneal across the street, because some seriously weird stuff starts happening around him. Sims-Dennett doesn’t really care to let anyone know what’s happening, but he really loves pointing out that whatever’s going on isn’t good, whether it’s slowly zooming in on a bloodstain on the apartment floor (courtesy of Tucker cutting his finger on a rusty nail) or showing Tucker’s increasingly deranged nightmares. There’s a small aura of mystery around whatever Tucker has inadvertently made himself a part of, but some hints dropped early on make it easy to get a sense of where things will end up (perhaps the biggest influence here is Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, a comparison that attentive viewers might quickly pick up on). That makes Observance turn into a waiting game.

One of the nice parts of that wait is how, on a technical level, Observance shines. Rodrigo Vidal-Dawson’s cinematography makes Parker’s temporary living space look perfectly unsettling, letting the empty space of the apartment dominate the frame. The sound design also does a good job sustaining the film’s uncomfortable tone, relying on loud bursts of noise and high frequency in a way that’s surprisingly not obnoxious. The cinematography and sound go a long way in making the film’s few outright horrific sequences land effectively, with one moment in particular providing a really nice fright.

The narrative, on the other hand, drops the ball. Sims-Dennett and co-writer Josh Zammit lean heavily on clichés, like the person who tries to warn the protagonist with vague, useless advice (“You don’t understand, it’s an offering!” someone says to Parker when he sees a dead rat, a line that doesn’t really help clear things up). And at a certain point, it’s hard to believe Parker would even bother staying in that place, especially when he starts vomiting black tar (for some reason, this doesn’t really faze Parker that much). Even worse is when the film switches perspectives from Parker to a different character at a pivotal moment, a choice that makes for a rather anticlimactic ending. Observance may fumble quite a bit when judging it in terms of its writing, but as a mood piece, it’s a far more effective film. Putting its clichés and reliance on withholding information for the sake of mystery aside, there are some undeniably creepy moments peppered throughout. That’s certainly worth something, especially within a genre where it’s rare to see that kind of strong handle on tone.

Observance had its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival on July 19th. To find out more about the festival, visit www.fantasiafestival.com

The Drownsman stars Michelle Mylett as Madison, a young woman we know absolutely nothing about. Madison’s best friend Hannah (Caroline Korycki) just got engaged, and after accepting Hannah’s request to be maid of honour, Madison nearly drowns in an accident. Madison had a vision of a hulking, demonic-looking person locking her in a basement while drowning, and the hallucination now makes her deathly afraid of water. Director Chad Archibald establishes the severity of Madison’s fear by showing her cowering in her bedroom, sobbing because it’s raining outside. I wondered why Madison wasn’t afraid of crying, considering she’s covering herself in tears. I also wondered if Madison freaks out on a particularly humid day in case she starts sweating. Then I realized I was putting more thought into this movie than the writers ever did.

Unfortunately that rainy day also happened to be the day of Hannah’s wedding, and Hannah, now losing patience with her best friend’s behaviour, takes action. Hannah grabs two of Madison’s close friends (Gemma Bird Matheson & Sydney Kondruss) and a spiritual type (Clare Bastable) to contact the spirit haunting Madison and get it to leave. The whole thing is a hoax, though; Hannah’s doing it as a trick to convince Madison to get over her fear. Yet oddly enough this fake ceremony somehow does contact the evil spirit, the ghost of a serial killer whose MO was drowning women, and one by one everyone around Madison gets picked off by the titular villain.

The Drownsman can only travel through water, as it acts like a gateway to his “realm” (the shoddy basement in Madison’s vision) where he proceeds to drown his victims. Like everything else in the film, this brings up a lot of questions. Why does the Drownsman have to kill people in his basement? He can clearly exist in our world, as shown by how he appears in puddles or any pool of water, yet he continues to drag people kicking and screaming into his weird, undefined alternate dimension. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to drown them in the water he uses to travel to our world? And why, as we learn toward the climax of the film, does the Drownsman have a fear of fire? If someone tried to light him on fire, couldn’t he just use the water surrounding him to put it out? He wouldn’t even have to roll, just stop and drop.

I finished The Drownsman with plenty more questions, but sadly I don’t think I’ll ever get any answers. Some of the more basic questions are easy to figure out. This is a low budget, presumably straight to DVD horror film, so the awful acting, terrible dialogue and shoddy direction are all easy to understand. They’re expected to some degree. How a film with such a stupid premise made it past the development phase is something I can’t really figure out. I may have hated The Drownsman, but it’s not completely worthless. Whether it’s intentional or not, the scenes of characters flinching at the presence of water makes for some of the year’s funniest moments. I’ll give The Drownsman credit: it’s the only film I’ve seen where people cower in fear as someone next to them drinks from a bottle of water. There’s something of value there, even if I can’t figure out what it is exactly.

The honeymoon phase is meant to be one of the happiest moments in people’s lives. Which makes it the perfect backdrop for a horror film, of course! Director Leigh Janiak has been itching to make her first feature film for quite some time and finally, together with writing partner Phil Graziadei, she’s concocted a psychological and physical nightmare that’s been terrifying audiences ever since its premiere at South By South West earlier in the year. Now, Honeymoon gets its Canadian premiere in Montreal’s genre festival Fantasia; a perfectly suitable setting.

Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway) are newly weds who have decided to isolate themselves from the rest of the world for their honeymoon, and spend it in Bea’s old childhood place; a cabin by the lake. You’d think just because the cabin is located in Canada everything will be nice and well-mannered, but the young couple have no idea how life-altering a few days in these woods will be. A mysterious beam of light in the middle of the night heralds a dark presence into their lives, and once Bea starts sleepwalking, it all goes pear-shaped.

Janiak doesn’t like to focus on the fact that she’s a woman directing a genuinely engrossing and well-made indie genre film, but those discussing the film online would do well to take note of that. With controlled direction, excellent performances from the two leads, and a diabolical summary of how your better half can be such a pest sometimes, Honeymoon shines a light on a new female directing talent and presents some of the most authentic frights you’ll experience all year round.

To be released September 12, 2014. Look out for our full review right before.