I'm disappearing off the face of the Earth for 4 days.

I've planned myself a fairly rigorous schedule for this weekend. I'll be volunteering at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and, when I'm not working, I'll be seeing as many movies as I'm allowed to. If everything goes as planned, my schedule will look exactly like what you see below. Any time I don't have listed, I'll probably be either eating, walking around, and trying a feeble attempt at networking.

Thursday, April 2nd:
10:15am - 11:40am - Mechanical Love: "Exploring the possibility of love between humans and robots, this film challenges the conceptions of companionship and loneliness in the modern age."

1pm - 2:50pm - Rough Aunties: "A close-knit, multi-racial group of women activists help find justice and healing for victims of child rape in South Africa."

3pm - 9pm - Volunteer work and hopefully dinner.

9:30pm - 11:25pm - We Live In Public: "A provocative look at a frenzied decade in the life of Josh Harris, internet pioneer, social engineer and performance artist."

Friday, April 3rd:
10:45am - 12:15pm - Utopia, Part 3: "A monument to consumerism, the South China Mall is missing two important pieces: stores and shoppers." And on the B-roll, Supermen of Malegaon: "Documenting a localized remake of Superman in economically depressed Malegaon, India, this film captures a very particular example of the primal fun of movies around the world."

1:00pm - 2:55pm - I may or may not have time to see Salt and Salonica, since they end almost at 3pm, but I will try to see them. If not, I will just matriculate, network, and hang out. I guess eating lunch will be a good idea.

3pm - 9pm - Volunteer work.

10pm - 11:50pm - Bitch Academy: "In St. Petersburg, bitch really is the new black as attractive and accomplished young women enroll in the Vixen Academy to learn how to “turn off their heads” around men and dance like strippers for imaginary sugar daddies."

Saturday, April 4th:
8am - 6pm - Volunteer work. This is the long day of work, where I put in all those hours for all the free film I'm getting to see. Whew. And if I still have the energy.....

8:30pm - 10:30pm - Boy, Interrupted: "Filmmaker Dana Perry reveals an extraordinarily personal document of her son’s mental illness and the grief and questions surrounding his suicide at the age of 15."

10:45pm - 12:20 am - Miroir Noir: "Arcade Fire makes beautiful and moody music and Vincent Morrisett has made a beautiful and moody film about the making of their critically acclaimed 2007 album Neon Bible."

Sunday, April 5th:
10:30am - 12:30pm - This Sporting Life Panel: "Filmmakers and subjects from our series come together to discuss the allure and profound success of the sports film genre."

3pm - 6pm - Volunteer work.

After this, there's a rescreening of award winners, so hopefully I will get to see a film that I missed three days prior. As you can imagine, I will review every film I see, when I get the time, for this blog. Stick around!

Seed

There's very few films that have made me feel physically ill when the end credits roll. This sort of physical reaction is reserved for such films that are so powerful and uncompromising they drain me of emotion and cause me physical pain. I consider that an achievement for a film, and I tend to give films due credit for doing so. Funny Games (1997) and Irreversible (2002) are two films bestowed with such an achievement. I would like to add another film to that list, and that film is Seed.

Congratulations, Uwe Boll, your film made me physically sick after watching it.

You still suck as a director, and here's why.

Seed is a horror film about a serial killer in the late seventies in the United States. Caught after a series of grizzly murders, he is sentenced to death by electrocution. Having miraculously survived two electrocutions in a row, the prison warden fears that they will have to release him if he survives a third (a popular urban legend). They decide to bury him alive in a cemetery. Seed (the name of the killer) escapes and wreaks a path of revenge upon those who sentenced him to death.

This movie starts out surprisingly well. The dark, barely lit atmosphere hearkens back to the fear brought about in such classics as Alien or Halloween, where what you didn't see was just as important as what you did. The fear of the unknown and what lurks in the darkness can be a wonderful device. We see glimpses of Seed as he grabs his victims out of the darkness, and it's genuinely scary. Boll carries this for about 25 minutes before abandoning that concept completely. Shooting the villain from a wide angle in broad daylight may work for an action film, but it tanks a slasher film. Once Boll pulls the curtain away and exposes Seed as what he truly is, a man who looks like an overweight professional wrestler with a potato sack on his head, there's no more fear. This is one of the most basic concepts of horror cinema, and Boll misses the point completely.

In fact, this entire film is one missed point. Boll has been interviewed before as saying that to be a successful filmmaker, one has to be edgy. Whether it's a violent edge, a sexual edge, any sort of edge. You have to be edgy to get your name out there. Apparently, this means utilizing actual animal torture footage (obtained by PETA for the film) and having, most notably, a 10 minute shot of Seed torturing a woman to death with a hammer. I say woman, because frankly I have no idea who she was. It wasn't anyone I recognized from anywhere else in the film. Boll could have completely cut the scene out of the film, and the audience would have just chugged on oblivious to the missing scene (and would have been better off). This occurs with most of the deaths in the film. There's very little introduction into any of the "main" characters, and the protagonist's family only gets a few minutes of screen time. Why should we care if anything happens to them? If Boll's appealing to our basic human instincts then, sure, I don't want to see a little girl get tortured to death. But that's way too easy. Anyone can put a faceless puppy in front of an oncoming train, shoot it with a movie camera and proclaim, "See! You want this dog to live, but I will not do it! Ahaha, notice how I play with your emotions. I am such a skilled director!"

Why include such a disgusting and unsettling scenes in the film? Why include such obvious torture porn? I mentioned the two films, Funny Games and Irreversible, at the beginning of this review for a reason: both feature grisly scenes, both feature long unbearable takes. The difference between those two works of art and this rotting turd is that they're included with a purpose. Haneke indicts the audience in Funny Games, exposing us as just as guilty as the two kidnappers for having a lust for violence and entertainment. Boll may claim such, but to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, "if you gave him an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox." There's no deeper message here. There's no entertainment. No one is scared, no one is frightened. They're just disgusted. Anyone can set up a camera, torture someone to death, and then burn it onto a DVD. That doesn't make them a good filmmaker. Uwe Boll succeeded at failing to do anything but turn my stomach. Was that your intention? Great. I look forward to your next release of "Maggots and Shit" or something as equally vapid.

I am Omega

I Am Omega is a 2007 straight to DVD release by the now infamous film producers The Asylum. Released one month before it's blockbuster counterpart, I Am Omega chronicles the adventures of a man named Renchard who believes he is the last man on Earth after a zombie infection wipes out civilization (I found out after checking the IMDB credits that his name is in fact "Renchard" and not "Richard," and I was going to comment about the strange nasal inflections heard from people in the film). As you can imagine, he soon finds out that he is not alone in this world, and he has to leave his fortress of solitude to rescue Brianna, a woman trapped in the nearby city. Like most post-apocalyptic films, this film has a problem straddling the fence between realism and convenience. If the character has an electric-powered home and drives around in a gas-powered vehicle, we have to have an explanation for how this is possible. There is a willingness by the audience to overlook some minute details, but when Renchard receives an "incoming video transmission" on his Macbook... come on. You're saying the Internet still works after a zombie apocalypse? Awesome.

Glaring technical errors, like the zombie infection, plague this entire film. I realize it's challenging to shoot a scene in a city where civilization has been eradicated, but could you at least do a re-shoot if a pickup truck drives into the scene at the last moment? The icing on the cake was a horrible nuit américaine scene towards the end which looked like someone had spent five minutes in Adobe After Effects applying a dark haze around the cast in the center of the frame. This was compounded by cuts to the cast standing in an area where it actually was night, seemingly seconds later.

As expected, the acting was mediocre and the dialogue was annoying. One character would not stop using the word "compadre" at the end of every sentence. The relationship between the leading man and leading lady was as scorching hot as the surface of Pluto. The villain's motives for his actions were at best mind-numbingly stupid, plus he makes the bone-headed (yet strangely oft-repeated in cinema) mistake of kidnapping someone he repeatedly states he just wants to kill. Why didn't you just kill them when you were standing right next to them with a loaded weapon in your hands? Am I the only one who picks up on this?

Sharks in Venice

I never thought that I would run into a film worse than Alien vs. Hunter. Today, I have been proven wrong. Sharks in Venice is a completely awful direct to DVD horror film starring Stephen Baldwin. Sharks in Venice is a film about a diving professor (???) who travels to Venice after his father (also a diver) goes missing while on a diving expedition in the canals of Venice. "The Man" says it was a propeller blade that killed the diving team, but Stephen Baldwin knows better: It was a fucking shark, and he's going to find the bastard. Like most horrible films, this film fails on all fronts. I will attempt to break this down into categories to ease your suffering.

Cinematography: Instead of taking us to Venice, the director of this film decides to use stock footage of Venice (or perhaps some other city with canals) and then "strategically" cut to interior shots of the characters inside buildings. When outside, the characters are shot from an extreme low angle, so you can't see where they are. On the few shots where we actually see the characters "in Vienna," they are obviously standing in front of a green screen.

Editing: There was no shark used in this film. I'm just going to say it right now. And Jesus Christ, it just looks awful. The first shark attack is edited as such:

1. Shot of a diver in the water.
2. Stock footage of a shark, probably taken from The Discover Channel.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 with rapid cuts.
4. Shot of the diver moving forward out from a rock.
5. Shot of, and I'm not kidding, the same shot as #4, but played in reverse to give the appearance of the diver being pulled back behind the rock.
6. Close up shot of the diver's face, while "blood" appears around him.

Almost* every shark attack in this film is shown the exact same way. It's almost as if the director learned about building tension by repeatedly watching those black and white Western films where the bad guy tied the damsel in distress to the railroad tracks, and the train quickly made it's way towards her doom.

*I say almost, because one man dies in a spectacular fashion from a CGI shark. Sadly, this is the only occurrence in the film. If the director had continued this vision to apply to the rest of the film, I might have reviewed this film differently today.

Acting/Dialogue: If you've seen any straight to DVD Stephen Baldwin film, you've seen them all. Baldwin stumbles through this film, collecting his paycheck as the one "big name" actor in the film. The rest of the actors deliver their lines with incredibly transparent attempts at Italian accents, all while offering opinions of the most idiotic caliber.

At one point, Stephen Baldwin is diving in the water, complete with a full breathing apparatus, and continuously communicates with the boat using spoken word. This includes times when the camera is showing close up shots of his face, lips tightly wrapped around the plastic. Bravo, director. Bravo.

Even though this movie was purchased by Viacom and played on the Sci-Fi Network, I'm not tagging this as a Sci-Fi Original. That would do a disservice to the fine men and women who produce the genuine Sci-Fi Original films.

Except for those who made Alien vs. Hunter. Those men and women can die.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Lloyd Kaufman's Troma films are notorious for their over the top sex, graphic violence, and juvenile comedy. Kaufman spares no expense with this film, one he had to draw into his own personal savings to fund the production. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is a horror comedy musical about a geeky virgin named Arbie who works at a fast-food restaurant on an ancient burial ground. The chickens begin coming back from the dead, and it's up to Arbie to save the customers and Wendy, the love of his life, from the coming chicken apocalypse.

The violence, sex, and fart jokes are non-stop in this film, and they work like perfect portions of the classic American pie recipe. You smell the aroma as it's cooking, and once you take the first bite you know you've got something delicious on your hands. This film is not for the faint of heart, and if you dislike masturbation, lesbians, explosive diarrhea, beheading, fisting or any combination of any of these at the same time, then you may want to skip this movie. For those of you who can stomach the film, enjoy it. Kaufman designs these films to have over the top gross out violence, and it's meant to be read as comedy. Did I mention this film was a musical? The songs are hilarious and surprisingly well-written. They form the meat of the film; the binding between all of scat and blood that holds the film together.

Find some friends who you know would enjoy a nice night of low-brow graphic comedy, and you will have an enjoyable evening.

Mega Snake

This promotional image is lying to you. There are no tumbling skyscrapers, no jet fighters, and no helicopters in Mega Snake. The snake is not 500 feet tall. Feedback is, in fact, not "featured" in the film, but he only makes an appearance for 5 minutes. What do we have then? A Sci-Fi Original movie that succeeds in being entertaining.

We're introduced to two brothers from a family of religious snake handlers in a small town. Ambulance driver Les Daniels has grown up with a fear of snakes ever since his father was killed at a church while snake handling. His older brother Duff Daniels has followed the family tradition of snake handling and constantly berates Les about his fear of snakes. In need of new deadly snakes for his church, Duff visits Cherokee snake salesman Screaming Hawk. The salesman refuses to sell him a mysterious snake encased in a jar, telling him that it's a mythical snake that killed his ancestors and must never be released. Screaming Hawk tells him that there are three rules for the snake, "Don't let it out. Don't feed it. Don't fear the heart of the snake." Duff decides to steal the snake, and accidentally releases it once he gets home. As all three of Screaming Hawk's rules are broken throughout the rest of the film, the snake begins feeding on the citizens of the town, growing from a mere 12 inches to a gargantuan size, and wreaking havoc upon the town.

There's some conflict points in the film that it attempts to address. Les and Duff have the usual brother issues over the death of their father. Les is in a love triangle with his girlfriend Erin and a controlling cop named Bo. And as usual, once Les and Erin figure out that a snake is on the lose, the authority in the town doesn't believe them until "it is too late." These really take a backseat, though, to the main focus of the film: The Mega Snake.

The snake is sloppily rendered in CGI, looking like a monster out of a big budget Hollywood film from 1999. This works to the benefit of the film. This hearkens back to such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, where the protagonists are stabbing at something that clearly was put into the film post-production. Regardless of it's authenticity, we're privy to the snakes mayhem. And trust me, no one is spared. We cheer for the little guy as he grows into a behemoth and an audience favorite. During the course of the film, entire families are eaten, including children. Dogs and cats are gobbled up like snacks. And in an amusing turn of events, an entire section of people on an amusement park ride are beheaded in one swoop. Most of the violence in the film is comically over the top, and this makes it an enjoyable movie to watch with friends. As a straight to video release, this is definitely a good rental film to sit down with some popcorn and enjoy.

La Maison en Petits Cubes

It's amazing to see how such a short film can contain so much emotion by being so subtle. At a running time of 12 minutes, La Maison en Petits Cubes introduces us to an old man who lives in a tower. It's difficult to describe the plot of this film without spoiling what it's about, since it's a very short film. I think it best to go into this film completely surprised.

This film beautifully explores, through metaphor, the idea of forgotten memories and loss. The animation is a wonderful accompaniment to the story. Whereas most of the other films nominated this year feature slick computer-generated animation, La Maison en Petits Cubes' hand-drawn and colored scenes present the story the way we'd remember times of long ago. With animation that is softened, deep, and expressive, director Kunio Katô takes us on quite a journey. We see each grumble on the old man's face, and although he says nothing, his facial expressions, each perfectly animated, show us all we need to know. The music, composed by Kenji Kondô, sets the mood, and although it quietly plays in the background, without it the film wouldn't have the same effect. All of the elements come together to make this a memorable short film.

Alien vs. Hunter

This movie is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad. One of the worst films I have ever seen, and I've seen some awful films in my lifetime. I generally try to compile a list of reasons during the film, things I can write about, and I am not kidding when I say that I lost count 15 minutes into this horrible piece of shit.

Alien vs. Hunter was most likely the brainchild of a seventh grader at a local junior high school. The kid was reading some comic books, and he decided that he wanted to write a cool story for a school assignment:

Billy

7th Grade


Some aliens land in a small mountain town. There's a hunter who has this huge rifle, and he shoots stuff with it but he misses a lot. The alien is half alien from the movie aliens and the other half is a spider. There is a man who writes for the papers and he and this girl run from the aliens with some other people. The hunter with the huge rifle chases the people around and he shoots at them also at the alien. Some of the people die because they get shot and also the alien eats them a lot. Then the people find the alien ship and they find one of his guns and they shoot the alien and it dies. The end.

And after Billy finishes this, he shows it to his father. His father is a broken down director who is desperately trying to feed his cocaine and hooker habit. He sees dollar signs after reading Billy's assignment, and pats him on the head. "Good job, son," he says, dreaming of the drug-fueled sex binge he's going to go on after he directs this straight to video shitter. The dad asks him what the hunter is supposed to look like. Billy draws him a picture of a scuba diver in a samurai outfit.


"Thanks, son!" the father says. The father then directs the film straight from the handwritten essay, without developing it into a feature length screenplay.

There are three locations in this film: Rooms in someone's house, the forest, and the sewers. The same identical sets and shots are repeatedly used. The hunter, the samurai scuba diver, is the worst shot I have ever seen. He frequently misses everyone with his laser rifle (which actually goes "pew-pew"), not to mention he appears in about five total minutes of the film. When he does, repeated stock footage of the alien is shown through his "hunter vision," he runs off, and we're taken back to the main cast of humans.

And oh god, the humans. The progenitors of the most hackneyed, contradictory, and suicide-inducing prose ever spoken in modern cinema. I rarely literally cringe during a film, but this film had me clutching my stomach and desperately reaching for something to stab myself in the throat. It became more than a film-watching experience. It was like getting a cramp during the middle of a marathon. Every muscle in my body was telling me to quit, but I just had to see if I could make it through. And I did. I made it through to the anti-climatic, twist-attempting, incredibly demented ending. Had I a handgun at the ready, I would not be alive to write this review today.