@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 10: Kill List!

Matt Price of MAMO asks Colin Geddes for his thoughts on this year's very different, very satisfying slate of films. Plus, the gang sees Ben Wheatley's Kill List, which you will either love or hate, as it turns out. We're sad to see you go, TIFF Midnight Madness 2011, but thesubstream.com salutes you - thanks for all the fun!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness Review - SMUGGLER

A mea culpa, to start: me trying in earnest to apply any kind of critical analysis to Katsuhito Ishii's manga adaptation Smuggler would be like me trying to review the national epic of a country I've never heard of. It comes from a filmic/manga comic place that I know next to nothing about, so I'll just get to summarizing the plot.

Kinuta (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is a mild mannered failed actor turned "slacker", who unwittingly finds himself indebted to a gang of goofy Chinese gangsters. To pay it off, he's told to work with Joe (Masatoshi Nagase), the surly leader of a gang of body disposers. After they dispose of a body of a yakuza killed by the supernaturally-gifted "ultra assassin" Vertebrae, Kinuta, Joe and the Yakuza's widow find themselves in the middle of an alternately goofy and horrifyingly bloody gang war.


The joy in the film, for me and I'm going to assume many Western viewers is in watching the effects-laden ass whippings that Vertebrae hands out. He's scarred and tattooed and borderline psychotic, and he's a whiz with a pair of beaten up nunchuks, and Ishii fills his to be honest kind of disturbing fight scenes with more than a helping of pretty broad slapstick humour.

It's pure hubris that lets me think I can you a good movie from a bad one in the first place, but even I am in major balk-mode trying to decide if Smuggler is worth recommending. It's in more than one language I don't understand: Japanese, Mandarin and the completely all-over-the-place tonal language of manga movies. It pairs saccharine-sweet moments of golly-gee-whizzery with some of the most brutally sadistic torture scenes I've ever seen, and it's utterly baffling in a way that renders it simultaneously super enjoyable and kind of tiresome, to my foreign eyes. It's a mash-up that from moment-to-moment seeks to dazzle, to entertain, broadly, to gross you out, to engage you and to repulse you straight out of the movie-watching experience. It works, a lot of the time, insofar as it does all of those things, but is that rollercoaster experience by design or by dint of my being, well, kind of ignorant? Who knows. The good parts are great, and the bad parts are… different, and that's the smartest thing I can say. Sorry.

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 09: Smuggler!

Last night's TIFF 2011 Midnight Madness screening of Katsuhito Ishii's Smuggler (a film that guest host Matt Brown of MAMO knew absolutely nothing about) was delayed by an hour due to an unspecified technical glitch! Thankfully, Bobcat Goldthwait, humanitarian and all-round decent human being volunteered to keep the crowds entertained with 15 solid minutes of his hilarious stand-up routine. And Smuggler? It's all over the place, man. thesubstream.com's Midnight Madness coverage continues! ONLY ONE MORE NIGHT - Can you believe it???

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 08: The Day!

What would you do if the apocalypse came tomorrow? Do you have your machete ready? We asked this question of some die-hard Midnight Madness fans in line for last night's screening of The Day, a dreary post-apocalyptic yarn starring Dominic Monaghan, Shawn Ashmore and Ashley Bell. It was the first real red-carpet affair of this year's Midnight Madness program which got Rajo pretty excited, let me tell you. Or, hell - why not just watch for yourself? thesubstream.com's coverage of TIFF 2011 Midnight Madness continues!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 07: Lovely Molly!

Tonight's Midnight Madness film Lovely Molly is directed by one half of the team responsible for The Blair Witch Project. Maybe you've heard of it... it's one of the most groundbreaking horror films ever made and with regards to the collective output over this past decade: one of the most influential. Where were you when you first saw it? Tonight's guest-host Kurt Halfyard asks this question to die-hard fans, including Producer Robin Cowie who kindly helps Kurt ward off any evil spirits. thesubstream.com's coverage of TIFF 2011 Midnight Madness continues!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness Review - THE INCIDENT

The Incident probably shouldn't work as well as it does. It's music video director Alexandre Courtes' first feature film, and he's a Frenchman who was directing English actors playing American dirtbags in 1989, shooting in Belgium. The film bears the little scars of all these unlikelihoods - accents wander all over the place, there are a handful of pointless scenes, it's got a pat last 10 minutes - but Courtes, cinematographer Laurent Tangy and production designer Paul Rouschop's collective visual chops hoist The Incident right up out of its little trouble areas. Mostly.



Set in a bunker-looking asylum for the criminally insane, The Incident begins with tension among the shaggy-dog rock-band-cum-kitchen-crew that are responsible for feeding the inmates. The guitarist is questioning the drummer's reliability, others feel the singer might bail on the whole thing to just be with his chick, man. Their squabbles are amplified by the bizarre, threatening behaviour of the inmates who receive their meals from the boys through a small slit in a large pane of glass. Things get much worse - and much bloodier - when the power is knocked out with all of the inmates out of their cells.

The Incident is a mixed bag, fortunately with more good nuts than bad. It looks spectacular, with a level of polish in its set and costume design, photography and bloody effects work that's better than what you get with most major-release horror films. The performances are fairly good, as well (ignoring if possible the accent issues), and that's as much to do with the actors as it is to do with a script that in its first two-thirds works quite well.

Tension is ratcheted up quite slowly, and while the Jérôme Fansten's script doesn't do much to differentiate the three leads or the various lurking crazy people character-wise, it does root them in enough shorthand period detail that they seem known to us quite quickly.

Where the film falls apart, a bit, is in its disappointing, way too arbitrary last few minutes. The film climaxes with a scene so grisly, and so goofily horrifying that it literally knocked out a couple of people at the screening I was at, but that triumphant moment is then immediately bundled up into a weird change in direction that's supposed to be shocking or meaningful but is actually closer to pointless. If you're still smiling, as I was, from the film's numerous legitimate pleasures, the film's conclusion won't sting you too much, but if you're a stickler, Courtes' high-wire act of a first feature eventually, inevitably stumbles.

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 05: The Incident!

Mike and guest host rowthree.com's Kurt Halfyard seemed to be a bit at odds with their impressions of Alexandre Courtes' The Incident which screened last night at TIFF as part of Midnight Madness. One thing's for sure, the film proved to be too much for two audience members who passed out and required medical attention - the first casualties of this year's Midnight Madness! Not too shabby for the 'quiet night' of this year's program. thesubstream.com's coverage of the best block of films at this year's festival continues!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 04: Livid!

Tonight sees the Midnight Madness homecoming of, in programmer Colin Geddes' words 'the Daft Punk of french cinema' - co-directors of the bloody À l'intérieur, Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo. This time they're here with Livid, a film that goes in a completely different direction. Plus, guest host Matt Brown talks to Hitfix.com's Drew McWeeny who tells us a pretty crazy story about his uncle's haunted house. All this and more in the fourth instalment of thesubstream.com's TIFF 2011 Midnight Madness coverage!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness Review - LIVID

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's first film, À l'intérieur (Inside, 2007), was a jaw-dropping demonstration of precisely how much tension and horror can be wrung from a simple premise by two directors with a knack for gore. A woman with scissors wants in, a pregnant woman wants to keep her out. It was shocking and tense enough to be almost unendurable, all floated on the back of an exceedingly uncomplicated idea.

Their second film, Livide (Livid), is… more complex. To put it mildly. It opens with Lucy (Chloé Coulloud), a brooding young nurse-trainee with David Bowie eyes, waiting to be picked up by her trainer. She's taken to visit Mrs. Jessel, a profoundly old woman laying comatose in her enormously creepy, taxidermy-filled house. Jessel was a dancer and was fabulously rich, and her treasure is said to rest with her in the house (where she lays, having asked to be left to die, her dwindling life maintained by daily blood transfusions brought by the nurse).

When Lucy's boyfriend Will hears this tale, he enlists his brother and soon the three are crossing the moor (on Halloween, no less) to seek the treasure of the maybe-not-so-comatose Mrs. Jessel.


To describe Livide as a fairy tale, as many have, is to do it a kind of justice. It certainly has fairy tale elements - unnatural flames flickering in the forest, a catfish having tea with a deer (this is as terrifying as it sounds) - but while it shares the fable-like elliptical logic of a Grimm story, Livide is a fairy tale that's been pushed screaming through a bloody wire mesh of '70s Italian horror movies.

Focussing more on atmosphere than on linear A to B narrative, Bustillo and Maury augment the standard "three kids making bad decisions in a scary old house" structure with odd bits of geographic disorientation, sucking characters into hidden, secret spaces, and with odd, surreal flashbacks to Jessel's monstrous past. For every viscerally bloody murder (and there are a few) there are scenes that attempt to communicate a more intellectual type of thrill, some of which succeed and some of which... don't.

It's frustrating fare for folks not used to this kind of horror, and I have to admit that a lot of it went right by me, in the exact same way Dario Argento's work (which inspired Livide, to hear the directors tell it) did. It's not for everyone, but everyone is not everyone. While there are details and odd bits of the film that don't work (or were never supposed to) it'll satisfy fans looking for a little blood-red fairy tale dreaminess amidst the throat ripping and face biting.

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 03: You're Next!

Imagine if a bunch of masked assailants interrupted your fancy schmancy family dinner with crossbows and machetes... How freaky would that be? In the tradition of films like Last House on the Left and The Strangers, festival favourites Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett bring us You're Next, a home invasion thriller that was not only scary but pretty funny, and most importantly, believeable. thesubstream.com's own Tara Mason hosts this instalment of our coverage of Midnight Madness at TIFF 2011...

thesubstream.com Reviews Adam Wingard's You're Next

There's just… something about a good horror-movie mask. It's a detail that can make or break a movie, all on its plastic lonesome. Good ones can be icons and totems, bad ones can make a 6'4" lumbering axe-wielding lunatic look like an idiot. The masks worn by the gang of bad dudes laying siege to a house full of family reunioners in Adam Wingard's You're Next - innocent, hyper-creepy animals' faces in cheap hard plastic - are fantastic. So is the film.

Crispian Davison (A.J. Bowen) is filled with trepidation he can't quite articulate to his new girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) as they drive to his father's newly-purchased retirement villa deep in the dark, secluded woods. When we meet his asshole siblings, his flinty mother and cruel father, the source of his anxiety becomes clear. A reunion dinner turns almost immediately from tension to petty squabbling and from there into near chaos, which is again turned by Wingard and writer Simon Barrett into anarchy as the dinner is interrupted by a hail of judding crossbow bolts fired into the room through a broken window. The siege is on. Windows are locked, escape routes are planned, masked strangers loom and lurk and take the survivors out one by one.

The great surprise of the film, which sets itself up as an ensemble version of recent home-invasion movies like The Strangers or À l'intérieur, is that it's... funny. Amidst the chaos of creepy masks and bloody executions it's got a completely charming sense of humour, which is massively impressive, as the wrong joke at the wrong time could send the film's spinning plates of sibling rivalry, horror and building resolve all crashing down to the ground.

Instead, Wingard, Barrett and the cast sprinkle the proceedings with exactly the right amount of tiny, slapsticky moments and sidelong shots of Crispian's clueless brother lurching around the house zonked out on vicodin, unaware that he should be running and screaming.

It's not treacle-cutting humour either, used to manipulate the level of tension the film's producing. It's smart, character-based and tonally really clever. It helps film as it pretty elegantly transforms itself from siege-movie to scared-hunted-woman-turned-badass-hunter-woman as wee Erin steps up to turn the tables on her masked attackers.

The whole thing works. It's scary, it's funny and it's both based on solid performances, a good script, and really smart, well-done details like great costumes and snatches of a very good Georgio Moroder-y synth score (the unevenness of the score is the film's one technical shortfall but director Wingard has indicated there may be changes to come). It's clever, and it was made by people who have as much idea of how to craft a tense hallway encounter as they do how to avoid the potholes that lie in the road to making a film like this work. It's a pure, bloody pleasure.

More reviews and footage from all 10 Midnight Madness nights at thesubstream.com!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 02: God Bless America!

Bobcat Goldthwait directs a dark comedy about people who are mad as hell and aren't gonna take it anymore! Plus, our buddy Tom attends his first ever Midnight Madness. thesubstream.com's coverage of the best program of films at TIFF continues...

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness Review - THE RAID

When Colin Geddes - TIFF programmer and one time originator of Toronto film-geek institution Kung Fu Fridays - selected an Asian martial arts film to open the Midnight Madness programme this year, clever heads took note. For the past few years Geddes has programmed either raucous Canadiana like 2010's opener Fubar 2 or huge-profile films like Borat or Jennifer's Body. So when that coveted slot is given over to a film that's square in his personal geek-out wheelhouse, you know you're likely gonna get something special.

Thankfully, Welshman Gareth Huw Evans' Indonesian action epic The Raid is that something special. It's a gnarly, frantic freakout launched on the flimsiest of premises - a team of SWAT-types (including star Iko Uwais) try and storm the castle of a local crimelord, who resides on the 15th floor of a decrepit building filled with assorted bad dudes and rude crudes itching to gain their boss' favour by delivering him a cop's head. There's fighting. A lot of it.


What makes the film work is the combination of the native Indonesian martial art (silat, which seems to have been designed to brutally answer questions like "why do kung fu guys flap around so much when they could just pick a dude up and smash his dome on the ground nine times?") frenetically and liberally applied by a talented performer, and a director who knows not only how to stage his intricate action pieces, but how to cut them together, as well.

It's delightfully old-fashioned, seeming to come from a distant much-loved time before the Jason Bourne movies turned the beloved genre institution of two dudes wailing on each other in a room into the confusing, nauseating shaky-cam action sequences that fill up too many mainstream action movies recently.

The film is divided into a series of discrete battles - my screening partner and I both individually were reminded of the Nintendo classic "Double Dragon" - each staged in a space whose dimensions are clear - no wobbly asymmetrical battlefields here.

The action is fast, furious, breath-taking and designed to be entertaining, to be the point, as it were, rather than stylish, confusing chaos. Which is a complicated way of not quite managing to say it's hilariously violent, fast and furious and innovative as hell in the ways that dudes get to dispatching each other. If you've ever liked a kung fu movie, you'll like this. As if my recommendation was worth a tenth of the maestro Geddes'.

Full coverage and reviews at www.thesubstream.com

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 01: The Raid!

Last night was the opening night of TIFF's Midnight Madness program, and relatively speaking it was a pretty low-key affair, at least until the ass whippings started. Seems that programmer-genius Colin Geddes wants to do something a little different this year, and so far we've got to say that we're intrigued... To start things off he screened The Raid, an Indonesian martial arts film that featured non-stop kinetic action sequences, and yes, plenty of dudes getting kicked in the face. Check out our coverage of night one of MIDNIGHT MADNESS!

Full coverage and reviews at www.thesubstream.com

@thesubstream ♥'s Midnight Madness Episode #7 - RED NIGHTS

"I don't care how kinky you are, there's probably stuff in this film that you either haven't seen or haven't tried."- Colin Geddes

Full coverage and reviews at www.thesubstream.com

@thesubstream ♥'s Midnight Madness #4 - Vanishing on 7th Street

The madness continues as we talk to fans, conduct risky rush line rescues and show some love to the die-hard GACKT DEARS!

Vanishing on 7th Street is like a lot of the other smart, lowish budget genre sophistications showing at this year's Toronto Int'l Film Festival: dark, dark, dark. Like Rodrgio Cortes' Buried, Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go and Matt Reeves Americanization Let Me In, 7th Street is bleak and almost unremittingly sad and like the best of those films, viscerally scary and filled with a prolonged, othering dread.

Four characters meet in a bar, all festooned with lights: a former news anchor (Hayden Christensen), a projectionist and a nurse (John Leguizamo and Thandie Newton) and the young son of the absent bartender (Jacob Latimore).

All have survived the three days since the apocalypse, the instantaneous disappearance of almost everyone in the city. The power went out for an instant, it came back on and everyone was gone, leaving their clothes, watches and dentures lying where they once were. Something is lurking in the dark, shadows creep with oily grace and silent black sentinels look, ready to snatch anyone that wanders too far into the gloom.

Batteries are dying, the sun is moving faster and faster through the sky leaving the days shorter and shorter, and the four survivors must decide what to do before their faltering generator fails, leaving them in the dark with no protection, waiting to be taken.

It's reminiscent of a lot of Stephen King's stuff, in particular his novella "The Langoliers" in which a similar motley crew find themselves abandoned and utterly alone. But the threat in Vanishing is simultaneously more abstract and more immediately threatening: it lurks in the shadows of the pool balls on the table around which the characters confer, a constantly-present force.

It's a conceit that works when it does and not when it doesn't. It's tense from start to finish but in a wearying way, largely because Anderson and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski refuse to supply any real explanation. The evil force in the film is just figures and whispers, and there is no "scientist" character to explain how he read a story about shadow people this is how the film logic works and blah blah blah.

It's deeply creepy and vaguely unsatisfying, but not in a way that makes the film worse, per se. Vanishing on 7th Street like Never Let Me Go and Buried is a genre film that refuses to indulge in a predictable resolution to a generic set up. The resulting film is suffused with atmosphere and creeping dread, a smart and decidedly different thriller, though one that will leave some folks unsatisfied.

thesubstream ♥'s Midnight Madness #1 - FUBAR II & The Legend of Beaver Dam

Opening night brought nothing less than madness to the midnight hour as not one, but two - yes two great Canadian filmmakers showed a packed house how it's done. A Midnight Madness first!

Here's to sharing 9 more of our favorite nights of the year with the best movie fans anywhere!




REVIEW - FUBAR II

It's better than Mon Oncle Antoine. Seriously

FUBAR II might be one of the top three or four best Canadian feature films I've ever seen.

Being more definitive and specific than that'd have me going way back through the dusty NFB byways and Claude Jutraian alleys of my memory which, well, I won't... so suffice it to say that it's riotously funny, transgressive and daring and filled to bursting with style and radiant dirtbag warmth.

It's a film that's not shot in Toronto or Vancouver, that's not about isolation or Hockey (well, not really), a film that tells a story almost no one else is interested in telling, from a place no one else is interested in visiting. It's the kind of film that should be opening the 2010 edition of TIFF rather than inaugurating that festival's best programme, Midnight Madness. Not that I'm complaining: moving the screening up the clock and down the street might have put the kibosh on the film's stars arrival at last night's screening, piped down Gerrard on a float accompanied by dancing girls and a band pounding out AC/DC.

The sequel to his 2002 surprise hit and cult favourite mockumentary FUBAR, director Michael Dowse and leads David Lawrence and Paul Spence have a bigger budget to work with this time around. They spent it making a much better film, a kinetic piss-take-cum-homage to films like Goin' Down the Road and the hoary old NFB docs that aimed to explain Canada to Canadians.

We catch up with best friends Terry (Lawrence) and Dean (Spence) in Calgary, celebrating Dean's 5 years of health post-cancer while simultaneously longing to get out of town and stop scraping by. They're visited by the enormous, rapping wrecking-ball Tron (Andrew Sparacino) who promises them jobs in Fort McMurray just before laying absolute waste to their apartment in what's for my money the funniest out-of-control-party scenes in film history (that's a list I can be more definitive about). They leave town and find work in Fort McMoney, shortly after Terry finds love at the local peelers. While Terry moves down the path towards domesticity, Terry tries to apply the brakes, and tries to game the Worker's Comp board by smashing his leg with a wooden post.

The film is vile and violent and full of people making horrible decisions, full of stupidity and cruelty and pettiness. It's also hilariously funny and brimming with heart, which is its most surprising, charming quality.

Terry and Dean are funny hoser stereotypes in the grand Canuck tradition of Bob & Doug or Bubbles, Ricky and Julian but in Dowse's film, as he makes the pair wend their way through the emotional detours prompted by a recurrence of testicular cancer and pride and adultery and success and failure, an astonishing shining warmth and authenticity breaks through the film's beer-drenched, long-haired facade. Their friendship, Terry's love for his loud, cruel wife and Dean's love for his daughter form a weirdly powerful emotional anchor that not only makes the film funnier, but makes it seem real in a way that few films, Canadian or otherwise, can match. 9/10

Mike Cameron