Black Gate

Directed by Giorgio Ferroni, Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra) was released in 1960. The first colour Italian horror film, its striking hues would influence Mario Bava in 1964’s Blood and Black Lace, and through him the emerging giallo genre. Arrow Video’s restored the film to its full original lushness, and the Fantasia Film Festiva screened the restoration. I was fascinated by the film’s imagery and tone; Mill captures a colourful gothic sensibility that echoes early Hammer Studios productions, a classic movie gothic that implies a world in which all sorts of horrors and monsters may exist.

(The writing credit for the film involves its own bit of gothic misdirection. Ferroni was involved in reworking a script by Remigio Del Grosso, Ugo Liberatore, and Giorgio Stegani, and the onscreen credits claim the film was based on a tale by Pieter van Weigen in his book Flemish Tales. But in fact there is no writer named Pieter van Weigen, and no book by him named Flemish Tales. Early gothic novels often used the device of false attributions to some nonexistent source — look at Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, which he originally claimed to be a medieval manuscript — and it’s amusing to see that game played here, a couple hundred years later in a different artform.)

Mill brings us an involved story set around the turn of the twentieth century. It follows a writer, Hans von Arnim (Pierre Brice), who travels to the well-known Mill of the Stone Women to write an article about the Mill’s pageant of lifelike statues, the stone women, put on display by the mysterious Professor Gregorius Wahl (Herbert A.E. Böhme). At the mill, Hans finds several mysteries, among them the professor’s beautiful daughter Elfie (Scilla Gabel) who is attended by her own live-in doctor, Loren Bohlem (Wolfgang Preiss). Hans is drawn to Elfie, and begins to uncover the secrets of the mill, putting himself in terrible danger.

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“Death and the Winemaker” (“Le Vigneron et la Mort”) is a 19-minute French-language animated film from Switzerland written and directed by Victor Jaquier. It’s a folkloric tale about a winemaker (voiced by Kacey Mottet Klein) in a Renaissancelike land who tries to win the heart of a noble young lady (Marie-Claire Dubois) by crafting the best wine in the world. But things take a turn when Death (Virginie Meisterhans) is drawn to the perfection of the winemaker’s creation. The story’s a nice rich tale of unwanted consequences, but what makes it work are the 2D visuals. The film recalls classic Disney movies in its designs, but is darker and naratively much richer. The castle in which the beautiful maiden dwells with her tyrannical father is detailed and charming, the winemaker’s town is intricate and gothic, the characters are cartoony and evocative. It’s good work for all ages.

The feature film it was bundled with was the movie I’d been most eagerly looking forward to at Fantasia, and it did not disappoint. The Spine of Night, written and directed by the team of Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt, is billed as a feature-length animated sword-and-sorcery film for adults in the vein of the Heavy Metal movie. And it very much is that. It’s more serious than Heavy Metal in many ways, but the violence and cosmic scope is if anything even greater.

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“A Tale Best Forgotten” is a five-minute film conceived and directed by Sweden’s Tomas Stark, based on a poem by Helen Adam. The text’s set to music, and sung over a long take in which the camera tilts back and forth to bring out the story; you can read the original here. It’s difficult to find detailed credits for the film, but it looks like Sebastian Bergström composed the tune to which Adam’s murder ballad is set, though I can’t find who does the singing. In any event, the evocative lyrics are given a fine cinematic accompaniment, as the images of the house and river create a lovely brooding atmosphere. I note that the first line of the poem, which specifies a certain mythic meaning to the ‘dog-headed man,’ is dropped; without it the film finds its own meanings for things, creating a more fairy-tale feel. In all it’s extremely strong work that displays a powerful visual imagination.

Bundled with the short was one of the movies I was most looking forward to at Fantasia 2021, Hellbender (or, as it’s sometimes written, H6llb6nd6r). It’s the sixth feature film from the Adams family: John Adams, his wife Toby Poser, and their teen daughters Zelda and Lulu. They make films as a collective — no studio backing, just their own resources, with locals and friends as actors. Different family members handle different tasks as strikes their fancy, with Poser usually the main writer, John Adams interested in sound, and Zelda Adams interested in cinematography and camerawork. I saw their previous movie The Deeper You Dig at Fantasia 2019, and enjoyed it; I was eager to see the follow-up. And while I liked The Deeper You Dig, I think Hellbender is a major step forward.

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Every year the Fantasia International Film Festival presents an International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, and every year it’s worth watching. This year’s edition gathered nine films from seven countries into one 115-minute block. Most of the films tended to the near-future and the dystopic, but still held surprises.

The showcase started with “Mark II,” an 8-minute piece directed by Brent Howard, who co-wrote with Pride St. Clair. Mark (John Ennis) is an office worker in a reality where technology’s taken an odd route: 90s-style PCs and CRT screens but advances in other fields, especially robotics. Mark, despairing at the limitations of his human body, is drawn to the possibility of an upgrade. But will he get what he wants? This is a fine short film that easily could have gone wrong, if the viewer had been left thinking Mark was the butt of a joke; that doesn’t happen, thanks to an excellent performance by Ennis. He brings out Mark’s profound depression, his despair at his body, and in one well-delivered voice-over line seals the film perfectly. I thought it was solid enough when I saw it, but Ennis’ performance has left it haunting me since.

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One of the more chilling films I saw at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival was “Please Hold,” a 19-minute short film directed by KD Dávila and co-written by Dávila with Levin Menekse. It’s not chilling in the way of a horror film, but of well-done near-future science fiction. In a North American city not too far away from now, a drone arrests a guy, Mateo (Erick Lopez), on his way to work. Mateo hasn’t done anything, but he can’t argue with the drone. He’s stuck in a cell with a computer screen, and has to try to navigate unhelpful menus just to place a phone call and find a lawyer and find out what the hell he’s doing in jail in the first place.

The film manages to find ways to make a story that’s basically a man interacting with a screen visually interesting. But the cleverness of the script is really what makes the story work. Mateo has to struggle with a system that’s clearly not designed with justice in mind, but with extracting money from anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in it. Unreadable terms and conditions scroll past as he tries to figure out what’s going on. The system forces him to labour in order to have a prayer of getting anywhere. The movie’s in all an extremely sharp look at the way various technologies are converging with the noxious for-profit prison system to create a new kind of hell, and it’s well worth watching.

Bundled with the short was Indemnity, a South African action-thriller. South Africa’s been developing quite a genre film culture in recent years — beyond science-fiction like District 9, consider previous Fantasia offerings like Five Fingers For Marseilles and 8, to say nothing of Fried Barry. So I was looking forward to seeing what this movie brought. If it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, at least it satisfies expectations in the way you want from a good honest genre tale.

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“The Gloom” (“La Penumbra”) is a 14-minute short from Spain’s Dani Viqueira, written by Luis Sánchez-Polack. It follows a young family with a mother, Laura (Lorena Hidalgo), who is in the middle of intense studies to earn her medical degree, potentially useful as her husband Joaquin is a hypochondriac. After a car ride marked by the squabbling of their children Tomás (Jaime P. Barahona) and Rosa (Lucía Hidalgo), Laura is menaced by what appears to be the incursion of the supernatural into the family home. But more may be happening here than meets the eye. In fact the ending’s fairly simple but emotionally effective, especially as it follows an atmospheric and involving horror sequence. The movie’s a very solid piece of work.

Bundled with it was the American feature What Josiah Saw. Directed by Vincent Grashaw and written by first-time screenwriter Robert Alan Dilts, it follows the family of one Josiah Graham (Robert Patrick, the T-1000 himself). Josiah’s three kids are adults now, in their 30s or thereabouts, and they’ve taken different paths in life. The movie opens somewhere in the southwestern US, with oil men talking about buying the Graham homestead; we then follow the youngest child, Thomas (Scott Haze), living on the old family property, overseen by the patriarchal Josiah. This first act establishes an uncomfortable, horrific atmosphere with some notably disturbing moments.

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“Wao” is a 25-minute short film from Japan, directed by Emi Yasumura and written by Atsushi Asada. It’s an odd mix of teen dramedy and science fiction story, in which a youth named Wao meets a trio of other teens who explain to him he’s an alien. This explains certain mysteries of Wao’s life, but he’s not sure he wants to leave Earth permanently. He decides to stake his future on his parents: if he can rekindle a love that seems to have died, he’ll stay on this planet. Things do not go entirely as planned. It’s an entertaining story which works not so much because of the teens but because of the character depth and relationship backstory given to Wao’s parents (I wish I had a reliable cast list that would let me put the names of the actors to their characters). The moral at the end is a bit pat in the way of an old Star Trek episode, but then there are far worse things to be than an old Star Trek episode. You can call the film whimsical, and I think that’s fair in the sense that whimsy to me works when it’s able to include genuine emotional paradox and a certain amount of darkness; “Wao” pulls that off.

Bundled with the short was Follow the Light (光を追いかけて, Hikari wo Oikakete), directed by Yoichi Narita, who wrote the script with Yu Sakudo. It’s set in a small town in Japan, where a boy named Akira (Tsubasa Nakagawa), gifted at drawing, has recently moved with his father Ryota (Taro Suruga). Ryota’s recently had a divorce and so returned to his old home town, but Akira’s having a difficult time fitting in. Then aliens show up. Or, at least, Akira spots a UFO, a mysterious green light streaking across the sky, and on following the light finds local outcast girl Maki (Itsuki Nagasawa) lying in a crop circle. The UFO’s vanished, but the two teens strike up a relationship, which the film follows in and around subplots about the local school being about to shut down, and Ryota rebuilding his life, and Maki’s uncle trying to hold on to his farmland in the face of financial trouble, and Akira fitting in at a school Maki long ago forsook, and a teacher who may be horribly miscast in her profession.

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A drum roll and trumpet fanfare; a multicoloured glassy background; a shield-shaped logo with a sunburst inside it and the big letters S and B. It’s the intro to a film, and it tells you just what you’re going to get. The letters stand for Shaw and Brothers, and for me the Fantasia International Film Festival only feels like Fantasia once I watch a classic Shaw Brothers kung-fu cinema gem. Fantasia selections from the Shaw archives typically draw from the later and weirder end of their catalogue, and so it was in 2021 with Return Of The Bastard Swordsman (天蠶变之布衣神相, Bu yi shen xiang).

It’s the 1984 sequel to 1983’s Bastard Swordsman, which played Fantasia in 2017 and is considered here. Brought to us by director Tony Lu, with a story by Ying Wong and a screenplay by Lu and Kuo-Yuan Chang, it picks up right after the first one ends and eases us back in to the story. The evil Invincible Clan want to wipe out the good guys of the Wudang Clan, so one of the Wudang decides to track down Yun Fei Yang (Norman Chu), who mastered the silkworm style and brought victory to Wudang in the original Bastard Swordsman. He’s gone missing, now, though, in Wudang’s hour of need. Yet the evil Dugu Wu Di (Alex Man) of the Invincible Clan has problems of his own — a group of ninjas from Japan has arrived to challenge the champions of China for supremacy in the martial world.

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Straight to VHS (Directamente para Video) is a new documentary from Uruguay that investigates a video oddity from 1988. Act Of Violence In A Young Journalist (Acto de violencia en una joven periodista) is that oddity, an Uruguayan-made direct-to-video film from thirty-three years ago in which directing, writing, cinematography, soundtrack, and editing were all done by one man, Manuel Lamas. None of those things are done particularly well, but for some viewers the movie still has a strange power. The documentary looking at Lamas’ film comes to us from Emilio Silva Torres, and without claiming its subject is any good, it attempts to evoke the feel of looking at weird cinema of uncertain provenance without an internet to explain what you’re seeing. The Fantasia Film Festival bundled the two movies together, so I was able to see the thing itself and the investigation into its background back-to-back.

I started with Act of Violence, and I’m still unsure whether that was the best decision. It’s a movie about a woman journalist, Blanca (Blanca Gimenez), who is compiling a report on the causes of violence. Periodically the story of the film pauses for several minutes as she interviews people about the rise of violence in society; sometimes those people are psychologists from the health department and sometimes they’re soccer commentators. Much of the film is actually about Blanca’s personal life, though, particularly her relationship with Carlos, an Uruguayan businessman with ties to Canada. Except that by the time she meets him Blanca’s already given a piece of simple advice to a friend, which will turn out to have tragic and indeed violent consequences.

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