Black Gate

“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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Hercules and the Captive Women (Italy/France, 1961)

The Steve Reeves Hercules (Italy, 1958) was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic, proving there was a market for shirtless strongman movies in drive-in movie theaters across America. The Italian movie industry obliged by churning out reams of low-budget sword-and-sandal “peplum” films, many of which had heroes named Goliath or Maciste in their original forms. When they were dubbed into English, for name-recognition purposes most of these strongmen were renamed Hercules, giving us a bewildering array of Hercules and the… movies from 1960 through 1965, when they were abruptly replaced by the so-called Spaghetti Westerns. Not many of these slammed-out Herc films are worth spending 80 minutes on today, but a few of them hold up and are worth a look. Here, for your delectation and delight, are three very different examples.

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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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