Feb 25 2007
2007 Nevermore Film Festival Wrap-Up!
This year marked the 8th annual Nevermore film festival that’s hosted every year at the Carolina Theater in Durham NC. I’ve gone with Mel to the last 3 (though she had to reluctantly sit out this year because she got a real humdinger of a cold), and each year is a memorable experience. This year I went to 4 films and I thought I’d do some quick, one shot reviews of all four and hopefully give you a taste of what the festival was like.
First, a bit about the festival itself. Nevermore is a wonderful film festival that gives the horror/foreign film genre a chance to shine for and entire weekend. It focuses mostly on independent film though some of the foreign films shown are huge successes in their native lands. The entire Carolina Theater is decked out with skulls, skeletons, ravens (duh!), black cats, and TONS of old school classic one sheets (movie posters). Vendors sell everything from t-shirts, hard to find DVD’s, books, posters, and some specialty stuff like, for instance, this year they had professional special effects artists that were making folks up to look like zombies!! SWEET!! So for horror fans, this is a really great event to look forward to every year. It brings fans far and wide together to laugh, gasp, and scream in the dark for three days straight!
Here are the films that I saw in chronological order!
Friday Night:
The Host – 2007 (released in 2006 overseas entitled “Gwoemul”)
Written and Directed by: Joon-ho Bong
The Host has been making HUGE waves overseas, garnering tons of praise for its direction, cinematography, scares, and it’s special effects. So needless to say, I was psyched to see that Nevermore got to launch it’s premiere screening in NC! The creators of Nevermore came on stage introduced it to big applause and it wasn’t long before the light’s dimmed and the screen flickered to life. I always love that first Nevermore flick that comes on the screen, it sets the mood for everyone and gets folks pumped for what’s to come. Unfortunately, what followed was somewhat of mixed bag. I think that I was really looking forward to this film, so I went in with rose-tinted glasses which might’ve been half the problem.
The storyline is as follows:
Park Hee-bong (played by Byun Hee-bong), is a man in his late 60s. He runs a small snack bar on the banks of Seoul’s Han River. He lives with his two sons, one daughter and one granddaughter. The Parks seem to lead quite an ordinary and peaceful life, they’re a tad bit poorer than the average Seoul native, but that doesn’t seem to bother them one bit. Hee-bong’s eldest son, Gang-du (played by Song Gang-ho), is an immature and incompetent man in his 40s, whose wife left him long ago leaving him to take care of their daughter, Hee-bong’s granddaughter, Hyun-seo. Nam-il (played by Park Hae-il) is the youngest son, an unemployed grumbler, and daughter Nam-joo (played by Bae Du-na) is an archery medalist and member of the Korea’s national team. They’re a zany bunch for sure, bumbling through each day, but there is no doubt that they love each other very much and would do anything for each other.
One day, an unidentified mutant suddenly appears from the depths of the Han River and quickly spreads panic and death amongst the local populace. During the initial attack, Gang-du’s daughter Hyun-seo is carried off by the monster and disappears into the sewers. All the family members are in great agony as they have lost someone dearest to them. But as they find out she is still alive, they resolve to save her.
The movie at it’s core, is a monster movie. No different from “Alien”, “Godzilla”, or “Jaws” (a movie it’s been compared to quite a bit actually), the first half delivers on this theme in spades. The opening attack from the monster is nothing short of perfect. There are a few scenes where the director chose to cut the music entirely and just let the sound of the monsters huge loping foot falls fill the theater. It brought this anxiety to the scene that was just excellent, and all you can do is sit on the edge of your seat as you watch this freak of nature devour, stomp, and crush any unfortunate soul that falls in its path. But after that initial opening tour de force, oddly placed political agenda starts seeping in, along with environmental critique, US bashing (slightly well deserved I suppose), and an overdose of wacky zaniness. I can take small doses of this kind of stuff in any movie but when you dedicate an entire second half to it, it makes me wonder, What the hell happened to my awesome monster movie!!!
What you end up with is a well shot, well acted, beautiful looking flick with an identity crisis. Have I seen worse? Hell yes! And it’s not that “The Host” is a bad film; it’s far from it actually. It’s just that when it succeeds so much in the opening half it makes you wonder why Bong decided to change gears in the second half. I liked it, but I would’ve loved it, and that was bit of a let down.
My buddy Peter liked it a lot, but, as he said, he was somewhat loaded. =)
I give it a B-.
The lights came up, and we hustled our way out, got another beer in the lobby, and made our way to Fletcher Hall, the main theater in the Carolina Theater building. Showing at this time was a Thai film by the name of:
Shutter – 2004
Directed by: Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom
Written by: Banjong Pisanthanakun and Sopon Sukdapisit
“Shutter” wasn’t originally in the Nevermore line up, but a film called “Reunion” couldn’t be shown because of distribution issues, so “Shutter” got subbed in and again, I was psyched! I had read great things about the film when it came out years ago and it had been released to great critical acclaim.
Luckily, it didn’t disappoint…
The story follows a young photographer Thun and his girlfriend Jane. Everything seems wonderful for them, until one night they get involved in a hit and run accident. They run over a young woman walking across the road and after much consideration Thun convinces Jane to just drive away (!?!?!?). Soon afterwards a few days later, they discover mysterious shadows in his photographs. As they investigate the creepy phenomena they discover many things. One, that they find other photographs containing similar supernatural images, two, that Thun’s best friends are being haunted as well, and three, that Jane discovers that her boyfriend has not told her everything.
What follows is an almost direct “Ju-On” clone. A ghostly Asian girl with black scraggly hair shows up in various unexpected places, scaring the dickens out of our protagonists as well as the films viewers! But what separates this one out from other J-horror, ghost girl creations is a few creative writing decisions. Yes, it’s basically a montage of how many creepy situations the writers could make the ghost show up in odd positions, coughing up blood, walking on the ceiling or popping up out of no where. But it did have a few seemingly random plot points that get fleshed out in the end that had me saying “Okay, now that was cool…”.
Well made, well written, and well shot! Shutter definitely has been done before, but not as well as you get to see it here.
Needless to say, it surprised me in all the right ways, so I give it a B+. And better still we have a new country to look forward to getting films from: Thailand!
So! That ended Friday night and I woke the next day looking forward to another dose. And for good reason too! The first movie I was going to see was a remastered (video and sound) 35mm reprint of the Peter Jackson (yep, LOTR’s Peter Jackson) classic: DEAD ALIVE !!!!
Saturday - Day 2
Dead Alive – 1992
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Stephen Sinclair
This movie has a special place in my heart, as I watched it a LONG time ago in a corn field with high school buddies on a TV and VCR attached to a several hundred yard extension cord. We watched it in the middle of night, just the four of us, the light of the TV illuminating the corn stalks behind us.
It’s simply a wonderful memory and it was enhanced more by what transpired on the screen.
Dead Alive is listed, even today, as one of the goriest movies ever made, and it’s definitely up there for me. It’s definitely the first film to ever revolt me and make my stomach clench up. I know, I know, why the hell would you willingly watch something like that. Well, I’ll tell you. While the movie is repulsive, it’s also one of the zaniest, wacky, and genuinely funny movies ever made! It’s just pure outrageous schlock that doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is! My friend Peter attended the second day and he said that he was pretty sure he couldn’t see the movie again, but I’ll tell ya, there was very few minutes that went by where he was laughing his ass off!
Because this is truly a classic I won’t go into the plot but, if you want a disgusting dark comedy, that’s just plain silly in theme, call some friends over and rent this one tonight! It’s outstanding and I am just incredibly happy that I got the chance to see this on the big screen. Definitely a high point in my movie viewing “career”.
After mad amounts of applause during the credits, the lights came up and Peter and I grabbed a bite to eat. Durham is a surprisingly compact city and we were only a few blocks from some really nice restaurants. We found a cafe, sat down and enjoyed a beer and a good burger, as well as good talk on what we’d seen so far that weekend. The spare hour we had got eaten up quickly and before we knew it we were trudging back to the theater for the last movie of this year’s Nevermore experience (for us anyways, the movies still continued into Sunday).
Before we went into the next viewing, I hit up the vendor room one more time and found a woman by the name of Kristy Tallman. She was selling and promoting her most recent book she’d written and I was pretty taken by her. She’s strictly a horror writer/poet and I really identified with her and her philosophies on writing horror. I supported her cause and picked up a paperback of her recent book. She gave me her card, offered to check out some of my stuff some day, and signed my copy of her book. It’s weird, but I walked away from feeling that I’d be in touch with her again someday. Who knows! Either way I felt really lucky to have met her. I was almost late for the next movie but I wasn’t going to miss a minute of it. Next up, and last but not least, we took in a screening of:
Severance – 2006
Written and Directed by: Christopher Smith
I saw a trailer form “Severance” a couple of months back and was instantly hooked on seeing it. So when I saw it was being screening at Nevermore this year, I instantly moved it to the top of the list and sticking right after Dead Alive was just pure genius, if I can toot my own horn.
Here’s the plot line in a nutshell:
A multi-national weapons company, by the name of Palisade Defense, reward their European sales division with a team-building weekend in the mountains of Eastern Europe. Things quickly go horribly wrong and the blackest of comedies ensues as the team fights first amongst themselves, and later for their lives, against a group of war-crazed killers intent on revenge.
I’m being intentionally vague here because everything about this movie easily made it the high point of the fest for me! I mean, you can’t ask for better pacing, comedic beats, acting, cinematography, and effects (gore, CG and practical). And all of this is delivered with just the right amount gratuity. Seriously it was just pure entertainment! And talk about crowd pleasing! The whole theater erupted with laughter and cheers several times during the showing. It was great and kinda personified what Nevermore should be.
I give it an A+!
A lot of magazines and sites refer to it as “Shaun of the Dead meets Office Space”, but I would just compare it to “Shaun of the Dead”. It’s got the wit of “Office Space”, (and Shaun’ for that matter) but that’s about it. It came out on DVD recently, so go ahead and rent it! Or just buy it! You won’t be sorry!
So, that’s about it! Short reviews I know, but hopefully this gave you a taste of what the fest is all about, and when it comes around next year feel free to drop me a line. The more the merrier!
-Tad
