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The Toronto After Dark Film Festival is a rather cool idea: collect brand new, relatively obscure horror movies from around the world and offer them, point-blank, to the general public. It's a weekend series of ONE-TIME-ONLY showings, appealing to arty folk still salivating from last month's International Film Festival.

There are a whole subsect of people willing to sell their balls/vulvas just to see a flick nobody else knows about. This kind of festival is a feeding trough for smug little pigs to boast about eating at; a valuable medal of authenticity on the indie lapel. I suppose it's not a crime to look for new and interesting culture, but people should get a prison-rape sentence for idolatrizing something solely because it's underground and obscure. And this, my friends, is what is known as a "vindictive tangent."

Horrible hipsters aside, I fully recognize that horror is quite a varied genre and many people are genuinely interested in its numerous faces. I, myself, am not very partial to the horror experience, having led a sheltered Christian lifestyle during my formative years. My first covert experiences with slasher and suspense films were consequentially rather terrifying and, coupled with an overactive imagination, resulted in nightmares beyond my wildest... nightmares. I remember having a lot of trouble with mirrors and what might come out of them. Would it be a ghost? A ghost with hooks for hands? How about a Chinese acrobat? These were the questions that seemed pressing when I needed to pee.

I have since conquered my fears, for the most part, through sheer will of desensitization. But I still get jumpy when the music gets a certain way. And what's with little girls always saying creepy things and holding knives and stuff? It's fucked up, but I figure I should be able to take it by now.

And so me and the girl with Pac-man eyes boldly strode into Retribution, a Japanese film that happened to be about evil ghost women coming out of mirrors. Of course.

Before the feature, we were gifted with a SUPER SECRET SNEAK PREVIEW of a forthcoming Russian movie entitled Dead Daughters. The footage made very little sense and loosely implied that little girls were busily engaged in eviscerating their parents with knives. Also there were close-ups of somebody's eye being slowly torn in half. Then the screen went black and everyone clapped wildly except us.

Next was a showing of a short film, The Veil, which was basically an H.P. Lovecraft story. H.P. Lovecraft is pretty sweet because, let's face it, evil subterranean gods are awesome and Lovecraft is forever sacrificing his main characters in horrible fashion to these gods. Let's just say that sometimes amateur sleuthing doesn't pay off. The Veil was enjoyable, and especially so because it was impressively produced in just 48 hours for some speed-horror competition. We clapped for this one.

And finally: RETRIBUTION. The name echoes from wall to wall and most certainly implies some sort of retaliatory action of the violent type. In this film, Japanese folk deal with tiny earthquakes and drown each other in puddles of salt water. There is a lot of crime intrigue as our fearless detective (Japanese) begins to uncover evidence that suggests that he himself is a murder suspect. When a shrieking woman in a red dress (also Japanese) begins to haunt his steps, things really start to get wild!

Spooky things happen in mirrors and through windows and in shadows, but most of the terror is offset by the fact that our woman in red (Japanese, remember) is forever flying around like a Japanese Mary Poppins and there's no way you can't laugh at that. As far as genre innovation went, Retribution seemed to borrow rather liberally from other scary-girl movies like Ringu, as well as the old 'once-people-died-here-so-haunting-is-now!' schtick. Pac-man Eyes passed out repeatedly and I only felt my leg hairs bristle twice during the showing. This is a fairly tame bristle ratio for Retribution, and so I will only venture to recommend the film to small children and those who will heartily applaud any movie as long as it has subtitles.

[Toronto After Dark Film Festival] [Retribution] [horror movies]

Posted by Chris at 12:04 AM >> Commentations (4)