Tag: Thriller

Freaks (2018) to Redefine a Tired Genre

Image result for freaks movie poster 2018By Ed Sum
(The Vintage Tempest)

Well GO USA

* Spoiler Alert

Opens in Select Theatres Sept 13, 2019
Please check local listings.

Blu-Ray/VOD/DVD Release December 10th, 2019

In an uncertain world, the movie Freaks shows young Chloe and her father living in a dilapidated home. The trailers for this film suggests that she is an outcast and anyone labelled are despised. They are deemed a threat to regular society, and this hook was enough to get me hooked to beautifully crafted tale about parenthood, looking for heroes and isolation. Coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival as one of the Top Ten Canadian Films of 2018, I feel it’ll be a game changer and won’t say more since it’d be a major spoiler.

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein wrote and directed a perfect Twilight Zone style episode dealing with a young girl who just wants to be loved. But when her father does not permit her to play outside, her social skills are rough and little about reality she truly understands. The only exception is with the junk mail delivered and a book about an ice cream truck which one day appears. The man she meets, Mr. Snowcone (played by Bruce Dern), is her only source of information to the world around her.

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Out of Victoria Fringe Festival Comes Theatre SKAM’s SciFi The Rage Trials

The Rage Trials

By Ed Sum
(The Vintage Tempest)

Imagine, if you will, an alternative universe–a world just like our own, but different. Every 100 years, seven randomly selected teenagers get to decide the emotional foundation to which humanity has to adopt. The science is never explained in how one can edit the wide range of feelings a human has to express, but the option exists to wipe away the trait known as anger.

Theatre SKAM‘s The Rage Trials is not unlike The Hunger Games, The Purge or Logan’s Run of how a greater will can impose a ‘natural selection’ in the continuation of a species. Playwright Emma Leck is better known for her play Drops in a Broken Fountain which examines the human condition. It won the 2018 Winnipeg Fringe Award of Best New Play. She also wrote a similarly philosophical work How to Want (an Intrepid Theatre YOUshow with Vino Buono) which Joff Schmidt of CBC News wrote she’s a talent to watch.

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Top Scares from Fantasia’s Things That Go Bump in The East 2019 Shorts Program

We offer our top picks on which of Fantasia Festival’s “Things That Go Bump In The East” Shorts Program are must sees.

Fantasia Film Festival Basic Logo
Runs: July 11 – August 1st Montreal, Quebec

This year, Fantasia Festival‘s “Things That Go Bump In The East” Shorts Program offers an eclectic mix of animated works which I’m savoring like fine wine. This year featured eleven works and plenty are from the Tokyo University of the Arts. Some of these will no doubt screen at other film festivals. We can find a few online, like Shishigari (a wonderful tale of survival with elements of Mononoke Hime tossed in) and the others–they are worth seeking to get your scream on.

Various cinematic and illustration styles are used to deliver the goosebumps. In what makes these films unique is in how the animators push the envelope not only in how 2D Digital Animation can tell the story but also with how Asian filmmakers are defining an age old genre.

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[2019 Fantasia] Beware the Ak-in-jeon

The Gangster The Cop and The Devil (Ak-in-jeon) is a mix of a crime and thriller genre, and it’s hard boiled enough to have me guess who is worse.

Ak-in-jeon posterWell Go USA

Plenty of idioms come to mind with this handsomely suave and sinister film from South Korea. The Gangster, The Cop and The Devil (also known as Ak-in-jeon) is a mix of a crime and thriller genre, and it’s hard boiled enough to have me guess who is worse. We have Tae-suk (Kim Moon-yul), a brutal policeman going vigilante on organized crime, Dong-soo (Dong-seok Ma), a gangster who could probably put musician Psy to shame for his sense of style, and K (Kim Sung-kyu) the serial killer who made the mistake of targeting Dong-soo. When this Al Capone wannabe’s reputation is tarnished, he has to do what’s right, and the film is a twisted cat-and-mouse game where no matter who gets whose desserts, the bloody outcome is going to be more than cherry red.

Cop and thief gang up, for lack of a better term, to go after the killer. The action is intense, and the film is all fortune for lots of glory! Plenty of action takes place in the streets, and the wry black humour is sharp. Even though the slow moments drag out the film, the wait for the next bloody conflict makes up for it.

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On X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Tales of Future Past

The Rage Trials

By Ed Sum
(The Vintage Tempest)

Writer-Director Simon Kinberg redeemed himself from his involvement in the lamented X-Men: The Last Stand, the third chapter of the saga about mutants just looking for a place to belong in modern human society. This subtext has been running throughout the films and it’s been explored in the past films to varying degrees of success.

His film, The Dark Phoenix, gets a treatment that is not too out there and it works without having to resort to sending the mutants to the moon.

When I have seen all the movies to date and followed the saga of the Phoenix up till the mid-90s (Excalibur, Series one), I had specific expectations in mind. While Kinberg’s work lightly touches upon a few things coming full circle, I suspect The New Mutants will have to provide some answers about the human and mutant relationship before Marvel Entertainment rewrites the mutant chapter for Phase Five of their narrative plan.

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Unmasking M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable Trilogy & Glass

I feel with the Unbreakable trilogy, Shyamalan created a what if product based on Charles Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species.

The Rage Trials
Available on AmazonThe Rage Trials

Release Date: April 16, 2019

Although M. Night Shyamalan‘s Unbreakable trilogy took nearly twenty years to finish, the wait was certainly worth it. Ever since I saw the first film, I could not help but think of the line from Snow White, “Mirror, mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all?” Instead of considering the response from the Disney movie, I feel another meaning can be pulled from it. Anyone who has looked upon this reflective surface is asking to themselves, “Who am I, really?”

Not everybody will like what they see of themselves reflected back. With titles in part two and three suggestive of different mental states, I have enough theories going on in my head wanting to break down what this auteur’s films are about. The bonus material which comes in the home video release of Glass, however brief they are, offer more than a few teasing answers and confirmations in what I already believe. Upon seeing all three films again, back-to-back, I have a few theories.

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