by CHRIS BARRY

If you’ve been unable to sleep lately because you’re concerned there aren’t enough indie martial arts/fight films being made in Quebec, you can now put that sad half-empty bottle of Seconal away and prepare to rest easy. You see, these movies are being made, it’s just that nobody’s jumping up and down to screen them. Until now, that is.

As part of its quest to promote and celebrate local genre-specific cinema, Spasm Productions will screen 15 home-grown combat flicks at the first annual Kombat Québécois festival.

“We’re tired of the same old Quebec cinema, with all those [typical] dramas and comedies,” says Spasm rep Sylvain Raymond. “We like drama and everything. But it often feels like these are the only films being made and shown in Quebec.”

The idea of presenting a night of domestic, low-budget “fight films” came to fruition after the Spasm gang received several similarly themed submissions for last October’s third annual weekend of gore and horror shorts, aka Festival Spasm.

“We received enough combat films that we started thinking, ‘Hey, if we specifically ask people to start sending them, and if they actually exist out there, we’ll get them and be able to do a full [fight]night,’ which is what has happened,” says Raymond.

So now cinema enthusiasts can take heart that previously neglected Québécois classics such as Chez Tony Spaghetti (think From Dusk Till Dawn, but shot in Laval), Richard Mangemarais’ Cumshot Hero, and, direct from the post-production suite at le Cégep du Vieux Montréal, Nicolas Grenier’s animated short Klionax, along with several other domestically produced action-packed rumble extravaganzas.

“We feel it’s important to show all these genres: horror, combat and sci-fi,” says Raymond. “Prior to organizing the Spasm film festival, we kept asking ourselves, ‘How come Quebec is the only place in the world where they don’t make horror movies?’ But we soon learned that horror movies are definitely being made here, just not shown anywhere. Maybe in the future we’ll show Westerns as well, I don’t really know. All we really want to do is present a different side of Québécois cinema.”

Kombat Québécois screens at Club Soda Friday, Jan. 28. For more info, visit www.spasm.ca

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