Terror train

>> Montreal director Maurice Devereaux on his festival hit End of the Line, in which crazed Christians slice and dice stranded
subway passengers

by MATTHEW HAYS

Public transit doesn’t get much creepier than in Maurice Devereaux’s latest feature, End of the Line. In it, a disparate group of people board a subway train, only to have it break down between stations. Wouldn’t you know it, just when things couldn’t be worse, it turns out the tunnel is infested with a Christian cult who are murdering anyone who hasn’t converted to their church!

It’s pretty wacky stuff—but amid all the chases through the tunnels, the best bits come when the Montreal-based Devereaux devises ways to have his cast of characters chopped to bits. That chopping and hacking includes a decapitation and various other inventive slicings and dicings.

Devereaux reports that his inspiration came from a horrifying bit of recent history: “The film comes from a combination of September 11 and my own beef with religious extremes. A cult is a scary thing for me. But really, what I show in the film isn’t that far from reality. Islamic or Christian—religion has been used throughout history to justify some horrible acts.”

Religion in horror movies is usually about the king of Hell, notes Devereaux. “It’s always Satan, Satan, Satan. I wanted to show people who actually thought they were being nice by killing people, killers who thought they were saving your soul by knifing you.”

Devereaux, whose previous work includes $la$her$, is heartened by the strong response to his latest. The film won best feature at the Scottish Dead by Dawn horror film fest, and has been playing to enthusiastic sell-out crowds across the international film fest circuit. “Audiences have really been getting it—no matter what country it screens in, people jump out of their seats at all the right moments.”

Some of End of the Line’s scenes have had an overwhelming influence on audiences. In fact, some people walked out before the film was even over. One scene involves the chopping up of a pregnant woman. “When we were in the lab working on that, the lab technician stood up and yelled, ‘I’ve worked with Gaspar Noé [director of the notoriously violent Irreversible] but there is no way I’m working on this!’ And she got up and stormed out of the room!”

That rather stomach-churning scene also perturbed an audience member at the Toronto International Film Festival, where End of the Line screened last fall. “This guy got up during the scene and started yelling at the audience, furious with them for staying in their seats. He was insisting that everyone should be walking out. Someone started telling him to shut up, so a fight almost broke out. It was a pretty strong emotional reaction to the movie.”

End of the Line screens this
Friday, July 13 at 7:20 p.m. in
Concordia’s Hall Building

Deep freeze

>> Larry Fessenden on his existential eco-terror movie The Last Winter

STARK AND STUNNING: The Last Winter

by MATTHEW HAYS

For Larry Fessenden, the thought of an isolated group of oil riggers holed up in a desolate, freezing cold encampment was just too nasty to resist. “There wasn’t enough snow in my last movie,” he says, on the line from New York.

His latest, The Last Winter, is an ominous Alien-style, corporate-malfeasance suspense movie in which a gaggle of characters prepare to dig for oil in the far north. The ice beneath them, however, is diminished due to global warming, and that thawing layer of permafrost has been keeping something under wraps. Now it’s unleashed, and the members of this team soon find that their minds and bodies are being attacked by mysterious forces.

It’s a strange cocktail, an existential horror movie with environmental themes and a wicked cast, including Ron Perlman as the neo-con in eco-denial. The stark images of the frozen north are stunning, and Fessenden slowly and meticulously builds the tension. It feels like a National Geographic documentary crossed with Alien with a dash of a Herzog survivalist documentary thrown in. “My inspiration for this actually came from a mosaic,” Fessenden admits, stating that many of his films are simply variations on themes found in landmark Universal horror movies.

After searching for a number of possible shoot locations—including a rig in Alberta—Fessenden chose to shoot in Iceland. And he loved the extreme cold, as he felt it helped to get everyone into the mood the film called for. “We dealt with the harshest possible conditions. There were extreme blizzards and we really were in the middle of nowhere. I liked the idea of the claustrophobia that comes with endless white space. ”

And then there’s the power struggle between the old-school capitalist who doesn’t want to hear about global warming and the environmental consultant who warns that much of the damage has already been done. “I like the idea of that conflict, between someone with a knowledge of the land and someone with power. And Ron Perlman is great at those roles. He’s actually a sweetheart. I think he was happy to have a role where he wasn’t having to get into some kind of costume body suit.”

As well as making existential horror films, Fessenden has also championed the concept of environmentally-friendly filmmaking, arguing that shoots should be conducted while minimizing waste. He is the co-author of Low-Impact Filmmaking: A Practical Guide to Environmentally Conscious Film Production, which has become something of a bible for progressive indie film producers. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t hide his disdain for the Bush administration. “I feel we’ve been betraying our planet in a terrifying way. Horror films are often about the true horrors of life, and I feel like what’s going on is as horrifying as being strung up and tortured in a forest somewhere. Bush has been debilitating. Three years ago, people were joking about having outrage fatigue. People just can’t wait for him to be gone.”

The Last Winter screens on
Monday, July 16 at 9:50 p.m. at
Concordia’s Hall Theatre

Gangsters, ghosts, rat zombies and Mexican wrestlers

>> Picks and pans from Fantasia’s second week

GORY GAME SHOW: 13 Beloved

by MALCOLM FRASER,
MATTHEW HAYS,
JEFFREY MALECKI
and MARK SLUTSKY

A Bloody Aria

This compelling, funny and psychologically bizarre Korean thriller begs comparisons to Oldboy and the like, but in many ways director Won Shin-yeon is really off on his own trip here. The story begins with a sleazy music professor and his willowy pupil taking a break from driving on a remote beach; she runs off after refusing his violent advances, and soon the two separately encounter a very weird little gang of grown-up bullies and the teenager they’re tormenting. This is a truly unpredictable film and you will likely have no idea what happens next from scene to scene, so I won’t spoil any of the surprises and just say that it is highly recommended. (MS)

Ghosts of Cité Soleil

Director Asger Leth manages an incredible level of trust with his subjects, delving deep into the fold of gang life in Cité Soleil, one of the most dangerous spots in Haiti. Here, he shows us two brothers who work in brutal gangs that are terrorizing Haitians for the country’s embattled leader, Aristide. It’s as devastating as you’d expect, but at the same time, there’s a great deal of the unexpected, including the object of the two brothers’ affection, a French relief agent. An unblinking look into one of the harshest and most poverty-stricken spots anywhere. (MH)

Mulberry Street

An ultra-low-budget movie about a mysterious infection that turns people into rat creatures, this is a zombie movie on the face of it, but it has a local flavour that’s truly singular. Director Jim Mickle, who apparently did everything here for no money, sets the action in a single building in rapidly changing New York, and the movie seems as much a classic NYC neighbourhood indie flick, complete with believable local characters and downtown colour, as a genre gore-fest. While zombie flicks leave me a little cold these days, Mulberry Street has enough believable charm to make it a worthwhile viewing—plus how many horror movies also take on gentrification? (MS)

BULLIES AND BEATDOWNS: A Bloody Aria, Exiled, Mulberry Street

Loco Fighters

This uncinematic but informative documentary delves into the world of the men and women of Mexican wrestling. The popular “sport” is at once more theatrical than its American counterpart—the wrestlers’ masks and symbolic personas playing such a key role as they do—and less so; the action in Mexican rings is more like a chaotic improvisation than the WWE’s tightly staged soap operas. Director Nacho Cabana goes for breadth over depth, interviewing dozens of wrestlers and touching briefly on the hot topics of the scene, including the travails of women, gays and midget wrestlers, and Fray Tormenta, a wrestling priest. (MF)

KILLER KID: Death Note

Death Note

A clever student (Tatsuya Fujiwara) finds a magical notebook on the street—according to its supernatural rules, whoever’s name he writes in its pages dies instantly of a heart attack (although he can specify other methods if he likes). The killer kid begins offing criminals and other assorted baddies, but the cops—aided by a mysterious genius named “L”—soon close in, and in the deadly game that ensues, he begins offing innocents as well. Based on the popular manga, this is a largely entertaining, if slow-moving thriller, that also features one of the least scary and just plain ridiculous movie demons in cinema history. Dude looks like he stepped out of a ’90s video game or something. (MS)

Sakura No Kage

The credits at the end, which blink by too quickly to read, suit this baffling and empty near-silent film, jointly directed by Guillaume Tauveron and Hiroshi Toda. Very little motivation is given for the main characters, a hired killer and his vacant lover, so we don’t care much about their nihilism and mysterious past. Even the violence has little emotional effect. Much is done to disrupt genre conventions, such as shifting between monochrome and colour, and using an absurdly eclectic score, but there seems to be no reason for this. The film has the stench of pretense about it, and afterwards one is left unmoved and confused, and not in the good way. (JM)

13 Beloved

A whirling Thai thriller about a down-on-his-luck office worker contacted by a mysterious game show. For every task our sad sack hero completes, he wins a little more money, but the challenges get progressively more intense and morally challenging until he’s literally killing people. A strange and kinetic mix of comedy, satire and straight-up action, 13 Beloved is uneven but quite hilarious in parts, and it’s full of weird stock characters that seem like they’ve stepped out of a ’30s serial or something, and who are deployed, seemingly, without a whiff of self-consciousness. This looks to be a real crowd-pleaser. (MS)

We Are the Strange

This unsettling hybrid of no-budget animation styles was made single-handedly over three years by a filmmaker who goes by the name of M dot Strange. The ostensible plot takes place inside a video game and involves an emotionally damaged young woman, a doll-headed boy and a destructive evil force. The film is genuinely post-cinematic, its aesthetic and pacing grounded entirely in video games, music videos and obscurist video art. Better dialogue, or none at all, would have kept the project truly original; Strange’s bold genre-mashing approach is marred by the clichéd, clunky lines his characters speak, perhaps revealing the limitations of the video-game as art. (MF)

Exiled

What a year for Montreal Johnnie To fans this is shaping up to be. First we get his excellent two Election movies, and now this, his latest (well, not exactly, as the prolific director probably already has a couple more movies in the can). Opening with an exiled gangster returning home to face down his past, and leading to an interestingly intricate showdown between his friends and his enemies, this is a solid gangster drama and definitely recommended for fans of Hong Kong cinema. (MS)

For showtimes and more info,
see www.fantasiafest.com

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