Trash smash

>> The sixth annual Spasm festival revels
in the lowbrow side of Quebec cinema

by MALCOLM FRASER

It’s true that Montreal has an awful lot of film festivals. But if your cinematic tastes run along the lines of blood, gore, scatalogical humour and/or extreme wrestling, there’s really only one. When the Spasm festival first reared its head back in 2002, the showcase of ultra-low-budget Québécois horror shorts seemed like a somewhat ramshackle affair. Now in its sixth edition, the fest can claim some accomplishment, with an elevated profile and a program higher in both quantity and quality, while retaining its DIY, unapologetically lowbrow mission untarnished. With an ever-so-slight chip on their shoulder against the genre-allergic Quebec cinema mainstream, the programmers are coming on strong with the fest’s most bold and diverse selection to date.

The fest opens with the premiere of local director Mathieu Arsenault’s half-hour short Aquariums. Boasting a top-notch local cast—Pierre-Luc Brilliant (C.R.A.Z.Y.), Catherine De Léan (La capture) and Michel Lamothe (Offenbach bassist and son of legendary Quebec country singer Willie Lamothe)—it’s the touching story of a Hochelaga topless-car-wash owner desperately trying to score $5,000 to pay for his teenage girlfriend’s breast implants.

The other big-ticket item on the agenda is the premiere of Clinicotopsie, an hour-long local documentary directed by Renaud Rouverand. Documentaries don’t usually figure into the Spasm programming, but this one’s subject makes it apropos: it explores the journey of a corpse from autopsy to cremation. The programmers indicate that while the doc isn’t voyeuristic or gratuitous, the subject matter is distinctly not for all tastes, but if you’re curious about the one place we’re all sure to end up, this offers a first-hand look.

The festival’s bread and butter is its selection of shorts. This year features more than ever, and the 100 per cent Québécois programming is helpfully catalogued by region, in case you’re curious about what’s coming out of St-Eustache, Vaudreuil or Val-Bélair these days. The Grande Soirée Horreur collects the more straightforward horror flicks; the Cabaret Trash Costumé, a costume-obligatory night taking place at famed drag-queen bar Café Cléopâtre on Halloween, compiles work described by the programmers as “stupid, immature, anal, offensive, sexist, disturbing and in totally bad taste,” including the intriguingly titled Porn Star Trek, while the Un Genre de 5 @ 7 event presents an assortment of science fiction, animation, comedy and unclassifiable shorts. For the second year running, local video collective Kino is also featuring a Spasm-friendly variation on their patented audience-driven filmmaking competitions.

Thinking out of the box, the festival has also included a number of events that fall outside its usual parameters. These include its first-ever theatrical play, Texas—petit thriller texan, which takes place on the set of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre; a scratch video throwdown between local mixmaster DJ XL5 and Quebec City’s mash-up maniacs Total Crap, and perhaps most excitingly, a closing-night event in which a final round of shorts will be followed by a real live wrestling match from extreme regional league Fédération Lutte Québécoise.

With this kind of programming, the Spasm crowd isn’t likely to be welcomed into the mainstream anytime soon, but one suspects that they enjoy their outsider status just fine. In any case, the fest is a great opportunity to check out the regional film scene’s filthy, creature-infested gutters.

Spasm runs Oct. 25–Nov. 3. For more
info and showtimes, see www.spasm.ca

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