Seventh deadly spin

The seven-year-old SPASM
festival offers another collection
of proudly trashy Québécois efforts

SUBWAY SPLATTER: End of the Line

by MALCOLM FRASER

The SPASM festival began as a ramshackle collection of “100 per cent Québécois” horror shorts—the sort of enterprising move that deserves an A for effort, and perhaps a chuckle for the results. But seven years on, the fest definitely has the last laugh, with its profile rising consistently even as it maintains a proudly local and unashamedly trashy raison d’être. To illustrate how the fest keeps one foot in respectability with the other firmly planted in its low-culture roots, consider that no other festival in town divides its screenings between the Cinémathèque québécoise, the Cinéma Impérial, La Ronde and tranny strip club Café Cléopâtre.

While last year’s fest boasted its first-ever feature film, this year finds the number of full-length films ratcheted up to three. The opening gala première is local production Cul-de-$ac, the tale of three Montreal hoodlums who kidnap a young girl and suddenly find themselves facing a cabal of ruthless ninjas (the film’s brilliant tagline is “C’est des câlisse de ninjas!”). A mishmash of Asian-style action and lo-fi gore ensues, enlivened further by the casting coup of ’60s-era québécois crooner Serge Laprade.

Chicoutimi-based director Éric Bilodeau has been a fixture at SPASM over the years with his short films; this year marks his feature debut with Hunting Grounds, a post-apocalyptic actioneer. End times also loom in the fest’s third feature, End of the Line, a thriller directed by Montrealer Maurice Devereaux in which a group of religious fanatics attacks the passengers of a stalled subway train. Screened at 2006’s Toronto International Film Festival, the film was hailed by critics as truly terrifying.

Short films remain the fest’s bread and butter, and this year finds them in plentiful supply. A program of science fiction includes the intriguing Le Dernier souverainiste, set in a post-referendum Quebec civil war and starring noted local actor Jean-Nicolas Verreault (Maelström, Truffe). Action films are the focus of another program, while still another soirée presents highlights over the fest’s history from the animation program at CÉGEP du Vieux Montréal.

The fest’s collection of unclassifiable material, named Un Genre de 5@7, features Sunday Afternoon by local filmmaker and Bell Orchestre member Kaveh Nabatian among many other twisted delights. The Cabaret Trash program consists of work that’s loudly and proudly in bad taste. Repurposed copyrighted material, toys submitted to sexual positions and scantily clad women figure heavily.

Halloween night itself will find the fest’s specialty, the horror short, on display at a costumed event. Several animated films will screen along with the expected no-budget screamers, and although it’s seemingly out of place, Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed short Next Floor will also be screened on this night.

Several special screenings will also take place over the course of the fest, including Trailer, a night of fake movie previews, the ever-popular video-culture mashup Total Crap, and a presentation of the 1964 hour-long Radio-Canada drama Cyborg, described by the fest as the first-ever Québécois science fiction film. In addition, the fest has ingeniously partnered with Montreal institution La Ronde to screen a collection of its highlights in the spooky season.

While the fest can’t exactly claim to have something for everyone, it does offer a lot for a certain few—fans of genre cinema, trash connoisseurs and anthropologists of Quebec culture will thrill to the peculiarities on display.

SPASM RUNS OCT. 23–31; FOR MORE
INFO, SEE WWW.SPASM.CA