Crazy 8th

The SPASM festival celebrates eight years of lowbrow, low-budget and local film

by MALCOLM FRASER

The SPASM festival, that scrappy purveyor of all things horrific, trashy and proudly local, this year celebrates its eighth anniversary with a surreal smorgasbord of screenings and special events, amped up to satisfy fans of all things low-budget, lowbrow and low-grade.

The fest opens with Montreal director Geoff Klein’s Bikini Girls on Ice, an old-fashioned slasher flick about a bevy of voluptuous babes on their way to a fundraising car wash. Their bus breaks down at an abandoned gas station whose owner turns out to be… well, again, it’s an old-fashioned slasher flick, so no need to elaborate the plot much further. Klein will be coming off a string of successful festival screenings in the U.S., so horror buffs should come welcome him home for this local premiere.

Another local notable, and frequent finalist for Best Local Filmmaker in the Mirror’s annual Best of Montreal survey, is veteran horrormeister Sv Bell. Here he presents his latest feature, Crawler, a festival prizewinner with a decidedly original hook—its villain is a bulldozer with tentacles (and a hate-on for the human race). Other local features include Max Perrier’s suspenseful The Ante and comic fable Sans Dessein, the first feature from SPASM regulars Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard.

SPASM has always prided itself on “100 per cent Québécois” content, but something about French filmmaker Laurent Sebelin’s Burn Paris Burn convinced the fest to make an exception and show its first-ever foreign film. With its heavily stylized, psychedelic animated backgrounds and quasi-mythical plotline involving video games, flying motorcycles and rock ’n’ roll deals with the devil, it fits pretty comfortably with the fest’s local contributions.

The Mon premier film program showcases the first-ever works by locals who would later go on to be part of projects like Phylactère Cola, Total Crap, Chick N’ Swell and others. The SPASM organizers warn that these works of juvenilia are often of an extremely poor quality, which is saying something considering the fest’s love of amateurism, but the presence of the filmmakers discussing their earliest efforts should be entertaining.

Local site 33mag.com is launching its new web series Inspector Bronco, a pastiche of ’70s Bollywood crime-fighting action, at a special SPASM 5 à 7 event featuring music and a live stage show. Perennial festival faves Total Crap will be showcasing their latest collage of bottom-scraping cultural detritus from decades past. Another annual feature, Cabaret Trash, spotlights work that the organizers boastfully promote as being in particularly bad taste. And as always, the fest presents a series of shorts divided by genre, with spotlights on science-fiction/fantasy, suspense, a program of “unclassifiable” weirdness, and a horror showcase coinciding with a costume party on Halloween night itself.

The same evening, the SPASM gang takes things pan-Québécois with simultaneous screening/parties going on in Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Chicoutimi and Alma as well as our fair city. While not quite the Quebec culture the Montreal boomer elite would approve of, it is a riotous event whose content could only come from this special place.

THE SPASM FESTIVAL RUNS
FROM OCT. 22–31. SEE
SPASM.CA FOR DETAILS.