Offscreen Notes
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Clive Barker’s History of the Devil (August 1-3)
“As long as we do bad things we need somebody to blame.” So says Clive Barker on the premise of his play “History of the Devil,” in which Satan himself pleads innocence to a court of law overseeing his case for parole from damnation. Longing to return to the side of God where he once shone so brightly, he claims that the evil of the world is the work of humankind alone, that he has been our scapegoat for too long. And so we tour the history of atrocity in seven acts, each open to interpretation so that we might contemplate the nature of our own ideological orientations. Originally written in 1980 for Barker’s own theatre The Dog Company, the play has gone on to be staged numerous times over the last 30 years by various production companies, selling-out houses, often striking up controversy and occasionally being banned for blasphemy. But all accounts suggest that the current version mounted by the relatively new Title 66 troupe is the most riveting to date. The man who brought us the Hellraiser universe meets an upstart theatre company eager to re-vitalize the stodgy world of the contemporary stage, and the combination promises a stellar rendition indeed. Don’t miss their stop at Montreal’s Cinqueme Salle, three nights only – August 1-3 – in conjunction with the Fantasia International Film Festival. Tickets here.
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Pollygrind Underground Film Festival on the Map
Taken from their press release, Pollygrind is becoming a leader in the support of offbeat, challenging and experimental genre cinema:
“Films from Peter Grendle, James Cullen Bressack and Eric Stanze will get special out-of -competition showcases at the 2013 PollyGrind Film Festival in October. PollyGrind director Chad Clinton Freeman excitedly announced during San Diego’s Comic Con Weekend that Grendle’s Blood Soaked, Bressack’s 13/13/13 and Stanze’s China White Serpentine will screen at the Las Vegas event.
“We’re still receiving entries for our competition films until July 31,” Freeman said. “We are also six weeks away from when the official in-competition selections are announced, but I thought it might be a cool tradition to start naming the special showcases each year during Comic Con.”
Blood Soaked, a small film from New Mexico that features zombies, Nazis and lesbians, will have a Special Wild Eye Releasing Showcase.
Featured recently in Fangoria magazine, Blood Soaked won Best SFX at the Jersey Gore Film Festival and played the Dark Matters Film Festival. It is also slated to screen at the Salty Horror International Film Festival.
“I can’t tell you how proud I am that we’ll be playing PollyGrind,” Grendle said. “I’m a big fan of your programming. You guys do great stuff.”
Blood Soaked recently signed with Wild Eye Releasing, who has been a sponsor of PollyGrind since 2011. In addition to the showcase, this year Wild Eye will be hosting a panel on distribution, and giving away distribution contracts and consultations to winners.
The demonic 13/13/13, a sequel to 11/11/11 and 12/12/12, gets a Special Asylum Showcase. The film will have its world premiere at the festival. Writer and director Bressack world premiered his found footage film Hate Crime at PollyGrind last year and won awards for Most Horrifying and Best Transgression Film.
“I’m really glad to have The Asylum on board PollyGrind as a sponsor and to be screening 13/13/13,” Freeman said. “I’ve been talking with them for some time, they recently had some success with Sharknado on the SyFy channel and had a film from a PollyGrind alumni in the pipeline, so the timing worked out really well.”
China White Serpentine will have an Underrated Gem Showcase. It was originally released in 2003 and is currently out of print.
“I’m a huge fan of Stanze,” Freeman said. “And this is probably his least-seen and least-talked-about movie. It’s a great piece of experimental art filled with sex, drugs and death. I am very happy to be showcasing this.”
Stanze’s Ratline won Best Crime Film and Best Use of Music at the festival in 2011.
Currently revisiting a few of his older titles, hoping to give them a new spotlight, Stanze, who also directed the cult classics Ice from the Sun and Scrapbook, had many praises for PollyGrind, which screens everything from arthouse to grindhouse.
“Few film fests in the world champion truly independent cinema the way Pollygrind does,” Stanze said. “Due to its exhibition of cutting-edge indie flicks and on-the-rise filmmakers, Pollygrind is an essential part of the independent film landscape.”
An international film festival steeped in artistic freedom, PollyGrind celebrates individuality, diversity, creativity, and empowerment by showcasing the work of filmmakers with defiantly independent visions.
Named one of 2012’s “25 Festivals Worth the Entry Fee” by MovieMaker, PollyGrind has seen its official selections earn distribution deals from LionsGate, Alternative Cinema, Showtime, IFC Midnight, Wild Eye Releasing, Hannover House, Troma, Synapse Films, Cult Epics, Autonomy Pictures, and a slew of other outlets.
An IMDb qualifying event, PollyGrind has been said by Withoutabox.com to revel “in the bold, the exciting, and the avant garde” and “single-handedly redefined what to expect during the film festival experience.” Past festivals have included concerts, burlesque and art shows, as well as a zombie red carpet walk and cupcake eating contest.
As one of the first festivals to screen, embrace, and award the underground gems Slime City Massacre, The Bunny Game, Dear God No!, The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol, and Adam Chaplin: Violent Avenger, PollyGrind “lives to champion underdogs by turning them into beloved sensations,” Withoutabox wrote in this year’s spotlight on the festival.
Before Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary success, their debut Dead Hooker in a Trunk won numerous awards at PollyGrind. Before Calvin Lee Reeder starred in the hit V/H/S or directed The Rambler feature, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, he won best director at PollyGrind.
Additionally, Randy Moore’s 2013 Sundance film Escape from Tomorrow was a 2012 official selection and Craig McIntyre’s L.A. Maniac (formerly The Los Angeles Ripper), which is slated to be released this fall by Lloyd Kaufman’s distribution company Troma, played the festival in 2011.
PollyGrind, which has more than $30,000 in cash, prizes and swag to give away this year, was founded in 2010 as a festival that pays homage to the spirit of the highly creative and innovative works of indie film pioneers of the past such as Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ted V. Mikels and Doris Wishman.
Scheduled to take place October 9-13, the festival offers special discounted categories for women and girl filmmakers, all filmmakers under 18, Nevada filmmakers and films, debut and sophomore features that have not had world premieres, as well as films that have been rejected from other festivals. New this year is also the addition of a screenplay competition.
PollyGrind selections have screened at Sundance, Telluride, Another Hole in the Head, Fantasia, Raindance, Fantastic, Toronto International, Arizona Underground, Chicago International, Austin and more. Its films and filmmakers have been covered by Variety, Hollywood Reporter, National Lampoon, Fearnet, Fangoria, Dread Central, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Indiewire, Diabolique Magazine, HorrorUnlimited.com and Arrow in the Head.
Aside from The Asylum and Wild Eye Releasing, other sponsors this year include Afternoon Innovations, Footage Firm, Video Blocks, Sony Creative, Glidecam, Alternative Cinema, Apprehensive Films, theatre7, Quick Film Budget and Atomic Liquors.”
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Fantasia International Film Festival
Fantasia is back with a bang, returning to the Imperial Theatre while its new home, Concordia University, undergoes some much needed renovations. Highlights for this edition include a lifetime achievement award to Poland’s dark genius Andrzej Zulawski, which includes rare screenings of select films from his back log (Szamanka, L’amour Braque), and a career retrospective talk moderated by scholar East European scholar Daniel Bird. Fantasia returns to its initiative of stepping beyond cinema with a theatrical presentation of Clive Barker’s play, “Clive Barker’s A History of the Devil.” Fantasia opened James Wan’s terrific The Conjuring a day before wide city release. I was lucky to catch the film on the opening night and can vouch for it being one of the creepiest haunted house films in years, reaffirming director James Wan’s position as one of the most formally inventive horror masters of his generation. The film is a heady blend of The Exorcist, The Haunting, Poltergeist, and The Amityville Horror. Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil sees him return to his shocking roots, with an audacious attempt to reconnect with the slow burn build-up of Audition. Much more to savor at Fantasia so check their website for details and updates.
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Lau Kar-leung (28 July 1934 – 25 June 2013)
One of the premier, if not THE master, of Hong Kong action, kung fu and wu xia film, as both fight choreographer and director, passes away just shy of his 77th birthday.
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Richard Matheson: RIP (February 20, 1926 - June 23, 2013)
Only a few weeks after the loss of Ray Harryhausen, the world of the Fantastic has lost another of its legends when writer Richard Matheson passed away on June 23, 2013 at the age of 87. Even is you never read one of Matheson’s novels, you no doubt saw one of his novel adaptations into film or saw one of his many screenplays for televison (notably Twilgiht Zone and Night Gallery) or cinema. His story “I am Legend” (1954), a ‘last man standing’ scenario pitting man against marauding, blood drinking undead, stands as one of most influential and important horror/SF novels of all time.
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UHF (Untitled Horror Film) Kickstarter Program
Director Jp Banks-Mercer needs 5000 British Pounds to complete post-production on his indie found footage horror film. Check out his kickstarter page for his pitch, and teaser footage. Found footage horror has been done to death, but this one seems to have a unique spin (blending snuff film with supernatural haunted house mythology) on the tired formula and just might be what horror fans are craving. Donate 15 pounds and you get a free digital download of the finished film.
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Project Django!
A retrospective on the spaghetti western programmed around the notion of a ‘parallel history of the western.’ A not too be missed event organised by the joint efforts of The Fantasia International Film Festival and the Festival of New Cinema.
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Françoise Blanchard: 1954-2013
Former adult actress who made the transition to feature film, largely through the tutelage of French horror master (who also made adult films during his lean days) Jean Rollin. Blanchard passed away at the young age of 58. Blanchard’s non sex films were almost exclusively made with Rollin, who gave her her debut in La Morte Vivante (1982), in which she played a young woman Catherine Valmont who comes back to life a blood craving zombie/vampire. Blanchard’s almost mute performance touches on many emotional nerves (childhood memory, friendship, class, etc.) and builds to a startlingly violent & sexual climax where her child-hood best friend Helene sacrifices herself to satiate Catherine’s ‘hunger.’ Blanchard’s last film was Rollin’s semi-autobiographical La nuit des horloges.
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Ray Harryhausen: 1920-2013
The last survivor of the three muskateers of the fantastic, Ray Harryhausen (1920-May 7, 2013), has died at the age of 92. The first to die was Forrest J Ackerman at same age 92 on Dec. 4, 2008, followed by Ray Bradbury age 91 on June 5, 2012. These three giants of the field of the Fantastic did more to shape and promote the field of the popular Fantastic than perhaps any other people in their field. Ackerman as a writer’s agent, ambassador and founder of the first ever monster magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Ray Bradbury as a science-fiction and fantasy writer and Harryhausen as the greatest ever stop motion animator and visual effects creator, an art that has now given way to digital animation. These three figures met in the late 1930s and remained close friends until the end. Harryhausen was inspired by the stop mositon animation work of pioneer Willis O’Brien, noting in particular King Kong as the film that inspired him to take up the field. Harryhausen first solo film was loosely based on a Bradbury short story, “The Fog Horn,” The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which quickly established him as the heir apparent to O’Brien. Over a dozen key works in the genre of fantasy/science-fiction followed in the 1960s, 1970s, including the classics Mighty Joe Young (1949), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts, and The Valley of Gwangi (1969). Although a cliche, an era has well and truly come to pass.
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Jesus Franco (May 12, 1930 - April 2, 2013)
The passing of prolific (over 200 films, an apparent Guinness Book of World Records for most films) Spanish director Jesus Franco, revered by some, reviled by others, marks the end of a wonderful era of Euro-horror, of which he was one of its prime movers and shakers. Euro horror is hot right now (with the first ever dedicated book just out by Ian Olney, entitled Eurohorror, 2013, published by Indiana University Press) and the deaths now of Mario Bava (1980), Riccardo Freda (1999), Lucio Fulci (1996), Paul Naschy (2009), Jean Rollin (2010), and now Jesus Franco leaves only a handful of younger directors who made films at the tale end of the euro-horror boom alive and kicking (Lamberto Bava, Dario Argento, Pupi Avati, Harry Kumel, Sergio Martino, and others). The recent passing of both Franco and Rollin is most strongly felt because they, perhaps, are two filmmakers who best exemplified the highs and lows of the euro-horror film: unabashedly personal, without care for taste or decorum, yet marked by a tasty streak of exploitation that made their films ultimately populist (if not for all tastes); at times veering toward artfully sublime, other times marred by the affects of time and budget restrains; never afraid to mix the once taboo elements of fierce violence and naked sexuality. The works of Franco and Rollin challenged the way films were told, the roles of women (who were often cast as powerfully iconic figures, dangerous, Amazonian, lethal, sensual, seductive, ‘monstrous’ female fatales, lesbian or bisexual lovers, and tragically fated to repeat the sins of their past incarnations), and the limits of what constitutes horror. With the recent boom in interest, academically and by ‘fan scholars’, the groundwork laid out by figures such as Franco and Rollin will only grow in historical stature.
