Artwork by Chris Bilheimer
Here’s how much of a creature of habit I am. The filmmaker Q&A for the last screening I attended last night at day 1 of Fantastic Fest ended a few minutes after 1:45am. By the time I got back to my host’s house – major thanks to the amazing Melody Smith, who has graciously opened her home to me during the fest – and had unwound enough to drop off to sleep, 2:30 was rearing its ugly head. Yet, right on schedule, my eyes popped open at 5:30, as they do most mornings. I was able to catnap for another 45 minutes before accepting the inevitable and starting my day.
After arriving in Austin mid-afternoon yesterday and securing my press badge, I settled in to my temporary home base with a little over four hours to kill before the first round of screenings. The good people of Fantastic Fest must have sensed I had a few free hours, because they sent me an email telling me six new films were available for me to watch via streaming as part of the Fantastic Fest @ Home option.
Might as well get an early start!
That’s how Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle became my first screening of Fantastic Fest. Had I seen either of the other two Birdemic movies? No, I had not. But these movies have a certain reputation as some of the worst cinema ever made, so I couldn’t resist experiencing what all the fuss was about. Turns out, it didn’t matter that I had never seen the third installment’s predecessors.
Released in 2010, the first in the Birdemic series, aka Birdemic: Shock and Terror, quickly made a name for itself in the so-bad-it’s-good subgenre. The movie’s poor acting, stilted dialog, and risible visual effects made it an instant classic in the mold of Plan 9 from Outer Space. Writer/director James Nguyen has not honed his craft in the intervening twelve years.
One of the cardinal rules of filmmaking is “show, don’t tell,” as the pictures in motion pictures are an elemental building block of the art form. Nguyen – who produces, writes, and directs – wants us to know two things: climate change will be the end of humanity and he loves Alfred Hitchcock movies. Those are thesis statements with which I wholeheartedly agree.
The problem is how Nguyen gets his points across. Every single dialog exchange in Birdemic 3 – and I am not kidding here, it is Every. Single. Exchange. – is structured as a lecture wherein one character harangues the other character(s) about either the terrors of climate change or how amazing Alfred Hitchcock movies are. Every character sounds exactly the same. Here’s some sample dialog:
Surfer, after coming out of the ocean when he is nearly attacked by a shark: “A few years ago, it was very rare to find sharks in the Santa Cruz ocean, right? Ok, but now, because of global warming and climate change, you know, the sea warmed, and now they’re out there. It’s like every time I surf, I’m playing Russian roulette with sharks.”
I had read that with the second Birdemic, Nguyen gave a knowing wink to the audience reception of the first film. With Birdemic 3, I could never determine with any certainty if Nguyen asked his actors to deliver intentionally wooden performances so that the movie could be in on the joke. I also couldn’t tell if he was aware that the only people with guns to fight the bird attacks – which doesn’t start in earnest until the final 20 minutes of the movie – are people of color, a Latinx biker gang and a Black man the movie credits only as “Rapper.” Also included is a song the two leads dance to that is about, naturally, the horrors of climate change, and the least erotic sex scene since The Room.
But, Nguyen has the courage of his convictions. After raising only $596 of his $500,000 Indiegogo goal and $230 of his $200,000 Kickstarter goal, Nguyen made it happen. You have to admire that kind of commitment. I’ll be honest, I’m tempted to attend one of the in-person screenings of Birdemic 3, if only to experience how it plays in a roomful of people.
Next up was the 8:15 screening of French director Léa Mysius’s The Five Devils, or Les Cinq Diables. Mysius uses the familiar technique of employing flashbacks to reveal the dark past of her characters, but with a notable twist. Vicky, the film’s young protagonist, has an otherworldly sense of smell. It’s so good that she can recreate any smell she choses by mixing different ingredients – in one of her perfume creations, one of the ingredients is her own urine.
These scents are so strong that smelling them transports Vicky back in time to witness the complicated relationship between her mother, Joanne, her father, Jimmy, and her father’s sister, Julia. That’s how Mysius peels back each increasingly complicated layer of the onion. Through Vicky’s ghost-like visitations to the past, we learn about what Julia did to cause her to go to prison and receive intense psychotherapy. It’s quite a shock when we also discover that one of these people can inexplicably see Vicky during these trips to the past, when no one else can.
Within Mysius’s nuanced film, she explores relentless bullying by Vicky’s classmates because the young girl is biracial. Actor Adèle Exarchopoulos gives a bracingly raw performance as mother Joanne. Sally Dramé, as Vicky, is very good as a blank slate that guides us through her strange world and the revelations it possesses. Florencia Di Concilio’s score is, at times, overwhelming in setting an otherworldly mood. The film also features an inspired use of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. The Five Devils is a film I won’t soon forget.
I had a little over an hour between the end of The Five Devils and my next screening, so I decided to check out the opening night party. As soon as I approached the line of people waiting to get into Alamo South Lamar’s Highball lounge, the guy working the door shouted that anyone wanting to enter needed to make sure they got their cocktail at the bar in the lobby first. He let us know we would never get one inside the lounge due of the crushing number of people in attendance. I firmly identify with Roger Murtaugh in these situations – I’m too old for this shit – so instead, I watched a fetish gear-clad drum corps perform their high-octane music and light show while I waited for my 11:35pm screening. The whole of Fantastic Fest has a very carnival-like atmosphere and a sea of humanity provides some amazing people-watching for introverts like me.
At Fantastic Fest, sometimes you’re waiting for your next screening to start and a fetish gear-clad drum corps starts up a show. NBD. (photo by the author)
The next screening was Short Fuse, a collection of horror shorts specially curated by a Fantastic Fest programmer. The presentation consisted of nine short films. Here were a few of the highlights for me:
Gnomes: This six-minute short from Dutch filmmaker Ruwan Heggelman is a dark take on the cute creatures we’ve all become accustomed to thinking of as helpful little woodland creatures. It works as a parable for the human cruelty involved in procuring and preparing the living creatures we ingest for nourishment. The disemboweling-through-the-mouth climax must be seen to be believed.
In the Flesh: From director Daphne Gardner, this 13-minute short focuses on a woman who is very into using her bathtub faucet for sexual gratification and release. Things take a turn for the horrific – and increasingly disgusting – when raw sewage starts running from the tap. Inexplicably, this causes the woman to start leaking a psychotropic black goo from her lady bits. My mom reads this, so I’ll leave it at that, but this is a must for body horror fans.
Swept Under: From director Ethan Soo comes an affecting 10-minute short about the horrors of American military intervention imagined as the literal horror of a Cambodian-made rug – or so we think – that attacks a first-generation Cambodian-American, exacting the debt of generational trauma. It’s a movie with a message, namely that American foreign policy can and has led to real suffering. Soo also implicates the actions of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in his creepy meditation on past atrocities.
From Beyond: The most experimental film of the lot, director Fredrik S. Hana’s 14-minute unsettling vision of extraterrestrial life insinuating itself into our reality feels like David Lynch crossed with Jonathan Glazer’s outré Under the Skin. The film uses beguiling pure-cinema imagery – one example is what looks like a zygote suspended in some sort of organic solution – to imagine a horrifying alien invasion. Bonus points for the psychedelic technique of blurring out the faces belonging to any voice of authority – the only dialog in the picture.
Rounding out the screening were shorts titled Blood Rites, Night Shift, Prom Car ’91, Ringworms, and Roach Love.
Filmmaker Q&A after the Short Fuse screening. From left to right: Two Fantastic Fest programmers (sorry, I didn’t get their names); from Prom Car ‘91, actor McKenna Marmolejo and director Brian F. Otting; from Ringworms, director Will Lee, cowriter Ian Hedman, and actor Alexis Clayton; from In the Flesh, director Daphne Gardner; from Swept Under, director Ethan Soo. (photo by the author)
Onward to day 2 of the fest!