Fantastic Fest 2023 - Day 2

Divinity was a disappointment. The Steven Soderbergh-executive produced sci-fi curio directed by Eddie Alcazar is about a pharmaceutical company titan, Jaxxon, who has the world hooked on Divinity, a drug that cures everything, allowing the user to become one with the gods and live forever. Early in the picture, two mysterious brothers appear out of a hole in the ground and kidnap Jaxxon in order to exact retribution on him for his wicked ways. Meanwhile, a mysterious group of women, led by a cryptic soothsayer, guide the brothers on a path that will shape the future of humanity.

Or something.

It's all very vague and mysterious, offering little in the way of an actual narrative. Storytelling like that can be mesmerizing – I love a good head trip movie, which Divinity certainly aspires to be – but the movie’s downfall is its all-consuming sense of self-seriousness. It veers into unintentional camp on occasion, causing the audience I was in to laugh a few times when I don’t think we were meant to do so. The literal last second of the movie, which provides what’s supposed to be a mind-blowing moment, comes off as sophomoric. My expectations were raised when I saw not only Scott Bakula but Stephen Dorff in the film’s opening minutes. The longer it wore on, the more I was ready for it to end.

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Speaking of disappointments, the system for getting people into screenings at this year’s Fantastic Fest leaves something to be desired and is a definite step down from last year’s process. From what I understand, Alamo South Lamar is undergoing a major renovation that has reduced the spacious lobby – where I did most of my hanging out between screenings last year – to essentially two narrow, long hallways leading to the screening rooms. (I didn’t get a chance to take any pictures last night, because it was nuts-to-butts all night, but I’ll get some at some point and include them in a future post.)

I have to assume that the plan was for the construction to be complete before the fest started, but we all know how construction goes. The setup should be fine for a regular movie theater foot traffic situation, but corralling and effectively moving hundreds of people in and out of those two narrow hallways five times a day is, quite frankly, a complete shitshow. We’re all now forced, while waiting for a screening to start, to congregate outside of the theater in the heat. (Hi, I live in Texas, where it reached 96° in late-September. FML.) Here’s to hoping the rest of the fest, which shouldn’t be nearly as packed as the opening night festivities, will be less stressful.

As I type this, I’m getting ready to reserve my tickets for day three of the fest before making the short trek to the theater for day two’s first screening. On the docket for today is my first documentary, Scala!!!, a Fantastic Fest original found footage festival, two more 2023 releases, The Origin and What You Wish For, and I’ll wrap things up at midnight with a 1984 repertory screening of Blonde Death.

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I’ve found my first must recommend of the fest. Scala!!! is a heartfelt documentary paying respects to a seminal outsider cinema and music venue, the Scala Cinema, that shaped punk and post-punk culture in London between the late 1970s through the mid- ‘90s. Like CBGB, Studio 54, or the infamous grindhouse movie theaters located along NYC’s 42nd street, the Scala was all that and more. It was a haven for misfits and oddballs of all sorts who built a home and a sense of community right as Thatcher’s Britain ramped up fascist attacks on those on the fringes of society. The stories that the filmmakers have memorialized are outrageous – the dead body of a (former) patron was dragged from the theater into a manager’s office once, for example – and they evince the sort of punk rock ethos that defined the theater’s raison d’etre.

The directors of *Scala!!!*, both on the right. (photo by the author)

The film itself gets closest to reaching transcendence in its first third. The directors weave in film clips – all of which actually screened at the Scala over its decades’ long run – to show us, rather than simply tell us, what it was like to be there. The doc clocks in at right over 90 minutes, but the heavy reliance on talking head interviews after the midway point began to weigh on the overall effect for me. The score also becomes a bit repetitive at a certain point.

Still, any theater that routinely screened Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (a movie that low-key terrifies me to even think about seeing) and that firmly fixed a middle finger in the eye of straight society will have my full, rapt attention. The whole time I was watching Scala!!!, I was confident in knowing that I never would have been cool enough to be a member of the club.

One of the co-directors of the film was a staff member at the Scala, and it’s obvious how much affection she has for something that meant so much to her and to hundreds of others. The theater’s inevitable downfall, which involved a screening of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, is as interesting as it is mundane. The film is a salute to an outsider institution that screened the kind of cinema written off by the respectable gatekeepers of cinematic history and criticism.

My next screening starts in 30 minutes, and it’s sure to be a doozy. It’s the Fantastic Fest Found Footage Festival, Vol. 10; see you on the other side!

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I just got out of the Found Footage Festival, Vol. 10, and holy shit, it rocked my world. This is going to take much more time and attention than I have before my next screening starts, which is in 30 minutes. I have a theory about the Found Footage Festival folks. I’ll go in depth tomorrow morning, as a way to kick off my day three coverage. I’ll see you there! I’m off now to see The Origin, a horror story set…IN THE STONE AGE! I watched Quest for Fire for the first time back in February of this year – thanks for the assist on the date, Letterboxd! – and I really liked it. I’m excited to find out how The Origin compares to one of the most rigorous recreations of paleolithic times ever committed to film!

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One of the coolest compliments I ever heard the late, great Roger Ebert express about a movie was that, while you were watching it, your mind kept turning, thinking up new questions about the situation that was playing out on the screen. He said that about a mid- ‘90s sci-fi movie starring Charlie Sheen and Teri Polo called The Arrival. I saw it four or five years later, and, to be honest, it didn’t move the needle much for me. The plot felt a little silly, and the CGI was already outdated by that point. Still, I appreciate the sentiment that Ebert was expressing.

The Origin is exactly the kind of movie Ebert was talking about. A monster mystery set 45,000 years ago among cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers; I kept coming up with new questions about the scenario I was seeing as I watched it.

First-time feature director Andrew Cumming commissioned a linguistics expert – apologies for not knowing the name, I wasn’t taking notes during the director Q&A after the screening – to invent a brand-new language for his film, because he decided using English made the whole thing seem silly.

What’s so fascinating about the movie is that you can see exactly why we’re still dealing with horrible inequality today because of systemic inequalities that began when we were still taking to caves for shelter. Almost the whole movie is a commentary how things got the way they are.

When the patriarch of the clan demands that his mate tell their son a story, it’s because she is there for his pleasure, and nothing more. That’s why women are still treated as property by a troubling proportion of men society even now. Humanity’s original sin was when a strong person decided to treat someone weaker than they were poorly simply because the stronger person had more power than the weaker one.

As an atheist, I also connected deeply with the film, because The Origin acts as an atheist Passion of the Christ. More so, because the movie shows you, right in front of your eyes, the rituals, myths, and legends that lead to so many people believing that Passion of the Christ is a true story in the first place. When everything in the natural world was mysterious, religion helped make the world make sense.

The movie makes us understand that the prehistoric characters we are following have ritualized and standardized the idea that cannibalism is wrong. No magic invisible sky wizards necessary for human beings to decide cannibalism is immoral. You don’t need any other reason than the simplest, “I don’t want you to eat me when I’m dead, so I’m going to decide not to eat you.”

The Origin’s composer provides a guttural, percussion-dominated score that’s propulsive and kept me in a state of alert throughout the movie. If I have one nit to pick, it’s that the actors looked a little too manicured at times. I was aware they were actors doing a job instead of actually being prehistoric people. It was an incredible experience on the big screen, though, and I’ll be dragging a few people to it when it hits theaters, if all goes according to plan, in February of 2024. Next up is What You Wish For in the 8 P.M. block. I have forgotten anything I once read about this since I decided on my schedule. So, whatever happens will be a complete surprise.

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I really can’t say it any better than the statements made about What You Wish For by the presenter who spoke before the screening. “The director is working in the style of a Patricia Highsmith novel and neo-noir.” I am Jack’s sense of being intrigued. “He also is exploring the themes of fear and desire with this movie.” Stop drilling, you’ve struck oil.

What You Wish For is a brutal, nasty little fable that is absolutely horrifying, while actually depicting a relatively little amount of carnage. It is a nihilistic, hopeless tale about how it’s the super rich’s world and we’re all just living in it. I loved it. There’s a Hitchcockian level of suspense throughout the picture that is incredibly effective. I won’t dare spoil anything about this extreme variation on Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, but I’ll just say, the callousness of the representatives of the rich in the movie are so outrageous, all the audience could do was laugh when presented with it. This thing is unbelievably bleak.

My last title for the day is a midnight screening of Blonde Death, a repertory showing of a 1984 cult classic. I have no idea what it’s about, but I really won’t mind if I fall asleep a little during it. I won’t be mad about the experience of letting dreams and movies start to blend into each other at a late night screening. It’s not that I don’t care about focusing on the movie, but this seems like a perfect title to let bleed into the dream world. I’ll let you know how it went tomorrow!

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Sights from around the fest: