Fantastic Fest 2023 - Day 3

Blonde Death is a stunning piece of outsider art/trash cinema. Made in 1984 by first (and only) time director James Robert Baker – aka James Dillinger – the shot-on-VHS movie is Badlands by way of a soap opera. Baker was a member of an early- ‘80s L.A. art collective called EZTV, and he was a prolific author of, as Wikipedia describes it, “sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction.” Shot with a budget of $2000 of his own money, Blonde Death has an air of Tennessee Williams about it, albeit unapologetically queer and gloriously transgressive.

The movie concerns a young couple who link violence against their oppressors with their burgeoning sexuality. This movie is so righteously angry towards Evangelical Christianity that it is, quite simply, breathtaking. It’s also a stunning portrayal of female desire not often seen in mainstream cinemas even today. I got my wish at the screening last night in the last thirty minutes or so when I started to slowly nod off as the movie came to its crescendo of an ending. Blonde Death is a movie-going experience I will not soon forget.

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After some time to turn it over in my head, I want to dive into my thoughts about the Found Footage Festival, Vol. 10 that I attended yesterday. Everything you are about to read is complete and total supposition and opinion on my part. I can’t prove a word of it. Hear me out, though. Anybody who knows me knows I’m about as far as can be from the kind of person who gets caught up in Q-anon-type conspiracy theories, but I fell into one of my own making when I decided that the two guys behind the Found Footage Festival are actually genius-level performance artists who are playing a clever game with what they are presenting as “found footage.”

The guys behind the Found Footage Festival

Here’s the basic idea. These guys claim to have a library of over 11,000 VHS tapes, and through exhaustive rummaging of the material, they curate collections of the best, funniest, most outrageous clips they come across.

I didn’t buy a word of it.

Or, at least, not all of it. To paraphrase a certain infamous nefarious historical figure, a lie is most effectively sandwiched between two truths. I came to the decision that the Found Footage Film Festival (you can find their stuff on YouTube) is either partly or mostly staged bits by these guys themselves, and they are building a comedy routine around the false “found footage” that they themselves created.

The first thing that made me furrow my brow was one of the first clips they presented. It was a marketing video from the 1980’s selling video rental stores on the success of dance-themed movies, and how going big on carrying such titles – which this marketing firm represented – would be a huge financial success for the rental stores. It is the grossest, most hilarious example of late-stage capitalism and packaging art as a purely financial consideration.

Here's where I go a little Q-anon. At the tail end of the video – which is supposed to be for no other purpose than selling video store owners on stocking dance-themed movies for teens – as the picture is fading out, there was the sound of a live studio audience applauding and cheering, very similar to what you would hear on something like Saturday Night Live at the end of a successful sketch. There is NO REASON such a sound effect would appear on a video like this if it is what the Found Footage Festival guys purport it to be. If they did actually produce this clip, instead of it being something they ran across, that sound effect is an easter egg for eagle-eyed (and eared) viewers as a signal that the video isn’t what it seems.

I continued my descent into skepticism with each new video they rolled out. The first was a montage of women’s video dating clips from a dating service company in the ‘80s. (Here was another clue for me in my theory: each video they introduced came with a baroque, convoluted story of how they came across the tape. For the dating video, they talked about how they had shown a montage of dating videos from men a few years ago from the same company, and IT JUST SO HAPPENED that the person that supplied them with that video came across the female counterpart video recently and got it to them.) In the montage, one woman goes on and on and on about how happy Woody Allen is in his relationship with Mia Farrow. This woman is so over the top in what she says about Allen and Farrow that it’s hard to believe she would have said it without the context of knowing the eventual outcome of that situation.

They also introduced a montage of footage from Simitar Entertainment, a real company – so, the truth sandwiching the lie – and included in it were some absolutely bonkers clips that were so ridiculously bad, it’s hard to believe they weren’t produced with the sole purpose of making people laugh.

Another video was of a North Carolina man who was convinced a petrified log of wood he found was used as a club by prehistoric humans. In the tape, purportedly made in the ‘80s, we hear the man, who is always off-screen, so we have no idea what he looks like, telling anyone who will listen, and a few people who won’t, his theory about the stick. The Found Footage Festival guys then show a clip of them tracking this guy down in the present to interview him about his stick.

I think this guy is an actor. If the Found Footage guys introduced me to him as a real person and not a character, they would not be able to convince me that he is not an actor doing a bit at their behest. That’s the level of Andy Kaufmann-esque performance art that I think is going on here. If I sound a little off my rocker, you can blame my recent experience with Nathan Fielder’s absolute mind-fuck of a show called The Rehearsal.

The most genius part about the whole thing is, no matter what the case – real footage or created – it doesn’t really matter. What these guys are doing is hilarious either way. But, it’s an endlessly more interesting situation if I’m right. I could go much deeper on this. I made mental notes about why I thought every tape these guys presented was staged and built around a comedy routine that they had orchestrated. Buy me a drink some time, and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll blame it all on the fascist, inveterate liar Donald Trump for making us all question everything we know about reality all the time now. I’ll also be sure to bring an extra tin foil hat for when we meet up to discuss!

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I was shut out of not one, but two, screenings I wanted to get into when selecting my tickets yesterday for today’s lineup. One of them was one of the four secret screenings. It sold out in no more than 15 seconds. It was a bummer for sure, but, the great thing about Fantastic Fest is, even if you don’t get into your first choice, there are always multiple other screenings that are just as intriguing. I’m about to try to get a ticket to Caligula for tomorrow. Wish me luck!

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I did not get a ticket to the first Caligula showing. It was marked as sold out even before I was able to reserve tickets. There is a Press & Industry (P&I) screening Monday morning, so I will likely ditch the midnight show on Sunday night (my beloved The People’s Joker) so I can get some sleep before the 8 A.M. Caligula screening. You win some, you lose some. I did snag a ticket to the second Secret Screening, so I am looking forward to that.

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Sri Asih: The Warrior is roughly 15° askew of anything you'd see in the MCU, to refreshing effect. From Indonesia, and based on a popular comic book, this superhero movie is part of the BCU (Bumilangit Cinematic Universe) and it tackles gendered violence, #metoo, and the police providing a service, for a fee, to the super rich to stage murders as random robberies-gone-wrong. Hard to imagine anything like that in the MCU. The DCU's The Batman has something it would like to discuss with me, though.

The CGI looks sketchy in places, and it is definitely born of the MCU mold (mid-credits sequence included), but it's fresh enough, because of the local filmmaking culture, that it demands a pass. You get long soap operatic-sequences just for the hell of it in this. I love how the movie takes its time to build a moment.

It also features a female hero who fights for the well-being of the marginalized and poor. The Big Bad’s plan that kicks off the climactic battle sequence is petty out there.

This is a screening that replaced a showing I got shut out of, and I’m glad I got to see it. To me, that’s the real joy in attending a film festival. It’s not the raucous opening and closing night parties, or the other high-hype, high-energy events. It’s waiting at the door for the announcer to call your theater and badge level for something you know next to nothing about, making your way to the theater when it’s time, plopping down in a quiet screening room with a dozen or so other people, and saying, “OK, show me what you got.”

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I just finished Mushrooms, and I really don’t know what to say about it yet. There is a spoiler that would completely wreck the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it, meaning I’m dying to see it again to find out how I will react on a second viewing. It begins with a kindly old gramma-type – it’s set and was made in Poland, so I believe “babushka” might be the word – peacefully hunting truffles in a vast forest. It’s a completely pleasant scene, until the soundtrack grows ominous as the old lady lingers in looking at a specific mushroom, like it might be malevolent.

She then comes upon a pair of early-20s kids who are dressed in Hansel and Gretl-style garb. They explain that they work at a theatre in Kraków, and sometimes, to blow off steam, the whole crew will dress in the theatre’s costumes, go out into the middle of nowhere, get drunk, and party. If someone gets so drunk that they pass out, it’s a common prank for this friend group to steal the hapless partygoers’ clothes and money and leave them in the woods to force them to walk to a nearby village to get rescued. Will she help them by leading them back to civilization?

The movie sets us up for a cat-and-mouse game, but the trick is that the cat and mouse keep switching places. The movie willfully makes us question who among these two factions has ill intentions. Sometimes it switches on a minute-by-minute basis. The final 180° twist, which comes in the final seconds of the movie, completely pulled the rug out from the entire audience. It was an exhilarating experience.

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When I discovered that the director of one of the most bonkers movies I’ve ever seen, called After Blue: Dirty Paradise, had a new film and that it was premiering at Fantastic Fest, it became a priority. I was not disappointed.

Directed by the singular voice that is Bertrand Mandico, Conann is even more batshit insane than I could have possibly imagined. No one other than Bertrand Mandico could have made Conann. His vision is wholly unique. Mandico takes the story of the well-known Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian character and realm and refashions it in his own gonzo image as pure acid trip. With Conann, our beloved hero, the “most barbarous of all barbarians,” Mandico reimagines the character as a woman. As with After Blue, the world he builds is a phantasmagoria of image and sound that perplexes and baffles even as it mesmerizes.

Mandico essentially recasts Conann as a fucked up Arthurian legend. She is the prodigal warrior who will be the greatest, most bloodthirsty ruler ever known. Conann’s Merlin is a prophesying character named Rainer who foresees the future greatness of her charge. Did I mention that Rainer is a dog-faced humanoid character whom everyone recognizes as having the face of a dog, but that everyone is also totally cool with? The pronouns for Rainer throughout the movie are he/him, but the character, under the dog-face mask and makeup, is played by a woman, wears a t-shirt and jeans, and has a haircut that looks about like a hair metal band member from the 1980s.

The framing device of the picture, outside of Rainer’s voiceover narration guiding us through the mighty Conann’s rise to power, comes as each older version of Conann appears after a time to murder the younger version of herself in order to take power for the version of herself who has greater experience and wisdom.

So, we have to get used to a new actor playing the character every twenty or so minutes, which works way better than it has any right to. The final version of Conann, becoming a legend after death, comes with a request from the warrior queen that leads to a sequence so outrageous, there’s no way the film wouldn’t have been banned in several countries had it been released only a few decades earlier. I’ll leave the sequence to your imagination but I’ll note that cannibalism really seems to be having a moment in pop culture right now.

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I have one more screening tonight, but this will be my last post of the fest. I am exhausted, and am ready to take in some movies without trying to also write about each one. Since the only person I answer to is me, I’ve decided to approve the request. Head over to my Letterboxd account to see quick reactions to everything I see for the rest of the fest. I’ll be taking a few weeks off after Fantastic Fest as well, before gearing up for the fall/winter awards season. Plus, Rae and I are participating, for the first time, in Hooptober, starting in October first. You can find out what that is and follow along here.

Thanks so much for reading!

Movies are neat.