An ex-cop gone bad gets back in the killer-catching game in The Chaser

The Chaser is a well-scripted stylish Korean thriller in which ex-cop Jung-ho, who has found a more lucrative occupation as a pimp, tries to solve the puzzle when some of his girls disappear. When a serial killer is found to be involved, things get complicated.

The Horseman is an intense Australian film in which we follow a man on another very grisly manhunt. When a father finds out his daughter was involved in an underground porn video, he sets out for bloody retribution against all those who may have been involved in her death.

Hardcore documentary Graphic Sexual Horror, about the ill-fated extreme bondage website insex.com, leaves even less breathing room and features, among other things, women in cages - not in a women-in-prison-movie kind of way, but literally, women in tiny cages, some of them even submerged in water. It's hard not to question the extremes to which the website creators and their cohorts go for apparent pleasure.

Lee Demarbre's Smash Cut is a homage to splatter master Herschell Gordon Lewis, and a who's who of cult film past. David Hess (Last House on the Left) stars as a hack director who chops people up to include convincing gore in his latest film. The cast also includes Michael Berryman in a grandma-style hairpiece, Wizard of Gore's Ray Sager, and H.G. Lewis himself, all of whom seem to be trying to outshine each other with dubious acting skills, with amusing results.

Finally, there's Crush and Blush, an unromantic comedy produced by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst) about an angry, goofy teacher who seeks to ruin an affair between a rival teacher and her long-time crush. A very funny, disenchanted tale with a fabulous script from director/writer Lee Kyoung-mi.
 
 

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~Fantasia 2009: III~     Again, many films that deserve to be seen and hyped won't be so I'll do it for them. France's Lascars was a wickedly wild bit of animation that really deserved a better spotlight than it got. In terms of animation it's a complete throwback to hand drawn caricatures à la Duckman with an insane hip hop sountrack. One of the best comedies of the summer. Take that Just For Laughs! ~ Graphic Sexual Horror will disturb you. This wasn't some cute and tame piece on the world of S&M and bondage, this was an in your face exploration of the subject matter with none of the regular filters that allows an audience to experience a previously misunderstood world. In the same way that Bianca Beauchamp's All Access docs from previous Fantasias were insightful and sexy this doc by Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon is visceral and unflinching. Easily the most graphically powerful film of this Fantasia fest. Definitely not for everyone ~ Wow, you plug Lee Demarbre's Smash Cut by listing off every actor involved in the flick except the one that a lot of people who bought a ticket went to see--Sasha Grey. Real ballsy oversight that was. Smash Cut wasn't a great movie by any lenght of the imagination but the least that you could have done is give props to the actress for trying to branch out of her adult cinema world and making it to the Fantasia premiere for a film venture that was at best an iffy proposition.
Pedro Eggers		July 20th, 2009
Fantasia: End of week 1 report     We are already into week to of Fantasia and i thought that maybe it would be fun to right a weekly report of what i love and what i hated during that week plus what i'm looking forward to see during week 2 So first of all, let's talk about some of the really good movies that came out of week one. The first really good movie that i saw was Must Love Death, this was one of the most original movie have seen in a while, who would have thought that mixing romantic comedy with torture porn would work so well. The story isn't really important in this is the follow of the action and comedy that make this movie so fun to watch. Then you got IP Man, who is a completely different type of movie. I loved this movie simply because of the old school feel this movie brings to the table. This is your typical martial arts movie but set in a time when martial arts were a way of life. What can a say about Thirst that wasn't said before. This was the way Twilight should have been done. Have a love story between a vampire and a human while keeping into the rules of vampire movies intact, great film. Some other film i enjoyed during this first week were Sweet Karma, A Canadian made revenge movie about a deaf Russian girl seeking revenge for the death of here sister. Stoic, the new movie from Uwe Boll, i got to say that since i left the video-games based movie, Uwe Boll as become a way better director, this movie about prison life is really intriguing and made for a better film then i expected. Has for movie that i hated, Evil Spirits: VIY was a movie that was so boring that many people including myself walk out on. Other movies in this category were Grace and Mutants. 2 Horrors movies that don't deliver suspense wise. Has for week 2, I'm mostly looking forward to seeing Warlords, Alien trespass, Blood River and Orphan. So week one was a pretty good week as far as movies are concern let's hope the week 2 stay as strong as week 1 and let's just continue to have fun.
Martin Rioux		July 16th, 2009

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