Festivals: Fantasia
Fantasia 2024 Wrap: What We Saw, Liked, and Loved
From July 18 through August 4, 2024, the centre of our genre-film loving world moved to Montreal, Canada, where the Fantasia International Film Festival unveiled a broad and diverse selection of films from around the world, as they have done,...
Fantasia 2024 Review: A SAMURAI IN TIME, A Time Traveling Swordsman Finds New Life As A Samurai TV Extra
Steeped in a combined sense of nostalgic whimsy and melancholy, Yasuda Jun'ichi’s A Samurai in Time serves up a comedic fish-out-of-water tale of an Edo-period warrior magically transplanted to the present day and the challenges he faces as he tries...
Fantasia 2024 Review: SHELBY OAKS, A Rock Solid Fright Film From First Time Director Chris Stuckmann
Twelve years ago, YouTuber Riley Brennan went missing. When, after a long dry spell, a seemingly related tragedy lands on the doorstep of her sister Mia, the rescue mission restarts in debutante director Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks. Chris Stuckmann is...
Fantasia 2024 Review: BABY ASSASSIN NICE DAYS, Third Chapter Does The Same Things Over Again, Just Better
In the ongoing adventures of Chisato and Mahiro, our teenage assassins are on vacation in Miyazaki, Japan, for a little bit of work and a whole lot of rest and relaxation. A last minute dropout from another assassin in the...
Fantasia 2024 Review: IN OUR BLOOD, Using Documentary Sensibilities to Elevate Found Footage Horror
Emily is making a documentary about reconnecting with her estranged mother, Sam. Emily was removed from their home when she was just a teenager and put in foster care because of her mother’s addiction. Years later, Sam wants to reconnect....
Fantasia 2024: BOOKWORM Wins Audience Award/Prix du Public
Screendaily shared the news that Ant Timpson's Bookworm, the story of an absent father who reunites with their daughter to get proof of a mythical beast, has won the Audience Award for this year's edition of Fantasia. Bookworm was...
Fantasia 2024 Review: 100 YARDS, Exemplary Martial Arts Action
It’s the 1920s in Northern China and prized student Qi Quan returns to their martial arts academy. He is there to participate in a formal duel, for leadership of the academy. He will fight Shen An, son of the academy’s...
Fantasia 2024 Review: BLACK EYED SUSAN, A Hard Look at Toxicity and Exploitation
Derek is down on his luck. Separated from his wife and child he lives out of his car, using it for ride-sharing to make ends meet. He meets an old friend, Gilbert, who offers to give him a job testing...
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Fantasia 2024 Review: THE DEAD THING, Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places
It's tough out there for a single gal. Alex (Blu Hunt) is a woman caught in the throes of malaise, accompanied by a desperate wish to find something worth caring about. Her daily grind is uninspiring, her home life with...
Fantasia 2024: BLACK EYED SUSAN Red Band Trailer, Scooter McCrae Returns After 25 Years
CW: Domestic abuse, realistic violence Exploitation icon Scooter McCrae is back behind the camera with Black Eyed Susan, his first feature film since 1999's Sixteen Tongues. After having directed a few shorts and doing a bit of acting in the...
Fantasia 2024 Review: LANTERN BLADE, Stop-Motion Martial Arts Series Delights And Impresses
Lantern Blade is a web-seires directed by Zhu Ziqi at Mote Stop Motion Animation studio in China. Lantern Blade is part of the Tencent Video Original Animation Short Film Collection, an anthology with a stop-mo program. It was released in...
Fantasia 2024: NIGHT FISHING Short Film, Short Review
The award winning Sci fi-Action short film, Night Fishing, from Byoung-gon Moon played to an appreciative crowd before the other night's screening of The Roundup: Punishment. Moon takes home the award for Best Editing at this year’s festival and we got...
Fantasia 2024 Review: BRUSH OF THE GOD, A Charming Elegiac Ode To Kaiju Films Of The Past
A teenage girl and her geeky friend must use a magic paintbrush to save the world from killer kaiju in eighty-eight-year-old Murase Keizô’s debut feature, Brush of the God. Akari’s (Suzuki Rio) grandfather has just passed away and she doesn’t...
Fantasia 2024 Review: TIMESTALKER, Alice Lowe Chases The Love of Their Lives
They say "You'll find love when you stop looking for it." Well, I can tell you from experience that I stopped a long time ago and either I’m not looking very well or it’s complete bullshit. On the other...
Fantasia 2024: FACES, Short Film Short Review
Judy is in town, visiting her cousin, when she's invited to a party at Brad's house. Brad, eternally a frat bro, thinks he has an easy mark for a night of sexy fun. But tables are quickly turned and the...
Fantasia 2024 Review: PARVULOS, Coming of Age in The Darkest of Ages
Three brothers, Salvador, Oliver and Benjamin, have been forced to fend for themselves, holed up in a stone house in the middle of the forest. Their family fled there after a catastrophic event wiped out large swaths of the population....
Fantasia 2024 Review: RATS! A Blast Of Hilarious Punk Energy From Small Town Texas
Raphael (Luke Wilcox) is a a typical 2007 teenage dirtbag who gets wrangles into working as an informant for a local lunatic cop in directors Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky’s uproariously funny cringe comedy, Rats! When Rafi is picked up for...
Fantasia 2024 Review: HELL HOLE, Man In The Warmest Place To Hide In The Adams Family Creature Feature
The Adams Family filmmaking team moves away from their usual introspective slow burns in their latest film, the Serbia-set creature feature, Hell Hole. Even though this film seems mile away from their usual projects, the Adams/Poser family can’t help injecting...
HELL HOLE Official Trailer: Is This a Sillier, Gorier Adams Family Than We're Used to?
We've got to hurry with this announcement because we've got to get in line to catch the world premiere of Hell Hole here at Fantasia. The latest horror flick from the Adams Family premieres in less than a couple hours....
Fantasia 2024 Review: HAZE, A Dark Psychological Thriller Bouyed By A Striking Lead Performance
A struggling young journalist returns to the hometown he abandoned long ago with hopes of digging up a story about the local psychiatric facility, what he finds instead is a past that refuses to rest in Matthew Fifer’s psychological thriller,...
