SXSW Review: "Honeymoon"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 17 March 2014 00:52

Written by Matt Oakes

"Honeymoon"
Directed by Leigh Janiak
Starring Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Ben Huber, Hanna Brown
Thriller, Horror, Sci-Fi
87 Mins
United States

In 1954, Colliers Magazine published Jack Finney's sci-fi horror serial The Body Snatchers. Since then, this fire starter novella has led to a handful of direct film adaptations (the latest being Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2007 The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman) and dozens of spinoffs (John Carpenter's The Thing for instance.) But even more importantly, Finney's creation all but gave birth to a whole subsection of genre: the infamous body invasion flick. In the years since, many filmmakers have employed this humble little niche market as an elastic stage to claim veritable scares by peddling harrowing practical visual effects and unsettling character shifts (in the best of cases) or CG sight gags and the banal formula of a group's numbers mysteriously thinning (in the worst of cases). Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak though sees the genre as a chance to explore change on a microscopic scale, to prod just how absolutely horrifying it would be to see the one you love most temporally drained from their own body. Let's just say, it's not nice.

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SXSW Review: "Starry Eyes"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 15 March 2014 00:51

Written by Matt Oakes

"Starry Eyes"
Directed by Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Starring Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Shane Coffey, Natalie Castillo, Pat Healy, Nick Simmons, Maria Olsen, Louis Dezseran
Horror
United States

At the risk of emasculating myself, I'll admit that Starry Eyes was so scary that it made me cry. Not ooey, gooey gobs of terror tears so much as the lone, solitary drop leaking down my face as my jaw was busy sagging half-way to the floor. Still, a tear's a tear and a tear did floweth. So if this film doesn't at least creep you out, check your pulse because you're probably not human or may have already sold your soul to the devil. It's more likely though that you'll be sitting in a pile of your own yuck after the screening, tired, sweaty, fearful and all the more afraid of the dark.

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SXSW Review: "Ping Pong Summer"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 14 March 2014 00:50

Written by Matt Oakes

"Ping Pong Summer"
Directed by Michael Tully 
Starring Marcello Conte, Myles Massey, Emmi Shockley, Lea Thompson, Susan Sarandon, Amy Sedaris, John Hannah, Robert Longstreet
Comedy
United States

The opening scene to Ping Pong Summer sees Rad - our very uncool, ironically named protagonist - trying to make a hardboiled egg. After getting a pot of water boiling, he eyes the microwave, opting for the easier route, hoping to satisfy his need for eggy goodness as quickly as possible. As that white egg spins in the hollows of a 1980s microwave, you could hear the audience groan with unease. "Is it gonna explode?" you could almost hear them fret. When Rad pops the now piping hot egg out thirty seconds later, peels it and chomps down, the yolk - now essentially a yellow sun of melty goo - explodes onto his face like yolked magma. Half of the hapless audience explodes with laughter. After digesting the contents of the remainder of this helplessly uncool flick though, one ought to see this dismal cold open as the perfect analogy for the film at large - an easy route to the finish line that just ends up exploding in its own face.

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