Fantastic Fest Capsule Reviews
Deep Fear - Several years ago, there was a horror movie called As Above, So Below about a bunch of young people who venture into the catacombs beneath Paris, only to find scary stuff. It was terrible. Deep Fear is also about young people finding scary stuff in the Parisian catacombs. It's much better. Early scenes play heavily on claustrophobia, as the characters have to squeeze themselves through tight spaces in order to get down that far. The darkness is creepy, as are the rats and skinheads they encounter inside. The second half is creepy in a totally different way, as the gang stumbles into an old Nazi bunker that isn't exactly unoccupied. At least one German has never been told the war is over, and he's pissed. Is using Nazis for lightweight thrills arguably tasteless? Perhaps, but Deep Fear is consistently nerve-rattling, so you don't really think about that until afterward. I don't know where they filmed this movie, but the illusion that these people are deep in underground catacombs is thoroughly convincing.
A Life on the Farm - Here's a documentary that starts off as one thing, then evolves into something far more meaningful. It looks at the bizarre case of Charles Carson, a lonely British farmer who used his video camera to make a movie about his own life. It featured graphic sequences of cow births, a funeral for a deceased cat, and Carson taking photos with his mother's corpse. The bizarre nature of the tape led it to become a viral sensation years later. At first, we think A Life on the Farm is just a “Wow, wasn't this guy crazy!” lark. Then, through interviews with people who knew Carson, it becomes a fascinating meditation on life and death. Far from being morbid, he seemed to be using his camera to deal with losses he couldn't process otherwise. Making the movie was his own form of therapy, in which he channelled his grief into a constructive form. The last act takes a wild twist you won't see coming. At 75 minutes, it's not a long film, yet a great deal of meaning is packed into that short running time.
The Stairway to Stardom Mixtape - One of the great things about the '80s was that there weren't a million cable channels like there are now, and late night programming tended to be a weird hodge-podge of whatever TV stations could toss on cheaply. One of those shows was Stairway to Stardom, a low-rent public access talent show filmed in host Frank Masi's basement. Masi booked anyone who wanted to come on, and this compilation of clips shows some of the strangest acts, many of whom perform against a bare-bones backdrop that consists of a trifold privacy screen and some potted plants on the floor. There are poorly choreographed dance routines, amateur magicians, musical acts poorly lip-syncing their songs, impressionists, and some of the worst stand-up comedians you can imagine. Even at 70 minutes, this oddity wears out its welcome by the end, although it did make me nostalgic for the anything-goes era of cable television.
