Fantastic Fest review roundup (Overlord, Starfish, One Cut of the Dead)

This year’s Fantastic Fest wrapped up in Austin last week, a 7-day-long marathon of great genre films (and many beers), all centered at the legendary Alamo Drafthouse Theatre. Below are a handful of capsule reviews of titles we caught at the festival, including the J.J. Abrams-produced WWII zombie film Overlord, the meditative and mysterious Starfish, and the meta and surprising One Cut of the Dead, a Japanese zombie-comedy that racked up the Audience Award at the festival.

You can view all of our coverage from this year’s Fantastic Fest here. Stay tuned for more reviews and interviews from the festival in the coming days.

Overlord

The J.J. Abrams-produced Overlord has been the cause of much speculation, with many assuming that the WWII zombie film was secretly a part of the Cloverfield universe. While there may be some hidden connection to the franchise (with Abrams this is indeed a possibility), Overlord stands on its own, eschewing the world of giant lizard creatures for a hard-hitting action film with a heavy dose of gore.

Set on the eve of D-Day, Julius Avery’s film kicks off with a group of US paratroopers dropping into France in order to take out a satellite tower in a Nazi-controlled church. If that sounds exactly like a mission from any number of first-person shooter games then buckle up, since much of Overlord feels like an extended Call of Duty cut scene, albeit one with much more gore.

When their plane is shot down en route, the ragtag group, including Ford (Wyatt Russell), Boyd (Jovan Adepo) and a handful of other survivors start carefully making their way on foot, behind enemy lines. The group quickly encounters Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), a determined young woman who has her own grudge against the invading Nazis, who joins to help the team get to the tower, where they encounter much more than a radio transmission.

Overlord is an effective WWII thriller for most of its running time, drawing much of its tension from the team’s plan to break into the Nazi-controlled tower. We don’t learn too much about the team, but the performances elevate them above simple cannon fodder, especially from lead Jovan Adepo (The Leftovers).

While the marketing for the film has really pushed the zombie angle, the horror almost comes as an add-on to what is essentially a fairly by-the-numbers war film. The gore effects are very effective, and nothing (especially in these times) is likely to get a late-night audience more excited than watching a bunch of Nazis take a bullet to the head.

As much fun as Overlord is, the J.J. Abrams association brings long certain expectations that the film can’t live up to. This is a fun and exciting B-movie, with a budget that allows it to veer near blockbuster territory — it never quite gets there, but Overlord is a solid journey regardless.

Overlord opens in theatres on November 9, 2018. 

Starfish

In Starfish, the debut film from A.T. White (frontman of the UK band Ghostlight), the end of the world gets a personal touch.

Aubrey Parker (Virginia Gardner) is mourning the death of her best friend Grace (Christina Masterson), when she discovers a mysterious mixtape, with a label reading “This Mixtape Will Save The World.” Sitting alone in Grace’s apartment, Aubrey plays the tape before going to bed one night, and wakes up in a deserted world. Snow suddenly covers the ground, and Lovecraftian creatures patrol the streets of her small town. Aubrey begins to uncover that Grace was working on a project to harness a powerful signal in the air, one that she has hidden throughout town on a handful of mix tapes, left for Aubrey to discover in places where the two friends used to hang out.

As the film progresses, Aubrey has to fight through her feelings of loss and despair in order to find all of the tapes, in hopes of reversing the damage done by playing the initial mix, all while hiding from the mysterious creatures in her path.

Starfish is an interesting study in tone, with its eerie, end-of-the-world atmosphere buoyed by the glistening indie rock contained on the various mix tapes Grace has left behind, mementos of her long friendship with Aubrey. There are some bold stylistic choices, including an animated sequence and a meta encounter that takes place on the actual set of the film, but even if all of the disparate elements don’t always coalesce, Starfish remains fascinating throughout. This is the rare horror film that accurately depicts loss and regret in a realistic way, human elements that can be just as defeating as the roving monsters that stalk Aubrey throughout the film.

Starfish screens next at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival and at Ithaca Fantastik.

One Cut of the Dead

One Cut of the Dead is a movie you have to stick with. The first 37 minutes of the Japanese film is one long take (hence the title), a plodding, low-budget zombie tale set in an abandoned factory. As the “action” unfolds, the characters seem a little discombobulated, reacting slightly out of time with the events, until we see a director named Higurashi (Hamatsu Takayuki) burst into the scene, furiously trying to whip them all into shape. It quickly becomes apparent that we’re watching a movie within a movie, a concept that unexpectedly shapes how the rest of this unusual film plays out.

One Cut of the Dead is best experienced with as little knowledge of the film as possible, so if you want to go into this film completely cold, come check back after you’ve had a chance to see it for yourself. After the 37-minute opening scene, we suddenly see the credits roll, wrapping up the film we’ve just seen. We then cut to a large city and witness Higurashi in a meeting where he is being pitched the concept for One Cut of the Dead, a live TV broadcast of a zombie film, one he agrees to helm after some initial hesitation.

The rest of the movie shows all the work that went into creating the 37-minute short, and fills in the gaps from what we just saw. We see why characters reacted the way the did, why certain shots looked the way they did, and follow the large behind-the-scenes team as they scramble around the set trying to execute this demented idea as smoothly as possible.

More than just a meta horror film, One Cut of the Dead largely succeeds due to the story of Higurashi’s supportive family who band together to help get the film done, including his extremely dedicated wife (Harumi Syuhama) who ends up heavily shaping the film when she’s forced to take over for another actress at the last minute.

Shot-through with outrageous slapstick comedy, and featuring a strong cast of newcomers, One Cut of the Dead manages to reinvigorate the long-dead zombie-comedy genre, while also serving as an ode to the DIY spirit of filmmaking that resulted in the creation of many of our favourite horror films in the first place.