Fantastic Fest 2021 reviews: Saloum, Iké Boys, The Sadness

Austin’s annual Fantastic Fest is currently underway, offering up a hybrid model of in-person screenings and at-home viewing options.

We took a look at a trio of new films screening at the fest including a fascinating African genre mash-up, a love letter to Japanese pop culture, and a truly revolting Taiwanese zombie movie.

Fantastic Fest runs through September 30, with the online FF@Home kicking off the same day and running through October 4. Passes are available via the official Fantastic Fest site.

Saloum

Written and directed by African filmmaker Jean Luc Herbulot (Netflix’s Dealer), Saloum is a thrilling and invigorating genre mashup that defies expectations at every turn.

Saloum follows a trio of mercenaries carrying stolen gold (along with a kidnapped drug dealer) who are forced to make an emergency landing after a major heist. The feared trio, known as the Bangui Hyenas – Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah) and Midnight (Mentor Ba) soon come upon Saloum, a small town in Senegal where they hunker down to recuperate, only to discover that the town and its spirits have their own ideas about how to handle the new arrivals.

Herbulot brilliantly weaves together notions of African-Caribbean folklore and mysticism with tense action scenes, along with classic western and supernatural elements, for this riveting feature. Saloum features stunning and stylistic camera work and a rat-a-tat editing style that brings to mind Guy Ritchie’s early films, but transposed into a world we rarely see brought to life in such a vivid and exciting way.

Shot through with unbridled energy you can almost feel burning through the screen, Saloum is a vibrant and fresh genre film that pays homage to everything from Reservoir Dogs to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre while blazing its own distinct path forward. See this one on a big screen if you can.

Iké Boys

Set in a small town in Oklahoma during the final days of 1999, Iké Boys revolves around a pair of best friends, Shawn (Quin Lord) and ‘Vik’ (Ronak Gandhi), who are obsessed with manga, anime, and all things Japanese.

Their fascination reaches its zenith when Vik’s family welcomes a Japanese exchange student named Miki (Christina Higa) into their home. Seeking to impress her, Shawn puts on his most recent acquisition, a lost anime film that magically transforms the trio into spectacular beings. Meanwhile, a doomsday cult is set on destroying the world before the end of the millennium rolls around, leading to an epic battle between good and evil.

Directed and co-written by Eric McEver (along with Jeff Hammer), Iké Boys is an engrossing coming-of-age story steeped in a love of kaiju movies and anime. There are some curious plot elements that may rub some viewers the wrong way (Miki’s obsession with Native Americans leads to a fairly cringe-worthy plot revelation), but overall, this is a sweet and light blast of low-budget genre fun. Filled with inventive set pieces and wild animation sequences, Iké Boys is a rousing action-adventure film that proudly wears its heart on its mech-covered sleeve.

The Sadness

Taiwanese horror film The Sadness is the first film in the Fantasia Film Festival’s 25-year history to generate a trigger warning from the programmers, which is really saying something for a festival renowned for its adventurous audiences. Readers; the warning is well deserved.

Rob Jabbaz’s feature debut is a zombie film fit for these pandemic times. The Sadness is a bludgeoning, nihilistic, and sickening look at what it would be like if humanity’s worst instincts took over (the North American equivalent is, of course, Florida).

The film focuses on a young couple, Jim (Berant Zhu), and Kat (Regina Lei). They live in a crowded high-rise, and through news reports and snippets of conversation, we learn that the country is in the grasp of a mutating virus. Experts are pleading for the government to take the strain seriously, while the general population already seems to be over it; they just want to get on with their lives.

Once Jim drops Kat off at work, The Sadness suddenly rockets into high gear; we see victims of the virus instantly turn into bloodthirsty beings when exposed, tearing people apart limb from limb while their sexual drives take over, resulting in rashes of rape and murder (and everything in-between).

Rob Jabbaz is clearly intending to shock audiences with The Sadness, and one’s “enjoyment” of this film will entirely depend on whether you can tolerate having your buttons (and gag reflex) repeatedly put to the test. There is no comedy or joy about any of this; it’s not like the blood-soaked horror-comedies that Peter Jackson made his name on. This is brutal and horrific and yet, is shot with such incredible style and verve that it’s hard to turn your eyes away from the bile-inducing carnage on-screen, which somehow gets increasingly more twisted and disgusting as the film unfolds.

In many ways, The Sadness feels tailor-made for notoriety, the sort of film teens will challenge themselves to watch once it becomes widely available. Yes, one can view the entire exercise as a commentary on the base desires we keep hidden deep within us and how that can be exploited by a deadly and contagious virus, but that reading feels like a flimsy frame from which Jabbaz gleefully gets to unleash one revolting set-piece after another. It’s hard to recommend The Sadness in any traditional sense of the word, but it’s somehow reassuring that a movie like this even got made in the first place.