Danger After Dark Shorts

Reviews for the 2010 Danger After Dark Film Festival, July 9-19

Venue key: RE=Ritz East, 125 S. Second St., 215-925-7900 | RB=Ritz at the Bourse, 400 Ranstead St., 215-925-7900 Following are reviews of movies premièring at QFest, July 8-18. Up to the day of the show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (noon-9 p.m.); by phone at 267-765-9800, ext. 4, or online at qfest.com; by noon Monday through Friday and 9 p.m. the previous night on Saturday and Sunday. Same-day tickets are available at the screening venue. Tickets are $10. recommended. highly recommended.

Amer

I almost feel bad for not loving Amer: It's a gorgeous yet nasty spectacle for both the ears and eyes. It's brave, too, weaving together three chaotic and nearly wordless episodes about a woman's sexual awakening in an admirable, if naïve, crack at essentialism, and its attempts to build on the innovations of Buñuel, Leone and, most obviously, giallo filmmakers like Argento will warm any fan's heart. Sadly, it's kind of a hack job. Now and again, the violently erotic sequences in Amer succeed in evolving the surreal trances and unsettling voyeurism their forebears made famous. But these moments are too often followed up by calculated signs and allusions that dole out self-aggrandizing rewards for the enlightened viewers who understand them. In the end, Amer's energy collapses into pedantry. It's academe billed as orgasm; a film for armchair theorists, all of whom think I missed the point. -Eric Henney (RB, 7/14, 10pm)

Big Tits Zombie 3-D

Though it's cause for international celebration based on title alone, Takao Nakano's answer to Jenna Jameson vehicle Zombie Strippers! — meaning it, too, is a bloody undead campfest starring a prominent adult film star — is also a riot to watch. Based on a popular manga, Big Tits Zombie follows the buxom travails of Rena (Japanese porn icon Sora Aoi), an exotic dancer who gets stuck at a remote spa resort ("It's like Texas in Japan!") where the entertainers outnumber the customers. Boredom is the rule — until bitchy, combative, Bataille-quoting rival Maria (Mari Sakurai) discovers a collection of occult literature in the basement and inadvertently raises the dead, forcing Rena to bust out her latent chainsaw slaying skills. Aoi has incredibly sharp comedic timing for someone who spends a good amount of her workweek with her feet in the air, and this short, sexy romp will appeal to anyone with the ability to laugh (the zombie infection can also spread to sushi!). -Drew Lazor (RB, 7/16, 10pm)

Deliver Us From Evil

Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch) delivers a slick, amoral Straw Dogs retread set in a Danish seaside town. After wastrel Lars (Jens Andersen) flattens an elderly woman with his tractor-trailer, he shifts the blame to Bojan Navojec, a Bosnian refugee doing odd jobs for his older, more productive brother, Johannes (Lasse Rimmer). Led by the dead woman's husband, a retired colonel whose son was killed in the Serbian theater, the town's population of angry drunks and bitter workingmen instantly jump at the chance to crucify the outsider, but Johannes stands in their way, motivated as much by bourgeois disdain as any sense of moral rectitude. Johannes' house, with wife and children inside, is converted into a fortress assailed by bloodthirsty rednecks, an overdetermined setup the movie does little to complicate. Like Sam Peckinpah, Bornedal clearly dislikes his ostensible hero, but there's none of Peckinpah's self-critical ambivalence. He doesn't have the courage or honesty to work himself into the story, and all that remains is glib condemnation. -Sam Adams (RB, 7/11, 10pm)

Dogtooth

Giorgos Lanthimos’ sublimely unsettling parable begins with an outlandish idea and follows it through with devastating logic. Taking parental oversight to its furthest extreme, a middle-aged father and mother keep their three grown children captive in their own house, restraining them not with locks or chains but an elaborate mythology that paints the world beyond as a toxic death trap. Rather than remaining innocent, if they ever were, the children exist in a state of pure amorality; their limbs hang awkwardly, as if there’s nothing holding them up. Lanthimos’ open-ended approach leaves the film open to multiple, if equally inconclusive, interpretations, but its indefiniteness only adds to the unease. -S.A. (RB, 7/9, 10pm)

Enter the Void

The brutal, brutalizing cinema of Gaspar Noé would seem to have dead-ended with Irreversible, a movie that centered around a rape conducted in excruciating real time. But Noé pushes the needles further into the red with Enter the Void, a postmortem hallucination whose pulsating cascade is likely to induce seizures even in the non-epileptic. Shot almost entirely from the P.O.V. of a callow American killed in a drug bust, the film floats through the neon miasma of Tokyo like a woozy ghost, seeking out the seedy milieux Noé loves so much. Ostensibly due to the largely unseen protagonist's desire to safeguard his stripper sister, Noé wastes no excuse to undress Paz de la Huerta, whose body has been covered outside and in by the final reel. Arguments over visionary psychedelia versus exploitation art-wank are sure to ensue, but it's worth seeing just for the chance to take sides. -S.A. (RB, 7/15, 10pm)

Robogeisha

Too concerned with hitting all its bugged-out bullet points to come off as anything more than a series of sick sight gags, Japanese cult auteur Noboru Iguchi's RoboGeisha is shocking by design, yet dull as a whole. Ultra-competitive sisters Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi) and Kikue (Hitomi Hasebe) are recruited by the dreamy CEO of a steel conglomerate for what they believe will be cushy gigs as geishas, but soon learn that the company's a front for a highly specialized, partially mechanized team of attractive young girls who work as high-power hitwomen. Circular saw mouthpieces, throat-slashing blade implants, throwing star-dispensing anuses and (of course) acidic projectile breast milk pepper every Troma-esque scene, but the movie's too long, and its premise is subversive for the sake of being so, like a high school kid who prominently pastes pentagrams on the inside of his locker. -D.L. (RB, 7/10, 10pm)

The Temptation of St. Tony

With what little comprehensible dialogue there is in Veiko Õunpuu's elusive psychological thriller, one line stands out: "A man's life these days is not worth shit." It summarizes the moral confusion of the main character, Tõnu, a factory manager close to a midlife crisis. He wants to know: Will a good life be rewarded in the afterlife? When he encounters a strange series of events, Tõnustruggles to grasp the point of leading a good life and with it goes his sanity. Practically every word out of his mouth, including a conversation he has with an agnostic priest, is purely existential. Mix in some acts of cannibalism and you've got the overall idea. Shot in black and white against a backdrop of the Estonian and Swedish countrysides, St. Tony's visuals and editing are what place The Temptation of St. Tony above other foreign thrillers. The same can't be said for the subjectless subtitles. -Lauren Macaluso (RB, 7/13, 10pm)