By Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributor
The lineup at this year’s Fantastic Fest, one of the most prominent and boisterous genre film-centric festivals, is a bit thin. To be fair, there are a number of terrific films that have already played the festival circuit at least once or twice now, like Beyond the Black Rainbow (Tribeca), Take Shelter (Sundance, Cannes), Boys on the Run (New York Asian Film Festival), Livid (Toronto), A Boy and His Samurai (New York Asian Film Festival) and Extraterrestrial (Toronto). But I don’t think of these films as Fantastic Fest titles; these aren’t films that need Fantastic Fest to become known quantities, so they can’t be exclusively associated with Tim League’s wonderful Austin-based festival.
Sitting on the sidelines and covering the festival remotely makes it hard to judge the atmosphere of Fantastic Fest. That’s why I won’t say much about why I’m disappointed that the Fantastic Fest Awards for “Best Horror Film,” “Best Horror Director” and “Best Horror Screenplay” went to You’re Next, a movie that I saw at Toronto and thought was reprehensibly lazy filmmaking all around. Still, I’m in New York as I type this, which is a long ways away from Texas. So no straw man arguments about awards, audience reception, etc.
With that caveat in mind, I’ve been frantically trying to cover Fantastic Fest (FF) titles that are both unique to the festival and that I feel are the best of the fest. Next week’s post will be a more indiscriminate post on festival viewing (i.e., stuff that’s already screened at other fests).
Fantastic Fest kicked off last week with the vile, draining but nonetheless weirdly satisfying Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, the sequel to the notorious exploitation film whose infamous reputation began in Austin last year. Writer/director Tom Six knew that he couldn’t pull the same prank twice, so he didn’t try to play coy as he did in the first film. In Human Centipede: First Sequence, Six didn’t unnerve viewers with explicit violence but with violent shifts in tone and the suggestion of some very gross stuff. It’s queasy stuff, but it’s also really funny when it wants to be. The main difference between First Sequence and Full Sequence is that in the latter film, Six only pulls the rug out from under his viewers after encouraging them to laugh with him.
Human Centipede 2 toys with its audience knowing that they already know what the film’s title entails. In it, a churlishly obese and hygienically challenged recluse plots to create a 12-person-strong human centipede. Six bludgeons his viewer with fetishized violence, including some torture scenes that are selectively filmed in real-time. He’s showing viewers more than they ever wanted to see and throwing in appropriately crass jokes, too. In that sense, Full Sequence is the second part in what Six promised Fantastic Fest audiences would be a three-part running gag. It’s the same joke but told in a paradoxically more grueling but less disorienting way.
The rest of the Fantastic Fest-centric titles I’ve seen have been OK, but none has really impressed me as much as Full Sequence. Clown: The Movie, the recipient of Fantastic Fest’s “Best Comedy” award, is satisfying, but it’s basically just a better version of raunchy but never-as-subversive-as-they-think-they-are Hollywood comedies like The Hangover or Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Based on the Danish TV show by the same name, Clown follows Frank (Frank Fvam), a nervous and very square married man, as he and his horndog best friend Casper (Casper Christensen) ditch their wives to go on a, uh, canoe trip that they constantly refer to as the “Tour de Pussy.” The trouble is that they have to take Frank’s withdrawn and very unsexy prepubescent nephew Bo (Marcusz Jess Petersen) with them when they go on the prowl, jeopardizing their chances of getting laid. Throw in some genuinely squirm-inducing sex and gay panic jokes, and you’ve got a satisfying, if wholly generic, sex comedy.
I have similarly mixed feelings about Calibre 9, a rabid French action comedy that takes cues from the Crank films’ emphasis on adrenaline-fueled mise-en-scčne instead of little things like blocking, lighting, polished camerawork, etc. While the Crank films were fun and genuinely silly, Calibre 9, a movie about a middle-mannered city planner that symbiotically bonds with a gun that’s possessed by the ghost of a dead hooker, is alternately too spastic and too serious for its own good. The jokes aren’t garish enough and I could do without the self-important and utterly meaningless social commentary about how corporate big-wigs redesigning the city are treating residents like cheap prostitutes. Still, when director Jean-Christian Tassy does intermittently achieve a good balance of goofy action and comedy, Calibre 9 is a hoot. The rest I can pretty much take or leave.
Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut.
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That is why Eastbound & Down’s second season, which arrived on 
When a representative from Tampa’s major league team, the unnamed Bay Rays, reveals that he wasn’t officially authorized to offer Kenny a deal, our anti-hero flees to Mexico to lick his wounds. While there, Kenny replaces Stevie with Aaron (Deep Roy), a pugnacious, switchblade-wielding dwarf from Bombay who winds up robbing Kenny at knife-point twice (see the season two outtakes reel to see Roy taunt a victim about his “burrito” and threaten to cut off his “titties”). Stevie leaves his job at a Starbucks-type coffee house in order to track Kenny done using credit card receipts (Kenny’s been using Stevie credit card to pay for $22,000 worth of debauchery, including cock-fighting, prostitutes and hallucinogens).
Stevie is so madly in love with Kenny that at the end of season one, he quits teaching just to follow in his hero’s footsteps—all the way to Tampa from North Carolina with no promise of a job or recompense beyond being able to bask in Kenny’s dickish glory. But Kenny shuts that idea down in the season one finale even before he learns that there is no job waiting for him in Tampa. He would have rejected Stevie earlier but he just didn’t know how.
Still, of all the protagonists in Gordon’s class-conscious fantasies, Space Truckers’ John Canyon has more in common with Edmond’s Burke than either Stuck’s Tom or King of the Ants’ Sean Crawley. Like Burke, Canyon has standards that he expects to be met both in his business dealings and in his personal life. Naturally, these standards are not met. For instance, Canyon wants to be paid for hauling square-shaped mutant pigs across the galaxy at the same time that he hands his cargo over. He doesn’t get that professional courtesy. Instead, he gets a punch thrown at him when he refuses to take a 75% pay cut (he does arrive two days late but his employers also knew full-well his rig was slow). The punch doesn’t connect. But the punch he responds with does.
That prison cell is Burke’s Hell, a fact that he eventually gets used to. He asks his cellmate, who rapes him when they first meet, if he thinks they’re in Hell. No answer is necessary because just asking that question is enough to tell us that, in Burke’s mind, he already knows where he is. All the pseudo-revelations he experiences while bleating about how important it is to be open about one’s own personal prejudices and how he needs to just ride out his “self-indulgent” flight of “madness”—all of those experiences were just precursors to the final circle of Hell Burke finds himself in at the end of Edmond. Burke was never in control of his life, and now that he’s gotten used to that idea, he just lies there and takes it. He’s well and truly stuck inside his head and nothing can ever really save him now.
This is the fate that befell Green Lantern. Metacritic's consensus ranks it with a meager score of 39 out of 100, as opposed to X-Men: First Class’s score of 64 and Thor’s 59. The difference is even more pronounced on Rotten Tomatoes, where X-Men: First Class has a score of 87%, Thor 77%, and Green Lantern trailing with 27%. My taste must be out-of-step with consensus; I found the uneven eccentricity of Green Lantern — which was directed by Martin Campbell, of No Escape, Goldeneye and Casino Royale — vastly more "interesting" than the other two films' machine-tooled smoothness. 
At least Green Lantern has the guts to be flamboyant, and has a couple of spectacular set pieces and two very strong lead performances from Ryan Reynolds and Peter Sarsgaard. Though the film often struggles to take off, the juxtaposition of Reynolds' fearless Hal Jordan and Sarsgaard's Hector Hammond is a fruitful comparison, one that the film's screenwriters were wise to make. Furthermore, the film feels like it's more of a piece than the Marvel Comics films: there may be a subplot or three too many in Green Lantern, but all of the inside references to mysterious people or objects that old fans should get a kick out of are actually incorporated into the story as plot points. Thor and X-Men: First Class, in contrast, are watchable and feature commendable performances from their respective casts, but they lack the ambition or central pathos that drive Green Lantern. And as boilerplate origin stories, they just don’t stay with me after a point. As a comic book nerd, I don’t particularly need any of these films to tell me who their characters are—I already know. But when a movie is good enough to show me a character or a story in a new light — as Green Lantern does — no matter how troubled it may be in other aspects, I don't think it can be considered "bad."
Admittedly, many of Zardoz’s fans have inadvertently done more harm than help to the film by treating it like a specialty cult item. There’s a reason why whenever you mention the film to someone who’s seen it, they’ll chirrup a loaded line like, “The gun is good; the penis is evil.” It’s like a secret handshake for fans who probably don’t even remember the meaning of the line anyway. I’m not trying to suggests that Zardoz’s cult is witless, nor am I trying to sweep the out-there-ness of Zardoz under a rug. You can’t make a movie where Sean Connery runs around with a ponytail, a loaded pistol, a bikini bottom, go-go boots and a bondage harness look normal. Still, the tendency of even the film's fans to repeat lines such as “The gun is good…the penis is evil…” suggests that even admirers have bought into the idea that Zardoz is more of a camp artifact than a potently strange film that happens to be worth serious consideration. The movie needs rescuing from detractors and defenders alike. Its revolutionary stance is only tempered by its intensely strange dedication to a continually devolving scenario. Boorman deliberately made it impossible to ever feel completely comfortable with Zardoz by concluding it with the end of human civilization. Connery’s character is an agent of chaos who can only create a brand new world by first destroying all the cultural treasures that the futuristic civilization he infiltrates has hoarded and kept to themselves over time. To expect a film this volatile to be tonally consistent is like expecting a Stan Brakhage film to have a linear storyline: it’s never gonna happen.
I suspect that Ebert was reluctant to outright dismiss Zardoz partly because it’s a Boorman film. He mentions Leo the Last and Deliverance in such a way as to suggest that Boorman was stepping away from the qualities that Ebert believed made him great. But I don’t understand how one can appreciate Boorman’s earlier explorations of man’s self-destructive tendencies and the power that comes from devolving and embracing one’s animal instincts and not care for Zardoz. It is in many ways the most vibrant expression of Boorman’s fascination with the problems and advantages of becoming more feral in order to become more civilized. In that sense, it's an incredibly personal film, just a few steps removed from Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain in its incendiary, get-out-your-pitchforks-and-start-a-revolution message. Its frothing-at-the-mouth madness needs context to be fully appreciated. That’s what criticism should strive for: making films like Zardoz, or a vastly more mainstream but still eccentric superhero film like Green Lantern, look good — and in general make films whose faults and/or merits might otherwise be inaccessible more accessible.
For example, take Shout Factory!’s new release of Battle Beyond the Stars, which just hit stores this past Tuesday. Shout Factory! not only commissioned a new anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film, but they also commissioned several worthwhile bonus features, including audio commentaries by screenwriter 
The same is true about Damnation Alley, another cult item with a fairly modest reputation that Shout Factory! released for the first time on DVD this past week. Based on a novel by the great “New Wave” scifi writer 
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