Map It! Canadian Serial Killers

When most people think of Canada, they think maple syrup and Mounties. And yeah, it's got a lot of both. It's also got crime. Awful, international-headline-making crime. Like that guy who cut off that poor man's head. Or the maple syrup heist of 2012.

Learn more about Canada's dark side--specifically its serial killers--by panning, zooming, and clicking on the map below.

Toronto After Dark 2012

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival started up in 2006 to showcase new and innovative genre cinema. The festival also hosts Pub After Dark, giving fans a chance to socialize with filmmakers. TAD has been extremely well-attended and received over the past few years, making it one of the more popular genre festivals in Canada. This year, TAD extended its run to nine nights, screening twenty films, some of which were national or local premiers.

Each feature was paired with a short film, and festival programmers took care to select complimentary films. The pairings were thoughtful and the short helped set the tone for the feature screening.

Grabbers

Grabbers opened the festival this year. The film, explained festival director Adam Lopez, features a lot of drinking which is fitting because The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema was recently licensed to sell alcohol. The hard drinking aside (by characters and audience members alike), Grabbers is great fun.

The film is an alien invasion story gone mad: The residents of Erin Island, an island of the coast of Ireland, are set upon by a swarm of space monsters. The aliens need water to survive and feed off blood, but are deathly allergic to alcohol. With the coming storm, the islanders' only hope of survival is a lock-in.

Reminiscent of Tremors, Grabbers focuses on the combined horror and humour of the situation. The blood-thirsty tentacle beasts are creatures straight from your nightmares, but the thought of having to get drunk in order to survive the onslaught is laughable. A lot of Grabbers' humour, however, is drawn from its characters--a colourful bunch of islanders that include the local drunk, the local cop (who is also drunk), and a marine "psychologist."

Paired with Not Till We're Married. A woman finds herself stuck in a relationship with an ill-formed and recently un-conjoined twin.

Doomsday Book

I remember someone telling me this movie isn't really about the end of the world. Doomsday Book is a Korean anthology comprising of three films, two of which are apocalypse stories. The third movie is more a spiritual "apocalypse" than a physical one. And since the world doesn't actually end in any installment, I suppose technically Doomsday Book isn't about the end of all things.

But that's all academic.

Doomsday Book's first and third stories are fun, relatively light-hearted movies about a zompocalypse and a meteor strike, respectively. In the former, a young man unwittingly brings about a deadly zombie virus. In the latter, a young girl looking to replace a broken billiard ball accidentally causes a meteor to crash into Earth. Both films are humorous takes on unlikely and outrageous end-of-the-world scenarios.

The middle story is very different from the other two both in subject and in tone, so much so that it's quite jarring and for just a moment takes the audience out of the film. In it, a robot that was originally bought to do administrative work at a Buddhist temple has gained enlightenment. The company that built the robot is determined to destroy it because its spiritualism is an affront to humanity.

The idea that a robot could have religion is interesting, but the film's discussion is so heavy handed and circuitous that it tires out the viewer. This is especially problematic given how the film ends. In its final moments the audience is asked to consider the limitations of humanity and the intersection of robotics and same.

The questions posed by the film's other two stories are less philosophical but no less interesting. The first touches on themes of food production and consumption, while the third suggests a natural (if unexpected) end to all things.

Paired with Frost: In the distant future, a young woman scavenges for food in a desolate city. Her scavenging turns into a fight for survival when she encounters what's left of civilization.

Dead Sushi

This was easily the most fun to watch. The rules are that you must yell "sushi" when sushi appears on screen, and "danger" when characters are in a dangerous situation. That makes for a lot of yelling  and laughter because the film is crammed full of sushi and action.

Keiko is the daughter of a sushi master chef. Distraught that she will never live up to her father's expectations, she leaves home and finds work at a resort as a waitress. A business retreat for a pharmaceutical company goes horribly awry when a former employee injects the sushi there with a reagent. Only Keiko has the specific skillset needed to defeat the deadly undead sushi and its zombified victims.

Anyone familiar with Noboru Iguchi's unique brand of filmmaking will immediately know what's in store; Dead Sushi is wonderfully insane. Weird to the point of hilarity, the film is better developed than RoboGeisha and more accessible than Mutant Girls Squad. The effects are cheesy and the comedy broad. It also features so fantastic fight action and an amazing robot dance.

Paired with Sandwich Crazy: The owner of a failing sandwich shop is given a brilliant sandwich-making microwave. The sandwiches prove to be too good, however.

To read my full-length reviews of select films, click the titles below.

American Mary
Lloyd the Conqueror
In Their Skin

This year, TAD also featured the Darkcade, an indie game showcase. Each night of the festival, after the second screening, two games were showcased at Pub After Dark. Unfortunately, my schedule did not allow for me to take in the games (I'm a crap gamer, btw) but using a film festival to showcase new, innovative indie games is, I think, a wonderful idea. Fantastic Fest runs a similar platform, with a gaming conference held in tandem with the festival.

The Corridor

I turned to Mark. "I'm not entirely sure I understood the end," I said.
"I'm just glad he wasn't crazy," came the reply.
But he was crazy.  That's the thing.

Tyler went nuts the day his mom killed herself.  His friends found him hiding in the closet with a knife, ranting about open doors and keys and all kinds of crazy stuff that didn't make any sense.  One violent confrontation later, Chris and Everett have been injured, and Tyler's in the loony bin.  Year later, shortly after Tyler's release, the friends gather for a weekend of bonding.  They're staying at Tyler's cabin, where the memory of his mom, Pauline, hangs in the air.

Tyler is keen to mend fences, to put the past behind him, and to no be crazy anymore.  But a supernatural force  filed in the woods challenges his sanity.  Luckily, everyone can experience it, too.  The force field, which takes the shape of a rectangular box, opens up the men's minds and the more contact they have with the thing, the more open and inhibited they become.  Tyler is relatively unaffected because of his medication--pills meant to block out the crazy--but he's worried his friends will catch his mental illness.  His worry is justified as his buddies grow increasingly obsessive and violent.  As the problems within the cabin escalate, the supernatural box elongates, stretching into a corridor begging to be explored.

Is it a film about mental illness?  Possibly.  Is it a film about adulthood?  Probably.  Tyler is struggling to return to a normal life, and we learn his friends each have personal issues as well.  When the mystical qualities of the corridor lay bare everyone's secrets, Tyler's insanity isn't any worse than Jim's impotence, or Bobcat's depression, but his mind is a danger to others because of repressed memories.  These memories trigger the latent violence in everyone else as they act out their own pent-up feelings of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

The Corridor isn't all subtext and metaphor, however.  The corridor is a very real presence and it's likely what drove Pauline over the edge all those years ago.  Blending sci-fi with straight drama, the film waffles between the fantastical and serious, and does an okay job balancing the two up to a point.  It's toward the end of its 98-minute running time that the film gives over entirely to its sci-fi element, and that's where it looses its narrative thread.  As the physical world seems to unravel down the length of the corridor, so too does the film's plot.  There's no reconciliation between the drama instigated by the the corridor's psychic properties and what happens at the end of the movie.

At least, none that Mark and I could figure out.  But the film won Best Canadian Feature at Fantasia and Best Screenplay at Fantastic Fest, so it's worth seeing.  Just keep an open mind.

Fan Expo Canada 2011

Ghoul Friday   Attic Raiders   Tall Gear Industrial 

Rituals

Oh, Canada.  Your filmmaking incentives are the foundation upon which the contemporary American film industry is built.  But, Canada is also capable of making its own movies and they're not all about weird sex.

Rituals, for instance, is about five friends on a hiking trip getting stalked and killed by a crazy person.  Any comparison with Deliverance glosses over the film's unique handling of the situation.  Also, no one gets raped.

What begins as a week-long hiking trip for a group of old friends turns into endless days of torture and fear as the group is slowly culled.  The film follows the men as they try desperately to extricate themselves from their terrible situation, but there is little hope of them surviving either their attacker or the vast Canadian wilderness.  The situation is dire, the outlook bleak.  And it just keeps getting worse.

With little remorse or redemption for its characters, Rituals offers little more than an exercise in torment and survival.  But it's a tense, compelling film.  Unlike similar, later films, Rituals offers an attempt at understanding its cruelty, and its characters are heartbreakingly human.  In the midst of all the chaos, there is time for grief, and the film mourns the passing of its unfortunate heroes.  Some die in spectacular, horrifying ways.  Others in mundane accidents, but no one person's death is any more or less tragic.

Rituals is, in a word, merciless.  But it is not senseless, either in its story or violence, and I think that is what elevates it above your run-of-the-mill killbilly fare.

My Bloody Valentine 3D

One more D than 2!

The last 3D movie I saw was, I think, Captain Eo. That was cool. It starred Michael Jackson who danced and sang with a cast of lovable muppet-type characters. I also vaugely recall R2D2 and possibly Yoda being involved, but there's a good chance I'm just combining a bunch of my early sci-fi experiences into one all-encompassing memory.

Anyway, My Bloody Valentine 3D kicks off a new round of gimmicky cinema. And what a way to start! (I'm not sure if that is meant to sound sarcastic.)

An explosion at the Hanniger Mine traps a group of miners underground. In order to save his own life, one of the trapped, Harry Warden, kills his workmates with his pickaxe. After his rescue, Harry is taken to hospital in a coma. He wakes up and kills the crap out of everyone on his ward before returning to the mine. A group of twenty-somethings are having a Valentine's party at the mine, but their good time is disrupted by Harry's arrival. Harry kills some more and is eventually shot and chased down.

Ten years after the killings, the survivors are getting on with life. Then Ted Hanniger, son of the deceased mine owner, arrives in town after a decade of absence. Round that same time people start dying again, and it seems that Harry Warden is back too. What follows is a gory murder spree punctuated by moments of profound stupidity.

The first My Bloody Valentine was Canadian and made in 2D in 1981. A victim of its own success, 9 minutes were cut out of the original movie because it was too violent. The 3D remake is extremely violent, the camera doesn't shy away from full-on impalement, and the murder set pieces are brutal, suggesting horrible and torturous deaths. But what the first movie lost in blood and guts, it made up for it in story. The original killer strikes without prejudice, killing with impunity. The remade killer has an agenda, one that actually makes little sense in the end. Furthermore, the straightforward plot of the 80s version is twisted and mutated into a convoluted and, at times, tedious series of events. Also, it's full of holes.

It's been a while since I watched a movie in the theatres. I truly believe there are some films that need a big screen, and this is one of them. In spite of the bad movie that underlies the fancy effects, the gore and the violence are really well done. And welcome. In a time when most new Hollywood horror releases are PG13, something like My Bloody Valentine 3D, though it relies heavily on its gimmick and is kind of terrible, is still an R.

I've come a long way from my Captain Eo days, but maybe not as far as I like to think. Complain though I might about the state of mainstream horror, I'll admit I really wanted to see MBV because of the 3D. However, that being said, I'm glad I went to a matinee and didn't pay full price.