My friend, Meg, came up from South Carolina to go to Nevermore with me. I think she had a good time. I was disappointed.
The computer system crashed Friday so we were unable to buy the ticket package (buy 8, get 2 free). I asked to for punch cards (their usual deal is buy 4, get 1 free) and was told those aren’t offered for film festivals. There was a line behind me and I didn’t feel like having a public fit.
I think the general manager who had been a moving force behind the festival has moved on. There were no skulls, plastic rats or other creepy decorations. There were no “what to do in case of zombie attack” signs in the rest rooms. The juried awards were posted before the festival even started. The volunteers were still handing out ballots, though.
Little Brother (USA) No dialogue, very creepy, uneven black and white line drawings, The Red Thunder (USA) not animated, funny, if I say anything else, it will give away the punch line, She’s Mine (UK) fairly standard animation, a stalker creeps into the house of the woman he intends to murder and finds competition, Pipo (Germany) little conehead, stop motion, weird and sad, House of Monsters: Frank and the Zombie Girl (USA) Stop motion nicely done, sweet story with monsters, A Brief Encounter (Iran), there is a dragon and a girl. Not a happy ending. Life Smartphone (China), line drawings, everybody is totally focused on their cell phones, it’s funny in a too familiar kind of way, Flight of the Soul (USA) stop motion, there are 4 modified clones, one has a birdcage in its middle. The ending is kind of telegraphed, but it’s sweet. Cristal Junket (Portugal) stop motion, surreal party, the story is vague Trolled (Singapore) fairly typical anime, cute The Seed (Greece) live action, good story, a little Blade Runner-esque, title could have been Monsanto World Millennium: Eternal Sunrise (USA) live action, daughter trying to get the Millennium Man to reset time so her mother can come back, the ending was unexpected, Jack is Pretty (USA) live action dystopia, Q&A with the writer and the producer afterward they are hoping to do more with this, planning a couple of “origin story” shorts and a feature film,
Gnomes (UK), garden gnomes gone bad, not bad, not great.
5 Ways 2 Die (Cyprus) this is funny and well made, The 5 ways are pills, jump off a bridge, carbon monoxide poisoning, bathtub electrocution and car wreck and that isn’t spoiling. The Black Bear (Belgium) what not to do in the woods where there are bears, a little Python-esque The Grandson (Netherlands) I liked this until the very end. dark_net (UK), the acting was good but the story was uneven, jealous ex hires a hit man online. A Bite to Eat (UK) at the Midnite Diner, this is cute, Last Night (France) the story was uneven, it’s the last night in an apartment with friends coming to help move tomorrow, and a threesome ends badly. They Will All Die in Space (Spain) this was creepy and well made, B&W
The Stomach (UK), A medium uses his stomach to contact the dead. #Help (Hungary), Very well made, and a good story. I would like to see it expanded into a feature length film Choice Cuts (USA), This started out making me flinch and I laughed out loud at the end. A Way Out (USA), Hit men. Entertaining, El Gigante (Canada), This is straight up slasher gore.
25m2 (Sweden) The wall developed an abscess, which was weird. And there was some grossness because …abscess. And, it was really slow. Not a favorite.
Hag, I loved this take on hag-ridden sleep walking. The Trap, This was short and funny. There is an alien. Night of the Slasher, The hero is blond and female. This was fun. The Fear Box (666 Telemarketing), This is why I don’t answer phone calls from numbers I don’t recognize. Home Sweet Home, This is what I expect from Alzheimer’s. Bad Guy #2, How to move up in organized crime. A little cheesy, a little gory, pretty funny. Never Tear Us Apart, There are cannibals. And grandparents. Shhh, Older sister Helena deserved to meet the monster. What a bitch! Thresher, an homage to Guillermo del Toro and H. P. Lovecraft. Locks galore. in Hell. I would like to see more from Michael Dahlquist and his friends. Knob Goblins, A monster movie where men have to deal with a sexual predator. Made me laugh. A lot.
This is my friend, Trey, meeting Knobby and Writer/Producer/Director Christopher G. Moore after we saw the film.
The Fisherman (Spain) set in Hong Kong, special effects are very good, story is good. I could see this being expanded into an interesting feature film.
Feature length films that I saw:
Reverie of a Solitary Walker This is awful. There are 4 story lines that hop around in time and don’t seem to have any real connection. I was excite about it and very, very disappointed.
13 Cameras. This didn’t go where I thought it was going to and it creeped me right out. There are many cringes, many jumps and several I-can’t-looks. Should get some mainstream play.
I meant to see Clinger, but it was sold out for the time I expected to be there. I’ll see it via Amazon sometime soon. I could have gotten tickets early, but I didn’t.
Fan Favorites were:
BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE – Idila (“Idyll”)
Best North American Feature – 13 CAMERAS
BEST NORTH AMERICAN SHORT – Bad Guy #2
BEST INTERNATIONAL SHORT – The Black Bear
BEST LONG FORM NARRATIVE SHORT – He Was His Friend
This year, the Carolina Theater messed with me. Last year, they had shows during the week. So, I didn’t ask for the weekend off for 2015. But, they didn’t do week day shows this year. When I asked about it on their FaceBook page, they told me that 2014 was a one-off and it wasn’t likely to happen again. And one of my co-workers had already made plans for Sunday. So, I got to cram all my films in to Friday and Saturday.
Then, they took down the film list as soon as the festival was over. So, I didn’t have any references for the shorts and am hard pressed to remember the titles of the feature films I saw.
I can remember that I saw Savageland and Valley of the Sasquatch and they were both excellent. And, I spotted David Saucedo, who had played Sergio-the-asshole in Sasquatch, in a small part in Savageland. I was pleased that my brain worked that well.
He was supposed to be at the festival, but got sick at the last minute and was unable to make it. And I’m sorry about that because I’m a fan, now.
Ch-ch-ch-changes! I was tripped up this year by my job. Last Spring, I changed to a 30/week shift that has me working 2 12-hour shifts on the weekend and one 6 hour shift on Tuesday. I get paid for 40 hours and have enough paid leave that I can usually be off if I have something to do on a weekend.
Unless a co-worker beats me to it. And one did.
BUT, the Universe conspired to allow me to see independent horror films in spite of that. For the first time ever, they are running most of the films in one of the 3 available theaters during the weekdays before they take over the entire building.
The Human Race was the least impressive of these 3. Christopher and I both thought it should have stopped when the last guy stepped onto the grass, even though the final bit had some great special effects.
The Returned is a love story with incidental zombies. There are actually very few zombies seen in it, which annoyed some people who left early. (They complained about that to Melissa, the ticket taker, who told us about it later. We compared notes with her all week.)
We liked it. In our discussion afterward, we all were of the opinion that asking your loved one to kill you, if you are contaminated with zombie cooties, isn’t fair to them. You should do it yourself and spare them that.
I really liked Open Grave. It had some classic horror cliches, but they weren’t heavy handed. For instance, the blonde does trip when running from zombies in the woods. BUT, she trips over a stick, not her own feet, and that whole scene explains the bodies tied to trees all over the place. And that makes sense in the context of the rest of the story. As a matter of fact, when you know the whole story, with the exception of the military action toward the end, it all makes sense in that “reality.”
On Wednesday, my son and I saw The Last Days. The plot line on this one didn’t have any huge surprises, but it was well made. There is bit where the main characters talk about where the planetwide agoraphobia came from, but it is never actually explained and that’s fine. You don’t need to know.
On Thursday, Carolyn and I saw Grand Piano. It was good but there was far too much leaving the stage in the middle of a performance.
And on Friday, Christopher and I saw Revolution of the Foreign Invaders, a collection of shorts, before Carolyn joined us for The Visitant, a decent ghost story that didn’t have the ending I anticipated.
Christopher saw The Shower afterward, catching a ride home with a friend. I don’t care for slasher films, so I skipped this one. My son thought it was the best thing he saw.
These are the shorts in Revolution of the Foreign Invaders:
Would you like to die the same way as your favorite movie star? Would you like to imitate the death of some memorable movie scene? Euthanas Inc. is for those who want to put a legitimately spectacular end to their lives. (I voted for this one as my favorite. The description isn’t very accurate. In a world where euthanasia is an acceptable choice (think Vonnegeut’s Ethical Suicide Parlors) an old woman has become inconvenient to her family. She’s not ready to go.)
Joseph Wood is an astronaut set to go where no man has ever gone before in the Universe in Hibernation. (Thought this was awful. Trying to be 2001 and not succeeding.)
Marta returns to her mom’s house to spend some days with her little sister in Madrid in Don’t Look Here. (Ending was very weak.)
Maid of Horror is the blood-soaked story of Emma, an overlooked Maid of Honor, who would kill to get her fairytale ending. (I don’t even remember this one.)
Driving through New York City for Christmas Eve dinner, Steve’s car breaks down and he accidentally stumbles upon a crime scene. Mistaken for the notorious cleaner, Mr. Bear, Steve has to face a difficult choice: dismember and get rid of some bodies or become a corpse himself. (This was hilarious. Nearly got my vote. It did win the Audience Choice award.)
Have you ever shared a dream with someone else? A young man’s world changes when the love of his life she comes in to the real world to rescue him in REM. (This one was trying to be Inception and wasn’t.)
A simple iPhone enables people to look into another dimension where murder and mayhem are commonplace and the evildoers may be themselves in Nexo. (This was jumbled and didn’t work for me.)
A young man jumps off a roof and inadvertently cheats death in The Revenant. (The story was entertaining. Special effects are, clearly, a new thing for the filmmakers.)
I look forward to the Nevermore Film Festival every year. This year it has fallen on the weekend I am changing shifts from 8hrs/day 5 days /week to 12 hour shifts on the weekend and a 6 hour evening on Wednesday. So, instead of going on Saturday and Sunday, I have shifted my days.
I don’t go see the retro stuff at the Carolina theater. If I can get it from Netflix and watch it at home, I’m not paying $9/ticket to see it in a theater. So, the single old movie on the list is an automatic skip. After that, it’s a question of figuring out what I can fit into the time I have.
I’m Dead (Italy, 17 minutes} Surprising. It looked liked a straight up slasher story but the last 5 minutes turned everything around and changed very thing you had seen earlier.
The Other Side(England, 20 minutes) an English slasher in the Welsh countryside. Not many surprises by a lot of jumps
Vadim(Austria, 17 minutes) Really didn’t have much new, but it did make me jump more than once.
John Dies at the End was hilarious and existential and very entertaining. There is a book available. I have tweeted to the writer asking if the book or the script came first. I am not interested in reading an expansion of the script, but might be interested in an original novel.
ABCs of Death This was a fun anthology film. For all practical purposes, it was a collection of shorts that was packaged as a single thing because of the overarching theme. Some of the letters were obvious and some were a little bit of a stretch. In particular, 2 Japanese directors whose letters worked in Japanese, but not in the English translation. The shorts DID work, though. Some were surreal, some were stories. Some were funny, some were terrifying. If you like shorts and if you like monsters, this is worth the time.
The Stolen (Canada, 6 minutes) Is a very familiar fairy tale with no surprises.
Take That (USA, 14 minutes) Buddy sets his PW friend up with a hooker. Things do not go as planned. Fun.
Found in Time was the second actual feature length film we saw this year. I loved it. It is an existential time loop story. Anansi is a happiness trigger for me. Filmmakers that use him usually make stories I’m going to like. I got to talk to the writer/director/producer and I’m following the FB page so I’ll know when it is available to buy a copy.
I am the Audience 