This has been noted on several websites after the announcement of the Locarno win, but I didn’t know that Enrique Rivero, director of Parque vía, had an identical twin brother. Apparently he does, though, and they’re even in the same business.

While Enrique makes arthouse films, his twin brother Seth Rogen makes successful indie comedies like The 40-year Old Virgin and Superbad.

I was just told that Parque vía won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. That’s a huge deal, actually, congratulations to Enrique, Paola, and everyone else involved, ourselves included, this time.

As you can see, Enrique got an enormous gilded (I assume that’s not solid gold) feline to take home with him. Locarno is one of the larger and more respected international festivals, especially for auteur and experimental cinema, and this should be a boost for the movie, both in terms of distribution and for consideration for the Ariels, the Mexican academy awards.

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that the movie got a new poster just in time for the festival, and it’s pretty awesome.

I thought the old poster was quite ok, but the photo on the new one is great, and really works for what the movie is about. I don’t know who took it, but I know Macias at Raya en medio is responsible for the poster, and he did a wonderful job.

Oh, and it has our logo on it, second from the left.

Parque vía, the movie directed by Enrique Rivero that we did post supervision on, has its international premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland during the first weeks of August, according to The Hollywood Reporter and others. I’ve known about this for a while, but not been allowed to tell anyone. Congratulations to Enrique, Paola, and everyone else involved. I’m sure it’ll do very well, it’s a good movie.

The same guy who made Chainsaw Maid has a lot of claymation horror stuff on YouTube. This one is pretty derivative of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but then at the end, there’s a vagina dentata-mouthed goat demon thing that freaks me the hell out, even though it’s a cute clay figure.

This claymation short is a pretty pitch-perfect take on zombie movies, especially the variety common in the seventies, like Dawn of the Dead. And somehow claymation blood and gore works really well.

You might have seen this video, which is a compilation of the best unintentionally hilarious scenes from the (by all accounts dire) remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage:

As if that wasn’t enough, however, there’s this mixture of the audio of the idiotic final scene from the movie with video from Mega Man, and, well, here’s Mega Wicker Man:

Neil Marshall’s a smart director, and he’s also very genre-aware. I liked his Dog Soldiers quite a bit, as a relatively fresh take on werewolves, which managed to do a lot with a small budget. I was less enthusiastic about The Descent, which I reviewed here back in 2005.

With Doomsday, he’s changed genres a bit. It’s certainly at least as gory as his earlier work, but this is a science fiction thriller in the vein of Escape from New York, which it obviously gets a lot of inspiration from (the heroine wears an eye patch for a bit, even). There are also bits clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies.

The plot isn’t particularly complicated, and it doesn’t matter that much either, to be honest. 20 years ago, in 2008, a virus broke out in Scotland, and the British government quarantined off all of it with a huge wall following the old path of Hadrian’s Wall. Now, the virus has broken out in London, and it turns out there are survivors in Scotland, who might hold the key to a cure. Badass paramilitary cop Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who barely escaped from Scotland as a child, leads a team of soldiers into the quarantine zone to find and bring back the cure.

That’s about it, really. As I said, the plot doesn’t really matter that much. Of course, the Scots have gone feral, divided into two camps, a Mad Max group of cannibalistic punk rockers (why is it that the fall of civilization equals mohawks and facial piercings?), and another group who have regressed to the middle ages, living in and around a castle, ruled over by a feudal lord. And obviously, the military mission goes pear-shaped really quickly, most of the soldiers are killed, and the few survivors need to resort to cunning and gory violence to survive and perhaps get what they came for.

This is not a perfect movie. The acting is ok, although Rhona Mitra has never been my idea of a great actress, but she’s good looking, and convincingly badass in this. The plot is simple and a bit thin. But the movie’s fun to watch, at times very much so, and it knows what it’s trying to do. As I mentioned, Marshall is genre aware, and this is at least as much a homage to his favourite movies as the Kill Bill movies were to Tarantino’s favourites. Hell, there’s even a synthesizer based score that sounds like anything John Carpenter did in the 80s.

In summary, recommended if you like Escape from New York, any of the Mad Max movies, and genera over the top action and gore. Not recommended if you don’t have a sense of humor, or can’t watch movies for pure entertainment, without taking them too seriously.

I wish I had the time to watch and blog about 100 movies in 100 days. Luckily, I don’t have to, since Scott Hamilton did it first. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including many horror movies, and the reviews are well-written and witty. And it includes a review of a Korean war/horror movie called R-Point, which I really want to see.

This video, titled “Cell phone in microwave”, starts out as a typical “let’s destroy stuff in wacky ways” YouTube video, but isn’t quite that… Nice work, too.

The short we did post on for Atole Metafilms a few months back is now on YouTube, after being shown at parties and other improvised screening locations around Mexico. The sound is sadly not great, but apart from that, it turned out fairly ok.