This ended up being a light day because I had class and could only get in three screenings. First up, a Thai horror film divided into four (mostly) unrelated segments:
Happiness - I was very impressed with how this segment kept ratcheting up the tension with hardly any special effects. The story is about a pretty girl who begins receiving texts from a mysterious admirer while she's stuck at home with a broken leg. The director does a masterful job of creating fear out of nothing more than shots of a phone display and the general tone. I was upset that it only lasted half an hour.
Tit for Tat - A rapid editing style that would give Michael Bay a headache definitely distracted from what would've been a pretty decent story about revenge gone wrong. I mean, it had black magic, cute Asians in schoolgirl outfits, and an increasingly ridiculous series of deaths. It should have been right up my alley!
The Middle - This ghost story about four boys who go camping/whitewater rafting together is by far the goofiest of the segments. It also verges on being annoyingly self aware. The boys keep relating to their situation by mentioning other horror films in a good gag that gets run into the ground.
Last Fright - Decent segment about a cat fight at 30,000 feet between a stewardess and a princess after the princess discovers that the stewardess had a fling with her prince. But things really get going on the return flight when the stewardess is forced to watch over the corpse of the princess after the princess dies of complications from the first flight. The whole thing is a little ridiculous but they pull it off well enough.
Great but tragic documentary about a boy who suffered from bipolar disorder and ended up taking his life at fifteen. The film offers an intimate look into how his family dealt with the disease and how the family dynamic changed over time. It's really heartbreaking to watch a great kid head down such a dark path. His loved ones do everything they can to change his trajectory but ultimately they're helpless to stop him from destroying himself. The boy's therapist gets to the heart of the issue when he says that bipolar is his profession's cancer, it kills people.
The forward to this film informs us that the zombie epidemic begins as a paralyzing disease and then, after three days, the victim turns into a brain-loving undead monster. And that today is the third day. So it's zombie time, right? Wrong. The zombies don't show up for seventy-one minutes. This film is seventy-two minutes long. What happens for the first hour and eleven minutes you ask? Nothing.
At least it was preceded by a decent short, the French-Canadian Next Floor. It's about a a ravenous group of diners who dress like they're attending a formal 19th century dinner and proceed to gorge themselves on a meat feast until their combined weight sends them crashing through the floor. Then the process begins all over again. It's a stylish and beautiful looking short, I'd like to see what the filmmakers could do with a feature and some money.
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