Fantastic Fest Review Roundup Part Two – ‘Horsehead’, ‘The Hive’, & ‘John Wick’

Be sure to check out Part One here!

Fantastic Fest has rolled around once more and continues to be the most entertaining film festival on Earth. This year sees the festival back at its home base of the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and the adjoining Highball bar in Austin, TX. This is my 5th time attending the festival, now celebrating it’s 10th year.

Fantastic Fest is unique among film festivals because, much like its host venue, it is more a festival of personality than one of quality. There are other genre festivals, sure, but Fantastic Fest is an experience where the campy, gorey, and outright weird films oftentimes serve as a backdrop to the chaos as opposed to the end goal. Fantastic Fest films rarely stick with me for very long, but the festival remains my most anticipated every year.

This year got off to a bit of a rough start as bad weather and inexperience with the remodeled Drafthouse led to a case of overcrowding and confusion in the lobby and bar. That didn’t stop me from having a few drinks and seeing some weird bullshit though. Here’s a roundup of my festival experience so far.

Horsehead

This surreal French horror flick strives to follow in the footsteps of Pan’s Labyrinth with its mixture of personal drama, horrific gore, and beautiful fantasy elements. Unfortunately it falls quite a bit short and ends up being kind of a bore.

The movie follows a young women as she returns home following the death of her grandmother. She suffers nightmares and tries to overcome them by studying lucid dreaming. While at home, she falls ill and her dreams and reality start to intermingle and her dead grandmother seems to be trying to tell her something.

Horsehead has plenty of arresting imagery and is moderately successful in creating a surreal dreamlike atmosphere, but the familial mystery at the core is never that engaging and the pace is often laborious. There’s also an uncomfortable exploitative streak in the movie with plenty of unnecessary slow motion bathing scenes and taboo sexual dream imagery that never seems like its exploring anything other than mastabatory fantasy.

A horsey man fights a wolf spirit and gets stabbed with a key thingy though, so I guess it was pretty ok.

The Hive

The Hive is essentially a zombie apocalypse film but it takes an interesting route by adding the idea of a hivemind to the mix. Once you turn, you share the thoughts and memories of every other hive zombie. The movie takes place at a summer camp and begins with our protagonist, who has already begun to turn, waking up alone in a trashed room covered with cryptic notes. His memory has been wiped by the hive zombie virus thing so he must piece together who he is and what has happened by relying on the clues in the room and the mess of memories he has, only some of which are his own.

The Hive has a lot of really great things going for it, but it is ultimately ruined by pure adolescence. This is a teenage movie masquerading as an adult one. That’s not meant to be a dig on teen movies. Movies about the teenage experience are often written by adults who can look back and make sense of that tumultuous time in their lives with the help of the life experience they’ve gained. The Hive feels like a kid writing about how he imagines adult relationships and behaviors will be, without having any experience in the matter. It’s all heightened emotion and naivete and ignorance, but presented with a confidence that makes it all the more grating.

This is a movie where our hero bumps into a pretty girl and causes her to cut her head and be sent to the nurse. He then sprains his own ankle and has to join her. Somehow these minor injuries cause them both to be bedridden and they have an extended meet cute in the camp infirmary. Their beds are a few feet apart but they can’t move out of them because of the severity of their ouchies. Over the course of what I assume to be a few hours, they go through the entire romantic experience through a montage that in a better movie would have taken place over the course of days or weeks and wouldn’t have been built on such a weak conceit.

The movie is full of silly things like this. Love, loyalty, betrayal, maturity, and a whole cavalcade of complex emotional states are just granted to characters who in no way earned them. Every big emotional moment becomes an embarrassing display of childishness. The whole movie felt like sitting at a dinner table with your 15 year old cousin as they told you about how the world was ending because that girl or guy they liked replied to their text with a “K” instead of an “Okay!”.

This immaturity makes its way into the filmmaking as well, which is overly stylized to the point of distraction. High contrast blown out lighting, dutch angles, and rapid edits all serve to distract instead of enhance. All topped off with terrible emo song signaling the end of the film.

The Hive also has an annoying tendency to over explain everything. There is a moment of revelation towards the end of movie where our protagonist finally pieces together the puzzle and remembers what happened. This scene is played as if the information should be revelatory to the audience as well, but anyone with half a brain would have figured all that stuff out within the first half hour of the movie. There really isn’t a puzzle to figure out, and the idea of a hivemind isn’t a new concept that’s hard to grasp and needs to be overly explained. Time and time again obvious concepts that can be understood instantly and visually are then explained by a man talking to himself alone in a room for no other reason than to hold an audience’s hand, and it gets really tedious.

It’s a shame because there are some nice naturalistic performances from the main actors and the hive mind zombie idea is one that hasn’t been explored all that often. There really is a good movie here, it just came out of someone who hasn’t experienced enough life to understand how to tell it.

John Wick

A grieving ex-hitman has his car stolen and his dog killed by a mobsters punk son. Grieving ex-hitman kills everyone.

That’s all you need to know about John Wick, it’s as lean and mean of a revenge film as I’ve seen in some time and that is actually pretty refreshing. Keanu Reeves plays the titular Wick and does an admiral job of looking super cool while shooting a whole mess of dudes in the head. This movie has more visceral headshots than any I can recall, its kind of nuts. Reeves also gets opportunities to get uncharacteristically broad with his performance. It’s not often you get to see him raging and screaming, so savor it.

The thing that really elevates John Wick past its skeletal concept is that filmmakers Chad Stahelski and Derek Kolstad build out a really fun underworld of professional assassins. When Wick re-enters the fold in order to exact his revenge, we are introduced to a whole secret society with its own rules and language and secret bases and authorities. These aren’t lone wolf renegades. These are respected members of a highly organized civilization. It’s neat, and makes me want to see more films set in this world.

Wick also has a wonderful cast, with familiar and welcome faces continuing to pop up throughout the movie. I won’t name names because, despite there not being any major surprise celebrity cameos, there is a joy in seeing these character actors pop up unexpectedly and do their thing.

My one complaint is that the action could have used more variety. The film focuses exclusively on quick, visceral gunplay and even that can wear out its welcome. You will see Keanu shoot tons of people in the head, and by the end you’re really gonna wish you could see him do something different. Some hand to hand or a stealthy hide and seek sequence would have worked wonders.