Fantasia 2012: Friday - The Marathon begins

Our intrepid trio slept in late to recover from the debauchery of the previous night. We stopped at Astro's for some lunch to settle our stomachs. That ... was a mistake. All of us ended up queasier than when we began, but nothing unpleasant happened. Several hours were spent digesting and recovering, then we made our way to Concodria Hall. All my movies were in the hall today, starting at 4:30 and ending at 1:30. We met up with the rest of our crew over the day: Forest, Vanessa, Nicole, Rachel, Michael, and Amanda. Here's what we saw:

Dragon. A man on the run from his past, an inspector who believes in Justice over Humanity, and a horde of evil martial artists make for a powerful good film. Set in 1919, the choreography and story were top notch. The investigation recalled Willem DeFoe's scenes in Boondock Saints. Some nice unexpected turns especially near the end. Johnny Yuen is a worthy successor to Jet Li. 4/5 punches.

Doomsday Book. An anthology film collecting three different views on the end of the world. "A Brave New World" gives us a zombie apocalypse born from a disease, rancid garbage turned into animal feed; the animals are eaten by humans, and then It Gets Real. Don't point too many fingers, vegetarians; the core of the plague starts with a rotten apple. There's an little hard luck love story to parallel the outbreak. "The Heavenly Creature" introduces us to a robot guide at a Buddhist temple who has gained sentience and is hailed as the Buddha himself. The creator of the robot sees this as the dawn of a robot revolution. A very philosophical segment, an example of good science fiction. Last up is "Happy Birthday" where an innocent attempt to replace a damaged eight ball causes an unusual meteor to doom the earth to destruction. This segment gives us a very funny view of the world on its way out, and celebrates familial love in the face of Apocalypse. 3.5/5 Armageddons

Hard Romanticker A young crook mistakenly kills the grandmother of a rival gang boss. His ultra violent friend Gu tries to save his friend and deal with the backlash, in his own very violent style. This is a very nasty gangster movie, heavily influenced by Tarrantino (especially the soundtrack). The films suffers from a lack of any real female characters, the only women are props or victims. Gu reminded me a lot of a Japanese Spike (complete with blonde hair), but the film could have used a few more Joss Whedon-y females. 3/5 beatings

InbredA group of troubled English youths are taken on a country work-holiday by their social workers. They end up in a secluded village that used to house freed mental patients, and years of insanity and inbreeding have taken their toll. This movie was billed as a splatte rfest, and the blood and gore (and other materials) did flow. What I didn't expect was how funny the movie would be and how empathetic the characters were. I quickly found myself shouting at the screen, and cheering the characters on. The gore wasn't non-stop, which I also expected. The film veers down familiar genre paths but takes some radical turns and twists. It's probably a hard movie to release commercially, but it's the kind of film that flourishes at Fantasia. 4/5 splatters

I contemplated a few ciders to help wash the gore from my brain, but decided to cash in my chips and get some sleep. Cris joined us after driving up to the city late, and we crashed at our hotel room (we being Cris, Michael, and Amanda).