Looking for something fun, frantic and spectacularly bloody to fill those slow summer Saturday nights? TIFF Bell Lightbox is launching a new series that has you covered – though what you’ll end up covered with is anybody’s guess.
The Best Of Midnight Madness brings a favourite title from the Toronto Film Festival’s beloved late-night program back to the big screen, where (ideally) it’ll be embraced all over again by a raucous, enthusiastic mixture of genre fans, cineastes and random gorehounds who wandered in because they saw an image of something horrible on a poster somewhere.
The series kicks off this week with Frank Henenlotter’s 1988 Brain Damage, an unapologetically sleazy tale of codependence about a hapless New Yorker (Rick Hearst) who becomes the unwilling host of a slithering parasite with a thirst for human flesh … and a lovely singing voice.
Subsequent features include Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (June 18), the terrific Belgian serial-killer mockumentary Man Bites Dog (June 25) Shinya Tsukamoto’s frenzied Cronenbergian cyberpunk Tetsuo: The Iron Man (July 16) and Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s harrowing French thriller À L’Intérieur (August 20). You can find the full schedule here.
The usual crabbing: anything that puts Man Bites Dog back on the big screen deserves to be hailed as a great lineup, but I do wish they’d found room for one of Peter Jackson’s delirious freakouts Meet The Feebles and Braindead [aka Dead Alive] were two of the very finest MM screenings I’ve ever attended, as was Clarence Fok’s demented Hong Kong actioner Naked Killer.
And given the subsequent trajectory of Heather Graham’s career, Sam Irvin’s Guilty As Charged might have been fun to pull out the vault. I’d also like to imagine the programmers tried to get hold of Jonathan Levine’s stylish slasher movie All The Boys Love Mandy Lane but ran into the same distributor reluctance that’s kept it locked on a shelf somewhere ever since The Weinstein Company picked it up at TIFF 2006.
Well, this is a recurring series. Maybe Mandy will join us next summer.
