TORONTO AFTER DARK FESTIVAL from Thursday (October 13) through October 21 at the Scotiabank Theatre. torontoafterdark.com.
Every year around this time, the Toronto After Dark film festival confronts the same existential question: What’s left to throw at genre fans that TIFF’s Midnight Madness program didn’t unleash a month ago?
And every year, the answer is the same: there’s plenty. After Dark offers nine days of horror, sci-fi and action culled from the festival circuit, offering audiences what might be their only chance to experience these titles on the big screen before they go on to DVD or VOD exclusivity.
(This isn’t a knock on any of the films it’s just that the market for genre movies is almost entirely post-theatrical these days, unless a small distributor is willing to go to the mat for a week at the Carlton.)
Canadian premieres this year include War On Everyone (October 14, 7 pm), the new film from Irish writer/director John Michael McDonagh featuring Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña as a pair of Albuquerque cops whose blatant disregard for procedure gives them something of an advantage when chasing a pair of super-asshole criminals (Theo James and an extra-snivelly Caleb Landry Jones).
After the disreputable delights of The Guard and the purity of Calvary, this feels like a hiccup for McDonagh, whose style doesn’t quite make the transition from Ireland to America (and who leans a little too heavily on genre clichés this time around). But Skarsgård and Peña are consistently entertaining, Miss Bala’s Stephanie Sigman gets a nice no-bullshit role as Peña’s wife and the invaluable Tessa Thompson turns up to remind us that she can invest even the most threadbare of characters with heart and life.
The evening of October 16 features a double-bill of old-school action with Ti West’s In A Valley Of Violence – a Western starring Ethan Hawke and John Travolta – at 6:45 pm and Jean-François Richet’s Blood Father – starring Mel Gibson as a vengeful papa out to rescue his kidnapped daughter – at 9:30 pm.
As is traditional, After Dark’s lineup mixes a few homegrown productions in with the imports. Cody Calahan’s Let Her Out (October 14, 9:30 pm) features an impressive performance by Alanna LeVierge as a Toronto bike courier struggling with lost time and strange visions after a head injury, though it doesn’t quite stick its landing.
Calahan’s also the co-writer on Jeff Maher’s Hamilton-shot Bed Of The Dead (October 17, 9:30 pm), which finds four would-be swingers trapped on the eponymous piece of furniture. It isn’t exactly good – it’s way too long, and the cast is uneven – but Calahan and Maher are aware of how ridiculous their premise is and have some fun with the structure.
Antibirth (October 19, 7 pm), which was shot in Sudbury, stars Natasha Lyonne as a Michigan party girl who finds herself inexplicably pregnant after a blackout – and experiencing some very strange gestational effects. It’s kind of a mess, and writer/director Danny Perez can’t decide whether to rip off David Lynch or John Waters, but I can imagine people getting into its dozy, half-baked vibe.
And then there’s The Void (October 21, 9:30 pm and midnight), the latest from Manborg makers Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski. It wasn’t available for review, but the pitch – a cop (Strange Empire’s Aaron Poole) investigates strange goings-on at a hospital, and finds a whole lot more than he bargained for – sounds like a riff on John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 and Prince Of Darkness. I am so there.
This is just a sampling of the festival’s program also, if you managed to miss the exceptional Korean zombie thriller Train To Busan during its theatrical run earlier this summer – yes, a rare exception to my straight-to-VOD horror rule – After Dark is having two screenings of it on October 15.
The 9:15 pm show is already sold out, but tickets are still available for the midnight show. You’re going to want to get on that. This one’s such a blast with a crowd.
