Cyrus at Fantastic Fest Day Five: Santos, Repo The Genetic Opera And Jason Gets To Chime In

That did it. The feud broke me. I woke up sometime mid-day smelling like a brewery exploded and feeling pretty blown up as well. There was no way I was gonna make it to the early screenings. Once upon a time I would have managed an all-nighter and gotten up three hours later to do a full day of screenings, but those days took place before most of ya’ll had even seen a R-rated film. Suffice it to say, around early evening I crawled into the festival looking sheepish and with another tiny piece of my soul chipped away. The hollow look in my eyes said it all but I fit right in with most of who I encountered...it was a gathering of the dead. I set myself with a steely determination and walked into my first of only two films I managed to get to today…

Santos

There have been a lot of films at this year’s fest that are comedies based on familiarity with various geek touchstones. “Santos” is..um..the most recent one I’ve seen.

Some young comic book fans who are obsessed with an “Ultraman”-like character called Gigaman, have a fateful shared birthday as a comet passes overhead, an earthquake shakes the ground, and one of their parents die in an accident (crashing their call into the backyard where the kids are having their party.) Flash to many years later and the kids are comic book makers right on the edge of ridiculous (and not very likely) amounts of success and fame. The comet approaches again and all kinds of weird stuff is preparing to happen. Do these childhood friends have superpowers of their own? Is the comic book they’ve written just imaginary or does it tap into something real? Does anyone totally understand what the hell is going on in this big, colorful mess of a superhero story?

Am I the only one? All kinds of other critics lavished this with praise. I feel like some sort of leper but I thought this felt like some guys wrote it when they were spectacularly high and then never went back to do a second draft. “Santos” careens wildly all over the place with bright garish colors, surreal multi-dimensional trotting “Heavy Metal”-like (the magazine, not the movie) superhero ideas and an uncomfortable amount of poop eating and something I’ve never seen anywhere before: poop snorting. I don’t think the drinking I did last night at the Feud did even half as much damage to my brain as seeing that did.

There are some funny moments here and I liked a lot of the art direction and the wild, untamed ambition on display but I can’t say I actually liked “Santos.” It’s so messy and disjointed and just plain gross at points. There’s nobody to like here as a character except the love interest Laura Luna (Elsa Pataky) and that’s mainly because they don’t let her do enough to be unlikable (plus the only truly heroic quality anyone in this entire film possesses are her unbelievable breasts as revealed in a somewhat odd and unexpected sex scene.) In the end I felt kind of the same way about this as I did about...I’m gonna get shit about this…”Southland Tales”...mixed with the distaste for the “Spy Kids” sequels. There are a lot of interesting ideas and some visuals unlike anything I’ve ever seen but they don’t congeal satisfyingly into a viable work of entertainment for my dollar. If the main “good guy” Salvador Santos (Javier Gutierrez) wasn’t such a depressingly useless douchebag housegeek, I might have at least found SOMETHING to identify with here. As it was I found enough with some funny gross-out jokes and comic book references to make it worth my time to see once, but “Santos” is hardly worthy of the gigantic praise some have given it.

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While the director of “Santos” who was in attendance, gave a absolutely gut-bustingly funny introduction to the movie, I had to get some work done and skipped out of the Q&A after wards. I couldn’t help but think, maybe it’s me? I’m SO tired and feel like such a big lumpy bag of oatmeal, I’m willing to admit that maybe my exhaustion is a factor in why I greeted “Santos” with such distaste. Which worried me. The next movie was one of my most highly anticipated films of the festival. What if I was too wiped out to enjoy it? As it turned out, I needn't have worried about my reaction to…

Repo: The Genetic Opera

A new Rocky Horror? That’s what many would have us believe. I missed the first two screenings of this during the fest but there were scantily clad ladies dressed up in outfits from the movie, fans handing out props, and a lot of the symptoms of the onset of cultdom. I couldn’t help but be cynical: how often does a film that sets out to be a cult film succeed? Not often but Repo is gonna bend the curve.

Paul Sorvino is Rotti Largo, the man who saved the world. There was an outbreak of disease that started world wide organ failures and his company GeneCo designed synthetic organs for replacement at the ninth hour and halted the complete destruction of mankind, although you’d imagine death might have been preferable to living in the bizarre post-disease dystopia that things have become. GeneCo with Rotti at its head controls the world and surgery has become not just necessary but a fashion statement for many. The company also manufactures a highly addictive painkilling drug that keeps their iron grip on the economy. Even worse is, if you get behind on your payments, GeneCo sends out the Repo Man to cut you open and reclaim their unpaid for organs. The Repo Man wears a mask but he secretly is Nathan Wallace (Anthony Stewart Head) a seemingly devoted widower and father to the sickly (but still hot in that Siouxsie Sioux sorta way) Shilo (Alexa Vega.)

Rotti is dying and has three selfish and rather monstrous children vying after his fortune (one of which played to the sluttiest hilt by Paris Hilton...make no mistake here kids, this ain’t acting.) He wants no part of giving satisfaction to the ungrateful brats and plans to steal away Shilo’s affections from Nathan and leave her the company.

And then...oh for the love of...there are ten billion characters and plot threads going on here. I could take of pages just detailing the plot. Here’s what you really need to know:

A-It’s an opera all right. The singing never really stops and serves as the exposition for the story. There are 57 songs in this damn thing. Luckily most of the singing is quite good and the songs are unavoidably catchy. All throughout the film classic staples of the opera appear including the grand guignol, singing arias as you die horribly, dramatic ending. That being said, only Paul Sorvino does the operatic voice and style of busting out the songs, but that brother can knock a tune the frak out.

B-Anthony Stewart Head is a frelling fantastic singer and he dominates here both with his acting and his musical numbers as strongly as Tim Curry did in Rocky Horror. Sure, sure, I'm a ginormous Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan in which he played the watcher Giles, but you can't deny the talent he displays here. Take the scene where he eviscerates a living victim and then reaches inside him to move his mouth to use him as a singing partner...I’d pay the price of admission for that alone.

C-Yes goth and industrial kids, Nivek Ogre from Skinny Puppy and numerous other bands is in here although he’s not given much to do except lurk around looking like a cross between Buffalo Bill and Marilyn Manson. Joan Jett as well has a brief but applause worthy appearance.

D-I feel almost embarrassed to say this, but I’d gladly go see this several more times, buy the soundtrack and maybe even go to a sing-a-long. They did actually manage to get the cult thing right...I don’t know how.

This is the pet project by Darren Lynn Bousman who is known pretty much only for making Lions Gate umpteen million dollars with the first three sequels to “Saw” that he directed, so they reluctantly gave him the money to make this. Finally, something worth being remembered for!

Not everybody is gonna like this to be sure, and if you consider yourself even VAGUELY queasy at gore, skip it...blood and guts are ever present here, singing while swinging knives, cutting people and a rug simultaneously. But it’s all done with such a sense of comic booky fun, that I found it hard to be grossed out at all. “Repo: The Genetic Opera” does what “Sweeny Todd” failed to for me; it made me laugh repeatedly, was an over-the-top horror film, and caught me up in it’s infectious musical numbers. THIS is how you do it, Burton.

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As I said, it was a short night for me, but Jason chimed in with a review of one that I missed…

The Substitute

The Danes are up to something. Damn right, something is rotten in that state of flaxen-haired devils. I always knew they were up to no good. It was too quiet over there. They were plotting some sort of global coupe d'etat behind those frosty blue eyes. My suspicions were not unfounded. I'm glad to say they're using their powers for good. This year, as the ubiquitous Cyrus has indicated, is the year of the Danes. Fantastic Fest is completely contaminated with them. One of their best - and arguably one of the best of the festival - is “The Substitute”.

Carl is your average misfit, slumming about on the fringe of his 6th grade class. He's got no friends, his mom is dead, and things generally suck for our protagonist. Enter Ulla, the heartless, but brilliant substitute teacher. She's determined to crack the educational whip on the class and shape them into competitors for some ill-defined conference in Paris. Her methods, however, are questionable. The bile she spews at these kids will leave you slack-jawed. She uses humiliation like other teachers would a textbook. And she can read minds. Something is not quite right with the new substitute teacher and as the mystery unfolds to just what she is and what her intentions are, Carl bands together with the rest of the class to stop her.

“The Substitute” doesn't take itself too seriously. There are elements here that border on the absurd, like the film's fixation on chickens. Fortunately, none of this overrides the tension as Ulla becomes more and more malevolent. The first comparison that jumps to mind is Robert Rodriguez' “The Faculty”, although that in itself was derivative of other films. Think of it as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” meets “The Goonies”. At it's heart, this is a family film about a motley group of kids facing off against an alien predator. It's a rare one, though, in that it blends genres and appeals to kids and adults, which is to say that you get to hear children drop F-bombs. It's a solid, fun bit of cinema and I'll be stunned if the pirates of Hollywood don't snatch this up for a remake. Danes, you've been put on alert. If you keep this quality up, the remake machine will come to your icy country and suck your nascent film industry dry. You've been warned.