Toronto After Dark 2008

by Jordan Yerman | October 19, 2008 at 08:15 am

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Cinema fans are thirsty for blood... and zombies and sci-fi and stunts. The third annual Toronto After Dark Film Festival is underway, and I was lucky enough to check out some of the opening-weekend action.

Toronto After Dark is an eight-night festival of horror, sci-fi, cult and action films that have yet to secure North American distribution. To some of these entries I say "good luck with that", and those were the ones I most wanted to see! I could not get tix to see Let the Right One In, a film version of a Swedish vampire novel which people were still raving about the next day. Apparently the rights have already been secured for the dreaded Hollywood Remake.

I was, however, able to see Mirageman, a Chilean lo-fi full-contact martial-arts adventure flick. This was actually the second-ever Chilean martial arts film, and it starred the gravity-defying Marko Zaror and his apparently-not-afraid-to-get-badly-hurt stunt team. Shot without wirework or computer effects (and, in some scenes, without preplanned choreography), this is an action movie with a heart of gold, chronicling the rise of a local superhero, and his effect on the city he calls home, and that city's effect on him.

If you decided to become a superhero, who would you fight? How would you dress? How would the media treat you? How would people contact you? All of these questions are answered as an average everyday martial-arts expert dons a Snake-Eyes mask to beat the stuffing out of bad guys in Santiago. I had trouble with the Chilean accent, so had to read the subtitles quite a bit, but "guy getting knocked on his ass" is pretty much Esperanto.

Mirageman has ridiculous amounts of humor as well as breathtaking stuntwork: the audience was cheering and laughing for the duration of the film, and the cast and production crew showed their love of moviemaking with every second of footage. Watch for a video-game-inspired fight sequence in a mountaintop villa, in which our hero takes on innumerable black-masked baddies, including mid-level "bosses". Easily the best martial-arts flick since Ong Bak, with which Mirageman is drawing inevitable comparisons. If you can only see one movie about guys kicking each other in the face with subtitles, then this should be that movie.

I also got tickets to see Tokyo Gore Police (<- the trailer at the bottom of the linked page is rather violent) and I Sell the Dead, about a Victorian Grave-robber, starring Dominic Monaghan and Ron Perlman. It's a comedy. This is my kinda film fest.

Update: last night I checked out Tokyo Gore Police, and... dang.

Easily the bloodiest movie I've ever seen, making Ichi the Killer look like The Wedding Singer. The tone was far lighter than the Miiki's Ichi, though- firmly tongue-in-cheek. TGP is about a miniskirted supercop whose duty is to hunt down and kill these genetically-altered mutants who sprout weapons from any injury they sustain. How do you kill them? Messily.

Just about every possible method of killing someone is used in this film, more than once. If body horror, S&M, slashing. hacking, chainsaws, buzzsaws, razors, and bazookas are not your thing, then give this a miss. However, if you like your humor dark and deviant, then check it out. This is destined to become a lo-budg freak-out classic, as well it should. As well it should.

Overheard on the way out of the cinema:
"That was more violent than I expected!" (What part of "Tokyo Gore Police" didn't you understand?)

"That was silly!" (What part of "Tokyo Gore Police" didn't you understand?)

"I need a shower!" (See above)

Nice write-up! Have to say these are not my kind of movies but a Chilean martial arts film does sound intriguing.

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