Tags: Film Festivals, Filmmaking, Movies, Reviews, Toronto Film Festival, Toronto or Canada
So tonight was the Opening night for the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, showcasing horror and fantasy films much in the same fashion as TIFF’s Midnight Madness… in fact, I ran into Colin Geddes, the Midnight Madness programmer briefly while in the popcorn line. The festival runs for 7 days at the Bloor Cinema, and has a TON of really interesting films. I’d go check out their website if I were you.
The opening night film was called “Mulberry Street” and was basically a new and unique taste on the zombie genre… this time, the disease comes from rats and turns people into giant Rat-zombies. Pretty neat. The build-up was a bit slow, developing decent (but not quintessential) characters while the infection spread in the background. Eventually, in true zombie-movie fashion, the survivors begin to dwindle one-by-one… however, I felt that there was no pay-off in the end… the characters did not evolve or grow or learn or succeed- they merely survive (SPOILER: Or not). The shooting style was pretty interesting- going for realism by having hand-held shakes and sloppy pans… while the camera work looked amateurish, with the stellar make-up and acting, the sloppy cinematography actually added a lot to the intensity of the film. But the film felt longer than it should have due to a very long set-up; while the rat-zombie-angle was original, the steady degradation of society during a zombie outbreak has been covered gratuitously… and Mulberry Street didn’t add anything to that regard (except of course, the rats) that set it apart from the others. So my verdict is “pretty good, but could’ve been better”. Still, I enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to the next few days at the festival!
Tomorrow- the DungeonSeige movie… and none other than Uwe Boll will be there. Hopefully, if things go well, someone will challenge him to a boxing match in the cinema
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