Those Northeasterners are so lucky. First, they got to experience the bone-shattering adventurousness of New Jersey’s Action Park (itself the focus of a documentary), and now comes Spooktacular!, a film by Quinn Monahan that charts the meteoric rise and crashing fall of SpookyWorld…. the first Halloween themed outdoor park established in the early 90’s.
Conjured from the imagination of two Massachusetts businessmen in the late 80’s (David Bertolino and Sean Fogarty) and evolving into a highly profitable destination, Spooktacular! is a loving ode to the men, women, and semi-celebrities who turned the hayride on small parcel of land into a sensation whose horror filled shacks and barns would often cause massive traffic jams from families hoping to have the beejeezus scared out of them. And scare people they did.
Interviewing many of the people directly involved with the park, it’s easy to see why SpookyWorld was so innocently infectious to everyone that visited. The documentary even goes so far as to include Jon Krasinski waxing poetic about his experiences there as a kid when interviewed by Seth Myers in 2019. And his experiences of wonder and joy are echoed by pretty much everyone else in the film.
Naturally, the wonder didn’t last and SpookyWorld became a relic of community bureaucracy and faded memories for those who experienced it, and it’s clear Monahan shares the same affection for the place. As a documentary, it’s pretty bare-bones, but the joyous subject matter far exceeds its rudimentary approach.
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Alot can happen in two minutes, and this idea is something that’s preoccupied filmmaker Junta Yamaguchi . His previous film titled Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (and one I’ve yet to see) is described as a comedy about a shop owner whose television set shows him images of the future…. but only two minutes into the future. His latest film, River, sees the inhabitants of a mountainous inn reliving their lives over and over in two-minute intervals. Whether it’s the future or the past, Yamaguchi is searching for something, and I think he’s found it in River’s deliriously trippy and skillfully handled narrative. It’s the best film I’ve seen at Fantastic Fest 2023 so far.
After a quick introduction to the staff and visitors to the exclusive Kibune, Kyoto inn, we watch as server Mikoto (Riko Fujitani) prays to the river god at the serene water’s edge behind the inn. It’s at that moment that her life- and that of all the others around her- begins to repeat over and over every 120 seconds., depositing everyone back to their starting point at her quiet moment of introspection.
Beginning as a loopy sci-fi comedy where all the participants slowly realize the effects of the endless time loop before turning into a perfectly imagined comedy of reactions and adaptability, River proves that new ideas can still be spun from age-old cinematic conundrums. Every new loop beginning opens up the possibility of suspended humor and critical thinking, which is strung out magnificently by Yamaguchi and screenwriter Makoto Ueda over the course of the entire effort.
Featuring wonderful acting by all involved, River straddles humor and pathos while never quite losing sight of the weirdo genre dynamics that many films need to grace the screens at Fantastic Fest. Underneath that, however, it’s also an endearing ode to the many paths our lives can take and a sharp examination of the human struggle to create meaning from chaos. Highly recommended.
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A fixture at the festival over the past few years, writer/director/producer Amanda Kramer returns with a slight departure from her usual strident stabs with the documentary So Unreal. Tracing the evolution of artificial intelligence and computerized democracy in cinema, her film takes a page from the dry but highly informative Adam Curtis school of presentation (although Curtis never had the unique pleasure of Debbie Harry as his narrator) and melds together so many clips and found footage that one’s head begins to spin within the first few minutes. And this is a good thing.
Beginning when music videos were on the technological forefront of computer graphics and ending with the millennial unease of 1999 Hollywood, So Unreal is chock full of interesting tidbits of information and critical readings of films. It also reminded me that The Thirteenth Floor was released just months apart from The Matrix. I remember seeing both in theaters and, if memory serves right, I found Josef Rusnak’s CGI futuro thriller much more involving than the Wachowski’s now legendary milestone.
Following a throughline that so many of these films accurately predicted our current reliance on computers, it’s breathtaking the amount of licensing that must have gone into this exhaustive effort. I wish there was a bit less of Kramer’s reliance on simply recounting the narrative of so many of these films- as if to provide filler for a more academic and shorter experiment- but So Unreal does justice to modern Hollywood history by not only examining the titans of the genre like James Cameron’s Terminator films, but also spotlighting less-financed and scrappy filmmakers like Albert Pyun for Arcade (1993) and Rachel Talalay’s Ghost In the Machine (1993)- which I’d never even heard of but now desperately want to see. If nothing else, Kramer achieves what she (and all documentaries) strives to achieve…. educate and entertain.
Dallas Film Now. 