The 15 Best Movies At Fantastic Fest 2012

After nearly a week's worth of delicious, if not at all nutritious, fried food, four to five out-there movies a day, and very hot weather, Complex's Pop Culture is back in the office on a genre movie high. Held out in Austin, Texas, at the expertly ran Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, this year's installment of the eighth annual Fantastic Fest was a glorious celebration of strange, unique films from all over the world, including Scandinavian crime thrillers, Canadian body horror, Australian nightmares, and darkly comedic Japanese oddities. In all, it was a sensory overload for the most adventurous of moviegoers, and the PC team can't wait to do it all again next year.

The best thing about events like Fantastic Fest is how the post-screenings reactions can generate buzz around independently made films that would otherwise struggle to gain attention, and there were plenty of those kinds of flicks shown in Austin over the last six days.

A few big deal Hollywood premieres did happen, though, all of which were top-notch, from the deeply unnerving Sinister (in theaters October 12th) to Tim Burton's playful return to form Frankenweenie (October 5th) and the stellar time travel head-rush Looper (in theaters tomorrow). But for the sake of showing love to smaller pictures, our picks for The 15 Best Movies at Fantastic Fest 2012 don't include any major studio productions. Here, it's all about the underdogs.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Director: Jen and Sylvia Soska
Stars: Katharine Isabelle, Tristan Risk, Antonio Cupo, John Emmet Tracy, David Lodgren, Twan Holliday, Paula Lindberg

At around the 40-minute point in American Mary, one thing becomes official: Jen and Sylvia Soska have officially arrived as formidable filmmakers.

Debuting last year with the cheaply made but vibrantly enjoyable exploitation flick Dead Hooker in a Trunk, the Canadian sisters, known as the Twisted Twins, showed tons of potential, and the first half of their equally depraved follow-up displays an immense growth as both storytellers and directors. With sexy, in control star Katharine Isabelle holding things down, American Mary opens up as its eponymous character deals with medical school stress, financial troubles, and her introduction into the underground world of body modification.

Up until Mary gets bloody revenge on a professor who violated her, the Soskas' sophomore effort develops its narrative with prowess; throughout American Mary's second half, though, the story loses focus as the sibling directors opt for unconnected sequences of carnage, black comedy, and graphic sexuality. Which, mind you, all entertain greatly, but it's a shame that American Mary turns into a delightful hodgepodge when it could've been a revelatory achievement.

Still, there's a lot to be said about a couple of young female directors who, after only two movies, have nailed their own unique style and aren't afraid to get down and dirty. Get familiar with the names Jen and Sylvia Soska, people—they're here to stay. A good thing, indeed.

Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Stars: Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Malcolm McDowell, Douglas Smith

Brandon Cronenberg, the son of acclaimed genre filmmaker David Cronenberg, doesn't seem all that interested in people embracing his feature film debut, Antiviral; cold, unwelcoming, and at times emotionally impenetrable, it's a challenging effort from a young director who's clearly inspired by his father's older classics, like Videodrome and The Fly. Fortunately for Cronenberg, Antiviral just so happens to be formidably directed, ripe with sharp wit, and filled with quite a few visually dazzling moments. As tough as it is to crack, the film is impossible to ignore.

Motivated by our culture's unhealthy obsession with celebrity, Cronenberg' conceives an otherworldly society where doctors, like the intensely creepy Syd March (a marvelous Caleb Landry Jones), treat patients to injections of their favorite famous person's disease of choice; for example, simply by forking over your hard-earned cash, you can feel closer to that desirable Hollywood dream girl by battling through her strand of herpes.

Naturally, that process has dire consequences in Antiviral, especially when March secretly unknowingly indulges in a starlet's (the radiant Sarah Gadon) fatal illness and has to fight through his deteriorating health to find the cure. And that's when Cronenberg really lets his creative freak flags fly.

Director: Michael Paul Stephenson

To not be completely enveloped by happiness and nostalgic warmth by the end of The American Scream, you'd have to an empty void where the heart is supposed to be—or, rather, an Ebenezer Scrooge mentality when it comes to Halloween. For everyone else, though, director Michael Paul Stephenson's follow-up to the wonderful 2009 documentary Best Worst Movie is a feel-good look at three Massachusetts families making tremendous sacrifices to turn their humble cribs into highly decorated haunted house every October.

Handling his subjects' personal lives with delicate care, Stephenson affectionately presents the film's festive suburbanites as purveyors of our country's greatest but mostly forgotten traditions. The American Scream, with steady humor and emotion, speaks directly to folks who've lost that childlike interest in all things spooky and those who've held onto the love of Halloween in spite of adulthood's many distractions.

Director: Charles de Lauzirika
Stars: Josh Lawson, Emma Lung, Ron Perlman, Edward Furlong

Have you ever wanted to bash a talkative, obnoxious person's brains in during a lecture? Or wished you could annihilate a pair of young thugs harassing an innocent, cute chick on a subway train? If so, first-time director Charles de Lauzirika's hugely impressive Crave should hit close to home.

In a magnificent performance, actor Josh Lawson plays a crime scene photographer who daydreams about killing those who irritate him and gets involved with a much younger, and emotionally confused, neighbor (the adorable and charismatic Emma Lung). Through wonderful dialogue and rich characters, Crave mixes several genres—specifically psychological drama, romantic comedy, and violent noir—while also demonstrating that de Lauzirika is a fresh-voiced filmmaker to watch. The kinds of storytelling elegance and deviant imagination shown here aren't to be taken lightly.

Director: Ernesto Diaz Espinoza
Stars: Mattias Oviedo, Fernanda Urrejola

Further proof that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez merely scratched the surface of modern-day exploitation homages in Grindhouse, Chilean filmmaker Ernesto Diaz Espinoza's Bring Me the Head of Machine Gun Woman, much like Jason Eisener's Hobo with a Shotgun (2011), totally nails the marriage of a sleazy throwback aesthetic and balls-out fun.

Visually presented as a live-action Grand Theft Auto, complete with "Mission" word graphics, it's a violent, funny, and extremely sexy (see: barely clothed, utterly badass Machine Gun Woman herself, actress Fernanda Urrejola) adrenaline rush about a harmless club DJ (Mattias Oviedo) who has to apprehend the elusive and deadly MGW and hand her over to a crime boss, known as Che Sausage, if he wants to live.

Clocking in at a breathless and filler-free 75 minutes, Bring Me the Head of Machine Gun Woman sticks to its wacky narrative course, supplies unwavering enjoyment, and inspires a new male fantasy, one involving Urrejola, automatic weapons, and a submissive nature. Let's leave it at that.

Director: Christopher MacBride
Stars: Aaron Poole, James Gilbert

There's nothing better than seeing adventurous young filmmakers see an excellent yet tricky idea through to its effective end. That's one way to describe the viewing experience of watching Christopher MacBride's first-rate The Conspiracy, an engrossing faux documentary about a couple of filmmakers descending deeper and deeper into the world occupied by those who nervously believe in the Illuminati, 9/11 conspiracies, and other New World Order paranoias.

MacBride and company intriguingly use real-life theories and sources of investigation, namely The Tarsus Club and the Bohemian Grove rituals, to construct an airtight thriller that starts off inducing unease before beginning a third act where first-person horror takes over. Not to mention, The Conspiracy pulls off that always complicated trick known as "the ambiguous ending," leaving viewers with plenty to think about and even more to lose sleep over.

Director: Eron Sheean
Stars: Michael Eklund, Karoline Herfuth, Tomas Lemarquis, Rik Mayall

And they say that genre filmmakers have run out of original ideas. Clearly, first-time writer-director Eron Sheean isn't phased by those claims, since his debut, Errors of the Human Body, practically goes out of its way to be unique, and bless his soul for that.

Seeped in the ins and outs of genetics and science, Sheean's film, thankfully, doesn't bog viewers down with the semantics of its headier concerns; instead, Errors of the Human Body uses laboratory dialect and philosophies as the backdrop for a tragic, deeply touching story about a geneticist (Michael Eklund) who's determined to find a cure for the mysterious cell mutation disease that led to his newborn son's death.

Equal parts emotional and disturbing horrific, the movie figuratively walks the fine line between David Cronenberg-esque body horror and heart-wrenching drama, working its way to several conclusive reveals that will stick in your mind long after Errors of the Human Body ends. It's a remarkably impressive feature film introduction for Sheean.

Director: Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis, Ernesto Diaz Espinosa, Jason Eisener, Bruno Forzani, Héléne Cattet, Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Lee Hardcastle, Jorge Michel Grau, Noboru Iguchi, Thomas Malling, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisathanakun, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalando, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard, Yudai Yamaguchi

Prior to the second, and final, public screening of The ABC's of Death, which took place Tuesday night, the word around the festival was that the high ambitious and outright insane anthology feature was a worthwhile disaster. And it was easy to accept that claim: Comprised of 26 directors each presenting a different means of life termination based on letters from the alphabet, it's one of those concepts that sounds amazing in theory but has a high potential of turning into a clusterfuck in execution. But it comes with fervent, pleasant enthusiasm to report that The ABC's of Death was one of Fantastic Fest's greatest surprises. In fact, it's an absolute blast.

Granted, several segments are complete wastes of time, namely The Innkeepers filmmaker Ti West's disappointingly lazy "M is for Miscarriage" and Angela Bettis' "E is for Exterminate." The combined weakness of the film's lesser offerings is easily dismissible, however, when one takes into account the awesomeness of The ABC's of Death's high-points, from Deadgirl director Marcel Sarmiento's exceptional "D is for Dogfight," Ben Wheatley's (Kill List) intense first-person exercise "U is for Unearthed," and Jason Eisener's (Hobo with a Shotgun) demented and uncomfortably hilarious "Y is for Youngbuck."

Don't believe the negative hype that's been circulating around the film in recent weeks—Though it's flawed, The ABC's of Death is, altogether, a giddily sick, nonstop shot of sadistic perversity to one's system.

Director: Adrián García Bogliano
Stars: Francisco Barreiro, Laura Caro, Alan Martinez, Michele Garcia

Argentina's own Adrián García Bogliano can't be put into any one kind of box within the horror genre. With each new film, the young writer-director totally shifts gears and challenges himself to subvert a common scary movie trope; in Here Comes the Devil, Bogliano tries his hand at the supernatural, telling an unsettling and unpredictable tale about two loving, though romantically fragile, parents struggling to figure out where their two young kids have been acting so oddly after returning from a mysterious cave.

Achieving a steady, overwhelming mood of dread from start to finish, Bogliano's latest twists and turns its way into a lane occupied by the most daring of horror movies, where familiar concepts and images never play out how one might expect and interesting, if not sometimes questionable, behind-the-camera choices show a director who's gamely open to risks. Here Comes the Devil won every single horror prize at Fantastic Fest's awards ceremony, and for good reason: It's an assured effort from an exciting new voice.

Director: Kristina Buozyte
Stars:Marius Jampolskis, Jurga JutaiteBrice Fournier, Frederic Andrau, Martina Jablonskyte, Arnoldas Eismantas

This year's crop of Fantastic Fest movies leaned heavily on foreign crime thrillers and icky body horror shows, which helped the Lithuanian sci-fi erotic drama Vanishing Waves establish its own powerful identity. Simply put, visionary director Kristina Buozyte's film was unlike anything else on the bill, or anything else seen in theaters recently, for that matter.

The story alone is of its own kind: After an automobile accident, the beautiful Aurora (Jurga Jutaite) lies motionless in a coma, unaware that scientists are hard at work trying to send conscious subject Lukas (Marius Jampolskis) into her mind for research purposes. So, yes, there are hints of Inception at play here, but Buozyte's trippy film is far more concerned with disarming romance than it is with any high-concept action. Vanishing Waves is a slow, quiet piece of visual meditation, one that's absorbing, gorgeously made, and deserving of widespread attention.

Director: Amil Courtin-Wilson
Stars: Daniel P. Jones, Leanne Cambell

One way to describe Australian director Amil Courtin-Wilson's thunderous character study Hail: It's one hell of a violent, visceral sneak attack. Starring real-life ex-con Daniel P. Jones (who also worked on the script with Courtin-Wilson), Hail trails a brutish but warm-hearted troublemaker (Jones) who's trying to rekindle things with his main squeeze (Jones' actual lover, Leanne Campbell), when an old friend pops up and sends the former inmate on a ferocious downward spiral.

One of the more inconspicuous films entering this year's Fantastic Fest, Courtin-Wilson's assaultive drama shocked and awed those who casually walked into its several screenings, dividing its viewers into camps of enthusiastic adoration and appalled hatred. Obviously, Complex falls into the former category, though, as a service to everyone who didn't attend the festival, it's best to stop discussing Hail at this point. Going into the film reasonably blind is no doubt the preferred way to experience its unforeseen, vicious turns.

Director: Ted Kotcheff
Stars: Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, John Meillon

Fans of obscure genre film are in for a real treat when Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright finally receives its proper due stateside later this month. Courtesy of Drafthouse Films, the unflinching, to-the-gut look at things spiraling out of control in the Australian outback will get a limited release starting on October 5th, 31 years after its splashy Cannes Film Festival premiere and subsequent, quickly forgotten release in America under the title Outback.

Since its 1971 disappearance, cinema historians had long considered Wake in Fright to be yet another lost gem, a notorious work of power that would forever languish in filmland purgatory. Now, though, Kotcheff's dark, moody, and increasingly nihilistic look at a schoolteacher (Gary Bond) contending against savage dudes, kangaroos, alcohol, and other dangerous vices should reach the audiences who'll truly appreciate its force—like this year's Fantastic Fest attendees, whom all greeted Wake in Fright with rapturous applause and uniformly positive word-of-mouth.

Director: Rodney Ascher

So, you're a big fan of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, you say? Prepare to see the iconic director's Stephen King adaptation in all new, mind-bending ways, thanks to documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher's bewildering, deconstructive knockout Room 237. Using the committed, albeit seemingly delirious, voiceovers from five Shining obsessives, Ascher's endlessly fascinating film pulls apart every minute detail within Kubrick's horror masterwork to present a series of crackpot theories that, by the picture's end, actually sound probable.

As in, The Shining was Kubrick's way to atone for staging the Apollo 11 moon landing; or, Kubrick's masked commentary on both the Holocaust and the genocide of Native Americans in our beloved U.S.A. Sounds batty, right? With Ascher's stellar craftsmanship and slick editing to thank, Room 237 begs to differ.

Director: Ben Wheatley
Stars: Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, Richard Glover, Eileen Davies, Jonathan Aris, Monica Dolan

Earlier this year, the incredibly disturbing horror flick Kill List solidified British filmmaker's Ben Wheatley's status as one of the movie game's most exciting on-the-rise talents, capitalizing on the promise he showed with his 2009 debut, the dark crime comedy Down Terrace. But cinephiles haven't seen anything yet. Sightseers, which played as one of Fantastic Fest's two "secret screenings," officially cements Wheatley's place atop the pile of currently working directors, nationality or experience levels aside.

Brilliantly written by stars Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, Sightseers exists in the same space as Natural Born Killers, though its morbid sense of humor and quirky characterizations are singularly unique. On a "holiday" road trip, a three-months-in couple (Oram and Lowe, both superb) work through their relationship's kinks while several others die gruesomely, from getting run over to having their heads bashed into huge rock. And it's all in good, twisted fun, a dose of macabre humor from a totally in command Mr. Wheatley.

Director: Leos Carax
Stars: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue

Like a breath of fresh, revitalizing air, French filmmaker Leos Carax's Holy Motors welcomely attacks the senses with unbridled imagination and creativity. It's as imaginative as it is transformative, following a nameless actor (Denis Lavant, in an outstanding performance) who makes a series of pit stops, while driving around in a stretch limousine, each of which allows him the chance to portray a different character in a new mini-movie. From a performance-capture suit to a leprechaun-like green suit, his various get-ups inform his many assignments, and they're all vibrant, funny, unnerving, and unnaturally surreal. Holy Motors is one cinematic fever dream from which you won't want to wake up.