Fantasia 2014 | Report #5

Starry Eyes is not a terribly original film, and it was clearly made on the cheap, but it’s creepy and funny and would be great as a midnight movie.

 

 

 

What would you do to make it as an actor? John Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby sold his soul—and his wife’s body—to the devil, and it sure paid off for him, although the consequences for her were a bit more mixed. The lead character in Starry Eyes, Sarah (Alex Essoe), is trying to make the grade in present-day Hollywood, and although she’s pretty and hard-working and eternally hopeful, there are just so many more like her (as her frenemy roommates like to remind her). Then she gets a call to audition for The Silver Scream, and has to decide exactly what, and whom, she is willing to sacrifice for her ambitions.

Starry Eyes is not a terribly original film, and it was clearly made on the cheap (directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widnyer raised some of their funding through Kickstarter), but it’s creepy and funny and would be great as a midnight movie. Additional bonuses—some great location work, and a very creepy supporting performances by Maria Olsen and Louis Dezseran as the casting director and producer, respectively, for The Silver Scream. It won the Director’s Award for Best Feature at the Boston Underground Film Festival and an award for Excellence in Poster Design (by Jay Shaw) at South by Southwest, both in 2014.

I wish I could be more positive about Black Mountain Side, a Canadian feature written and directed by Nick Szostakiwskyj that made its world premier at Fantasia. The concept is promising, if not terribly original—a group of scientists investigating a strange phenomenon in an out-of-the-way location come up against more than they are prepared to deal with—but the tone is inconsistent, the plot meandering, and the whole film is just way too long. Honestly, I think a good edit (losing 20 minutes or so along the way) could make this film a lot more attractive to the midnight madness market.

The basic conceit is that a mysterious stone with strange markings has pushed its way above ground, and a crew of archeologists has come to study it. However, things quickly start to get weird—one character’s cat is apparently sacrificed to whatever the stone represents, the Native American workers leave without notice in the middle of the night, the archaeologists start hearing voices—and then the radio goes out, leaving the crew stuck with themselves and the mysterious stone thing.

The problem with this film is not the concept but the execution—it’s not clear about when it wants to scare you and when it wants to be funny, so often it succeeds at neither. The worst examples is the creature that embodies the spirit that supposedly it taking over the men’s minds—it looks like something belonging in a Monty Python skit where the joke is that the characters don’t realize how lame it is. The best thing about Black Mountain Side may be the location—it was shot in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia, and a preshow talk assured us that the cast and crew lived in the cabins featured in the film while shooting. It’s an absolutely stunning location, and appears remote enough that you can believe that the only way in and out is by helicopter and that if the radio goes out, the characters really are up against it. | Sarah Boslaugh