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Fantastic Fest, a wonderfully inclusive and unpredictable event every September in Austin, turns 20 this year. To launch the 20th edition on Thursday night, one of the co-founders started shouting “Chaos Reigns!” into a microphone, refusing to stop until everyone in the theater stood up and chanted along with him. It was a great reminder of the spirit of this fest, one of community, and, well, chaos.
And then, I don’t think coincidentally, I saw two movies that most of the Bible Belt would call downright blasphemously chaotic. From a chimp ripping people’s faces apart to the unabashed lunacy of Brian Yuzna’s follow-up to a horror masterpiece, night one of Fantastic Fest also had an interesting dynamic for my specific double feature, in that one film won’t be out until 2026, and the other was initially released 15 years before this fest launched. One could almost consider the 20 years of FF the connection between the two. That and some gnarly kills.
Johannes Roberts introduced his creature feature/monster movie “Primate” with the playful hope that it would make up for his generally reviled “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.” Yes, it does top that slightly over-hated film through its excellent makeup effects and a few committed performances. It eventually gets pretty gnarly (and arguably kinda cruel in its brutality), but it suffers because it takes way too long to get there, feeling much longer than its brief runtime. Still, those who enjoy seeing the lost art of faces turning into red goo will eventually have a good time with what is essentially a throwback to an era when makeup reigned supreme over CGI.
Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her Hawaii home for summer break, where she reunites with sister Erin, dad Adam (Troy Kotsur, bringing much-needed warmth to a cold movie), and their pet chimpanzee Ben. She’s brought a couple of friends for a little party while her author dad goes off to a book signing event, but they don’t know that Ben was bitten by a rabid mongoose the night before, and, well, it’s about to get weird. After Ben attacks, the teenagers strand themselves in the pool—chimps can’t swim—and try to figure out how they can possibly escape the strong clutches of this killer primate.
Roberts struggles a bit with tone, crafting a single-location survival thriller that turns into a slasher movie with a chimp instead of Jason Voorhees. To say that Ben is irrationally smart in his stalking of these teenagers would be an understatement, but this is the kind of film that demands suspension of disbelief, something that’s easier to do at FF than it might be on Paramount+. I don’t mind giving into a movie’s concept if it’s executing it well, but I kept finding myself outside of “Primate,” trying to figure out things like why this million-dollar home doesn’t have an alarm with a panic button. It’s a product of slack pacing in the middle, which is really just killing time before the flesh-rending chaos of the final act. That’s when “Primate” truly reigns.
Another story of evolutionary violence unfolds in Brian Yuzna’s insane “Bride of Re-Animator,” a movie that’s even wackier than you remember in a new 4K restoration. A sequel to Stuart Gordon’s brilliant 1985 film “Re-Animator,” this one doesn’t replicate the Lovecraftian tension of the original, but that’s a high bar to meet. It works better than many ’80s and ‘90s horror sequels by virtue of Yuzna and writers Woody Keith & Rick Fry’s willingness to go where most Hollywood movies refuse to go. It’s not every day you see a flying head with bat wings or an arm & a leg fused together and become sentient and homicidal. And don’t forget the creature that’s just an eyeball with five fingers for legs. (“Alien: Earth” inspiration, maybe?) It’s really clunky at times, but it’s impossible not to admire the sheer ridiculousness of “Bride of Re-Animator,” and Austin was the perfect place to re-launch it.
Loosely based on episodes of the serialized story Herbert West-Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft, “Bride of Re-Animator” catches up with Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), continuing to play God. Dan is still apprehensive, grieving the loss of Meg from the first movie and the imminent death of a patient he’s become attached to, but West is full Frankenstein, seeing every human body as potential grist for his mill. Combs is wonderfully deranged in this movie, getting laughs from the FF crowd with some of his memorable line readings that sometimes make him look like Jim Carrey played a mad scientist. He’s the best thing about the movie, but he’s surrounded by an ensemble that rarely matches his temperature. Abbott is a particularly flat performer.
What’s not flat is the make-up and effects work that looks even better in 4K. When “Bride of Re-Animator” gets to its super-bloody final scenes, the entire movie feels unhinged in a way that can be best appreciated at Fantastic Fest.
May there be at least 20 more years of this kind of chaos.
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