Panic Fest 2020 - Day 1

Fuck. Film fests are brutal! I have a newfound respect for reviewers who do them.

In October, I went to Salem Horror Fest but managed to only see two movies. I was drawn to it by The Faculty of Horror podcasters being there. They always do a live podcast, showing the film directly beforehand, as well as one or both of them doing a separate lecture. I was also drawn to getting to go to Salemlecture, Massachusetts, during Halloween season. It was crazy busy and lively. There was so much to do and bf1 wanted to do THINGS, not sit in movies. Fair. It was a big vacation squeezed into a four-day weekend. Also many of the films weren't first runs and I either had seen them before or could see them some other time. (I will say that I can't wait for Scream Queen to come out on steaming. There was something else going on then and I decided to skip the documentary about the lead from Nightmare on Elm Street 2.) I came back having done lots of cool things, including getting a tattoo, and I wouldn't change any of it. This last weekend I went to Panic Fest here in my hometown at a great local independent theater. They bring in almost all indie films that are still trying to get picked up for distribution. They are mostly horror and Sci-Fi movies, though one could argue about horror versus horrific/horrifying, which is something I will get into more with two of the movies I saw on Saturday. At this point, Panic Fest is a full week, and then some. Officially it opened Thursday, though there was a showing on Wednesday, and they had the best of the Fest on the next Thursday. The weekend I attended there were films showing in all four theaters. Some movies showed again one or two times, during the week. showed

This just so happened to come on a weekend when I don't have kids, additionally when my parents asked me to have my daughter for some time on Sunday. I was going to just pick a few movies but bf2 offered to buy me a full pass and bf1 encourager me be gone for the whole weekend. Sadly, I still had to make decisions on what I would see. There were definitely many movies that I didn't get to see during the fest. There were times already by Sunday that I wish I hadn't seen what I saw, that I picked something else. I skipped almost all the podcasts for movies. Last week I sat down and made a sort of spreadsheet with what was playing at each time. And then looked up the summaries of all of them and picked number one, number two, or not very interested. I also made a list of ones that sounded like horror comedies that bf1 might want to see. So there was some prep work on this. Definitely. And I didn't even stick to the script perfectly.

I started writing this on Sunday and I'm not sure about writing, or really posting this on Scream Shed, but I'm going to try. At this point I did three movies on Friday after work, including one with twin bro, (thanks man!) and 6 on Saturday. Currently I'm writing at the taping of a podcast on Sunday, going to maybe one movie before going to get kid, and then to maybe one movie + podcast, if everything works out. Then maybe one or two movies on Monday, and one or two movies Wednesday. I want to write a little about the movies and my thoughts as well as cool Film Fest things. But, damn y'all, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to sit on your ass all day and night but it really is exhausting. And hard on my tummy, even though this place has better food than many theaters.

My first movie of the Fest was Extra Ordinary. It is about a woman who has turned her back on her natural ability to speak to ghosts and  become a driving instructor in her small Irish Town, only to be sucked back in to help a man and his teenage daughter. SNL alum Will Forte plays a one hit wonder who lives nearby and is planning his comeback in an unusual way. I really liked the production design. It had a town stuck in the past vibe, like the wardrobe from the late 80s and early 90s with some early 2000s Tech, like the Nokia brick phone. Great, low-key, mostly clean humor. A breakdown in communication meant that bf1 didn't come to it. Other than a reoccurring vomit gag, I think he would have liked most of it, so we'll probably look for it on streaming services. 

This is also where I met my friend of the Fest Beth. Almost all of the showings I went to were full. This one was no different. Shortly before the film started, a thin young woman with big glasses and friendly energy sat next to me and apologized to me for crunching her chips, the side for the theater's grilled sandwiches. When the festival's curator came to introduce the movie, he mentioned that the producer of one of the other films in the Fest was here and that her movie had the wildest last 15 minutes of any film at the Fest. He pointed to the young woman crunching next to me. She and I made a little small talk before the movie started but it would not be the last time we talked.

I did however chicken out on an introduction I should have made before this movie. One of the horror podcasts I listen to, The Horror Podclass, is based out of my hometown, though I didn't realize it until several episodes in when one of the podcasters, Tyler, added "here in Kansas City" to his intro of "and by day I'm a high-school teacher." With a push from bf1, I introduced myself to Tyler during a previous movie showing hosted by Signal Horizon, the horror and sci-fi website that hosts The Horror Podclass. In the last couple of months, the second chair of the podcast has been filled by a local author Orrin Grey. Both men had talked about coming to Panic Fest. During Extra Ordinary, Tyler was a row in front of me and as soon as one of his companions started talking, I knew it was Orrin. But I chickened out on saying anything before or after that movie, even though I really wanted to tell him that I love him on the podcast.

My next movie was Porno, which my twin brother from another mother came to see with me. The film is all set at a Christian-owned, G and PG only theater. During an after-hours film club, four teen employees and their college dropout projectionist watch a movie they hope will be a porno that they discover behind a boarded-up area of the theater. Needless to say, it does not go as planned and the five of them must deal with a literal demon as well as their own demons. My comments to my twin: "Wow this movie has a lot of dicks." (To be fair, there are also breasts, though mostly the same pair.) For a movie about a group of Christians, this movie had a good amount of sex, violence, and gore. I think the jokes about and on Christianity were pretty spot on, but I wonder what someone who identified as Christian would think of them. (And also what someone who used to be involved in conservative Christian congregations but has since "fallen from grace," so to speak, would thing.) Overall, I think this movie would be great for a horror comedy night with your adult group of friends, as long as they are not active conservative Christians.

As an aside, I really appreciated the use of nudity and overall how they chose to display the body in the movies at the Fest. In a genre well known for exploitation and gratuitous (mostly female) nudity, I thought that these films used nudity in thoughtful ways and had more male nudity and penises than female nudity and breasts.

After a bit of an after movie chat, I was back on my own for the last movie of the night, VHYes. Introduced with a bonkers video mixtape from Magnetic Mixtape, as well as a raffle (I won!) that they cosponsored with their Analog Sunday cohosts Forever Bogus, this movie was a late night movie treat. The plot is rather loosely based around a 12 year old who receives a VHS camcorder for Christmas and then proceeds to tape over his parents wedding video (Dummies! They should have broken the little square off!) with day to day shenanigans and late night TV. For me it worked as a love letter to the late-night TV of my youth, with comic actors from shows like Reno 911 recreating the greatest hits of my late night TV. For others, it probably hit their young love for making home movies and homemade films. Even though the late night TV gets progressively weirder, I found myself lulled by this nostalgia, making the scareiss at the end all the more effective. If you and your friends fondly remember watching USA's Up All Night or dirty edited their own movies with tandem VHS players,  I'd recommend this as a (very) late night treat. 

Though I was a bit hungry, I skipped any late night food and went straight home to bf 1 and the warm bed. I would have a big day Saturday.

(Started Sunday, finished writing Thursday, took until today to edit it. What can I say. Life is busy and tiring.)