Night Visions Maximum Halloween 3024 Review Roundup
Everything you should see at Night Visions Maximum Halloween 3024
Night Visions Maximum Halloween 3024 is in full swing, and there's still time to catch some of the absolute bangers at the festival. Below you'll find a compilation of mini-reviews for each of the films I've seen before the festival, along with links to full texts on them as they appear.
Shadowland
Joonatan
A rich and powerful documentary that stands proudly alongside films like Heart of Darkness and Burden of Dreams as an ethereal and revelatory introspection on life, faith, filmmaking and abuse, that becomes a part of us and never lets go.
★★★★★
Scared Shitless
Joonatan
Dementedly funny and surprisingly tender, this Canadian gross-out comedy is a delightful throwback to early Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi-era blood fests. Anchored by charming leads, especially the delightful Steven Ogg, it's one of the most fun creature features in years.
★★★★
Black Eyed Susan
Joonatan
A low-low-budget work that achieves far more than you'd initially expect. Horrific and unnerving, it superbly breaks down the toxic masculinity behind the technocracy created by tech bros, and does it by brilliantly replicating the grimy aesthetic of late 80s and early 90s Skinamax tapes.
It's decidedly not for everyone, but by treating its audience as smart adults capable of dealing with complex and uncompromising topics, Black Eyed Susan stands out as a prime example of what filmmakers with something to say can accomplish.
★★★★
A Samurai in Time
A loving elegy for genre films and the artists behind them, A Samurai in Time is a heartfelt and droll comedy and love letter to jidaigeki-cinema. Led by a wonderful performance from Makia Yamaguchi, it's a delightful film about our connection to culture and our past that deeply moved me when I least expected it to.
★★★★
Chain Reactions
Watching an Alexandre O. Philippe documentary is like having an animated conversation with a friend. His uncanny ability to get people to engage with the subject beyond the superficial proves fruitful once more, as actors, directors, and journalists dissect their love for Tobe Hooper’s iconic horror classic.
The result is a series of stimulating conversations that prove how much there still is to say about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
★★★★
Dead Talents Society
One of the unexpected treats of the year, Dead Talent’s Society is a hysterically funny and deeply touching comedy about life, regret, and finding our place in the world. Reminiscent of the mid-2000s cult series Dead Like Me, it consistently reinvents itself from horror to slapstick to drama without feeling like a gimmick.
★★★★★
Children of the Wicker Man
How do you grow up in the shadow of art? That's the question at the heart of Children of the Wicker Man, an intimate and revelatory portrait of a director, his definitive film, and the devastation he left behind to accomplish a vision that, at times, only he believed in.
The resulting documentary speaks to our love for film and its transformative power, but also how the people behind the films are just that; people. In all their complexities and failures.
★★★★★
Parvulos
A genre and tone-defying film directed with such bravado and confidence, it left me breathless by the end of its two-hour runtime. Set in a world devastated by an unknown plague, Parvulos (Preschoolers) is part Lord of the Flies, part zombie epic, part satire, and part coming-of-age story in a world redefining society. Tense, surprisingly funny, poignant, and riveting, Parvulos is a delight that kept me guessing until the very end.
★★★★
Eight Postcards from Utopia
Joonatan
A staggering mosaic of a society in a tumultuous time. Hypnotic and revelatory, it uses the ultimate form of deception to reveal deep truths about the hopes and dreams of a nation discovering itself.
★★★★★
Telepathic Letters
Telepathic Letters is a contradiction. What happens when you take two authors renowned for their imaginative, genre-defining works, and pair them with technology that is the anathema of everything creative? This AI-generated mess looks exactly as you'd imagine anything generated by AI to look: lifeless and unimaginative.
In theory, it could work as a short film. As a feature, it's a painfully long experience without an inkling of the wonder and mastery that came to define either of its subjects.
★
