POSTCARDS FROM CANNES
May 16th - Day three.

It was Lionsgate day on Friday. Practically every film we saw had that company logo and what a line-up it was. But before moving on, Paul is lying about me wanting to walk out of MARTYRS. As distressing and shocking as the film is, it also emerges as a profoundly moving experience if you can hang on through the brutality. It has stayed with me and really has emerged as the talking point film of the Cannes market so far.

First Lionsgate movie was Clive Barker’s THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN directed by Ryuhei (VERSUS) Kitamura in some demented compostional cross between Brian de Palma and Dario Argento. It’s a about a photographer taking shots for an art show who starts trailing someone he thinks is a serial killer gutting victims on empty trains in the New York subways. Incredibly gory (butcher Vinnie Jones bludgeons his prey making their eyes pop out), and very suspenseful (the chase through carcasses in a meat packing storeroom), those who know the book will know the creature discomfort ending. But this is really something special – this MEAT TRAIN’s timetable is spot on.

Then it was the new Italian giallo THE GIRL BY THE LAKE from newcomer Andrea Molaioli in which a nude girl is found dead in a picturesque mountain town and the usual thriller suspects line up, the local village idiot, the suspicious boyfriend and the father whose child she babysat. Toni Servillo is the grizzled detective with a past trying to make sense of it. Not of EYES OF CRYSTAL caliber, but I liked this hauntingly sad story told with muted direction and a soundtrack I can only describe as a cat being strangled.

Back to Lionsgate and Joel Schumacher’’s CREEK about a Nazi going to America’s mid-west in 1936 to find American Indian rune stones to help him achieve immortality for Hitler’s domination plans. Fast-forward to today and a US marine AWOL from Iraq and his brother take on the hideous blood-drinking monster. Think Joel’s JEEPERS CREEPERS and you’ve got a rough idea of how this non-stop gore-zombie-action-treat plays. I liked it a great deal.

Last up was Darren Lynn Bousman’s vanity project REPO THE GENETIC OPERA starring Pual Sorvino and Anthony Head singing pop rock in a futuristic nightmare world where organ transplants are removed if you can’t keep up the payments. The highlight? Sarah Brightman gouging out her eyes and being gored by a spike on stage. If she’d been singing “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper’ too, it would have been the icing on the very rich and heavily frosted cake.

So, until the next time.

Alan Jones.

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