29th September - Apologies for the hiatus in the delivery of the Post Cards. As it has been well intimated elsewhere, this has been due to problems in the wireless system here. Not that I'm looking for any sympathy, but to get the website updated with all the films for the Halloween All-Nighter, I was up at 6 am Austin time and off to the burger shop across the road from the hotel to use their wireless, which works perfectly. As I was updating the site I worked my way through two breakfast burgers and several cups of coffee.

So three Post Cards combined into one today. On Monday I was up nice and early to catch Cropsey. Cropsey is a documentary about a real-life murder case on Staten Island, one of the boroughs of New York. Back in the 70s some children began to go missing and a man called Andre Rand was eventually convicted of the crimes. Locked up for 20 odd years, just as he was due to be released, he was charged with another two murders. He was eventually found guilty and although the documentary makers Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman dug deep into the case, at the end of the film I really wasn't any the wiser and left the cinema very unsatisfied.

I was going to finally catch up with Antichrist on Tuesday. After the films first screening, the film was unexpectedly yanked from the festival, so I suppose I will now have to wait for the DVD.

Tuesday found me doing the barbecue run. This time to a small town about 40 miles from Austin called Tyler and another one of these quaint old-fashioned buildings that can be found in the small backwoods towns round here. Also on Tuesday, we all were bussed over to Tim and Kerry Leauge's home where we dined under the star's in some style eating wonderful Chinese food as we watched Crazy Racer on a giant inflatable screen. The film is full of bumbling cops, even more bumbling apprentice criminals, who for some reason keep changing professions. One minute they are assassins the next kidnappers. Add in double and triple-cross assassination attempts, the odd Triad gangster shootout, loads of explosions and finally car chases, a lot of time I had no idea what the hell was going on. Nevertheless it was a very pleasant evening in some very good company.

Finally, it was back to the cinema for 100 Best Deaths. I have to say this was heaps and heaps of fun and such a shame that we were unable to pull this one off back in London in August. Next year definitely.

First up on Wednesday was Sweet Karma. A low-budget revenge thriller set against the people trafficking gangs in Toronto. A the sister of a missing woman, who had been trafficked to Canada, slowly extracts her revenge against the people who had killed her sister in increasingly gory and bloody style. There was a nice twist at the end, which was unexpected, and made the film all the more satisfying.

Then it was onto the low-budget Canadian zombie film Yesterday. Reportedly made for under C$15,000, it certainly looked low budget in the quality of the projected pictures, however it had a nice spirit about it and some very good real and unintentional laughs. I enjoyed.

I also caught the Avatar 3-D preview footage, which I had not seen before. I thought the 3-D renditions fabulous, although I'm not sure about the story, but we will see when the film is fully finished. At a very long Q&A after the screening, the producer was telling us that it's about 90% done and that the film will run over 160 minutes.

As I said in a previous postcard Tom Shankland's film The Children is playing here. Reaction has been very positive, with the film rating very well on the Fantastic Fest web site.

Until the next time...

Ian.

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