Film festivals have emerged as one of the best, most fertile grounds for discovering new voices in genre filmmaking, so much so that just about every fest these days has a midnight sidebar for edgier, darker fare. Among the just-announced midnight selections at this year's SXSW Film Festival (held March 9-17 in Austin, TX): Tales of killer lady bartenders, faceless spooks, space-traveling Nazis, a deadly virus, VHS tapes, and the most evil kind of nightmare-inspiring villain imaginable, feral children. (Shudder.) Let's rundown the freakiest-sounding offerings of the SXSW Midnight slate!
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The midnight movie crowd at Sundance hooted for the grindhouse pic Hobo with a Shotgun, but it downright fell in love with the charming horror-musical short that played in front of it in a brilliant stroke of spot-on programming. The twists in Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion's 12-minute short The Legend of Beaver Dam are best left unspoiled, but suffice to say it involves a campfire tale, screaming children, plenty of gore, and a metal rock sing-off between a nerdy kid hero and a bloodthirsty killer. Sable and Batalion are supposedly working on a feature along the lines of Beaver Dam, so take a peek at this teaser and keep an eye out for more from these two. [StumpySam.com]
"Let's tear this place apart!" So instructed director Jason Eisener before Friday's midnight premiere of Hobo with a Shotgun, the unabashedly campy Canadian-American grindhouse flick about a homeless drifter who cleans up the streets of a depraved urban metropolis with only a pawn shop shotgun and plenty of gloriously insane death-dealing catchphrases in his arsenal. And while it may have disappointed Eisener and Co. that an actual riot didn't erupt before or after their film, they must have been pleased that Hobo played exactly right to just the genre-loving crowd it was made for.
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