Dead Snow: the face of neo-nazism?

The screen of the Bloor Cinema fills with ghoulish and freaky delights as Toronto After Dark relocates from October to a new slot to shock and titillate summertime moviegoers. The fourth annual festival of horror, science fiction, action and genre cinema presents 17 features — along with many world or North American premieres, the program includes movies that are already earning fervent cults of devotees all over the planet. EYE WEEKLY’s team of reviewers got rocked by everything from tales of killer kids to a Japanese gore-fest to a zombie double-feature to the very welcome return of blaxploitation…

Black ****
Dir Pierre Laffargue w/ MC Jean Gab’1, Carole Karemera. 115 min. Aug 15, 8:15pm.
This slick French heist flick set in Paris and Dakar follows a legendary thief as he does battle with mercenaries, Senegalese wrestlers, arms dealers and a snake man over a cache of ill-gotten diamonds. More Snatch than Shaft, this thriller brings an African dimension to the caper genre, with added traditional mysticism and a wicked soundtrack ranging from Afrobeat to funk.  KEVIN HILL

The Children ****
Dir Tom Shankland (see: Interview) w/ Eva Birthistle, Stephen Campbell Moore. 84 min. Aug 18, 7pm.
Yet more good reasons to never have kids are provided in this tight, brutal little British shocker, in which a few tykes wreak inexplicable violence on their parents during a Christmas cottage vacation.  There’s hardly a wasted second in the film’s 84-minute running time and while the movie walks the line between scary and ridiculous, it manages to land on the right side thanks to a tense atmosphere and some genuine terror.  WILL SLOAN

Dead Snow ***
Dir Tommy Wirkola w/ Vegar Hoel, Lasse Valdal. 90 min. Zombie Appreciation Night, Aug 16, 6:45pm.
There’s an orthodoxy to this Norwegian zombie flick that gets turned on its head the moment we’re introduced to its fearsome antagonists: a company of undead German infantrymen who’ve been stalking the sub-Arctic hills since World War II. It’s a visual hook, to be sure, and director Wirkola has a blast using it to terrorize us and the Nazi zombies’ prey, a small group of vacationing med students, in an otherwise by-the-book fashion. Wry humour and disembowelment pads out the onslaught as Dead Snow marches toward a final, cheeky note of resignation.  KIERAN GRANT

The Forbidden Door ****
Dir Joko Anwar w/ Fachry Albar, Marsha Timothy. 115 min. Aug 20, 7pm.
This might be hard, but try imagining one of Michael Haneke’s chilly, misanthropic parables filtered through Takashi Miike or Park Chan-wook’s “Asian Extreme” sensibility and you’ll have an idea of what to expect from this eerie, compulsively watchable Indonesian thriller about a well-to-do sculptor whose wife forbids him to enter one of the rooms in his house. Several outlandishly gory moments will please Asian genre fans, and a series of Lynchian plot twists will definitely spark discussion.  WS

Franklyn **
Dir Gerald McMorrow w/ Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green. 98 min. Aug 15, 5:30pm.
A fantasy-infused drama that incorporates elements of Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Christopher Nolan’s Following and countless movies about characters with strangely intertwined fates, this British curio falls just shy of its admirably large ambitions. Writer-director McMorrow is slow to reveal what the lives of a suicidal video artist (Green) and a broken-hearted bloke (Control’s Sam Riley) in modern-day London have to do with a parallel tale starring Ryan Phillippe as a masked sleuth in a future-noir city. As is so often the case, matters are most compelling when at their most mysterious, but Franklyn’s ornate visual style almost compensates for the narrative’s lack of substance.  JASON ANDERSON

The Revenant ***
Dir Kerry Prior w/ David Anders, Chris Wylde. 110 min. Zombie Appreciation Night, Aug 16, 9:30pm.
F/X wiz prior (The Lost Boys, Bubbo Ho-Tep) brings gory panache to this bleak comedy that creeps up not to scare its audience so much as unleash a blatant criticism of Bush-era foreign policy. Outclassing their castmates considerably in terms of performance, Anders and Wylde up the ante as — respectively — an undead (and understandably bewildered) US combat casualty and his drug-dealer buddy. Letting loose on LA, the pair turn vigilante, party hard and bicker like no vampires before them. Problems with pacing and overlong chatter are overcome by The Revenant’s surprising weight.  KG

Someone’s Knocking at the Door ***
Dir Chad Ferrin w/ Noah Segan, Andrea Rueda. 80 min. Aug 18, 9:30pm.
A demonic couple who rape their victims to death are loose on campus at a Los Angeles med school in this grindhouse-inspired flick from Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! creator Ferrin. With copious drugs and sex, Someone’s Knocking is like a slasher version of Martin Amis’ Dead Babies — albeit without any literary ambition whatsoever. Grotesque violence keeps thing interesting as the hallucinatory pacing ambles towards the denouement. CHRIS BILTON

Strigoi **
Dir Faye Jackson w/ Catalin Paraschiv, Constantin Barbulescu. 105 min. Aug 17, 9:29pm.
Gore and so-deadpan-it’s-hardly-even-there comedy jar sharply in this tonally challenged British production. Catalin Paraschiv stars as a college graduate who returns to his Romanian village to find a wealthy landowner is dead and that a vampire plague may have broken out. Despite a nice sense of atmosphere, Strigoi is more self-consciously odd than funny, and is hampered further by a dull lead performance by Paraschiv.  WS

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl ****
Dir Naoyuki Tomomatsu, Yoshihiro Nishimura w/ Yukie Kawamara, Takumi Saito. 85 min. Aug 17, 7pm.
It may be a vampire love story, but it ain’t no Twilight. Steeped in zany, ridiculously bloody sight gags from the first scene, this bit of slapstick-grindhouse (grindstick? slaphouse?) from the director of Tokyo Gore Police features possibly the craziest high school on the planet — Japanese kids in blackface, a vampire transfer student, a champion wrist-cutting team and a Dr. Frankenstein–inspired science teacher — and makes for a wickedly entertaining joyride full of ingenious visuals, memorable characters and more arterial spray than a GWAR concert.  CB

The Warlords ****
Dir Peter Chan w/ Jet Li, Andy Lau. 110 min. Aug 16, 3:45pm.
Less action-heavy than works of wuxia pageantry by Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and Tsui Hark, this 19th-century war epic succeeds as a punchy period piece that’s not as far as it initially seems from director Chan’s more intimately scaled contemporary dramas. Li, Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro all make strong showings as warriors whose bonds to each other are tested and eventually destroyed during the bloodiest conflagrations of the Taiping Rebellion. Making its Toronto premiere nearly two years after attaining blockbuster status in the Far East, The Warlords still cuts an impressive swath through otherwise well-trammelled territory.  JA