Let the right one in: a five-star movie about adolescence and vampires

Today’s best genre filmmakers need to have a talent for resurrection. Whether the task involves zombies, vampires, gunslingers, ninja nurses or nursing ninjas, it’s never easy to find ways to breathe new life into ideas, tropes and images that are dead tired or just plain dead after so many decades of use and misuse. Now in its third year at the Bloor Cinema, the Toronto After Dark Festival showcases the efforts of the world’s most determined resurrectionists. And while some results are livelier (and bloodier) than others, the fest nevertheless offers a very vital batch of new films.

Appropriately enough, the most arresting of the lot occupies Toronto After Dark’s opening night slot. Already one of the year’s most acclaimed horror films after big festival wins at Sitges, Fantasia and Tribeca, Let the Right One In (*****, pictured; Oct. 17, 7pm) is a story of love, adolescence and vampires that is blessedly free of Stephenie Meyer’s cheap theatrics and romance-novel putrescence. Matters are rather more serious and stylish in Tomas Alfredson’s icy adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel about a lonely, bullied 12-year-old Swede who develops a strong bond with the bloodthirsty girl next door. Undercurrents of sexual confusion, gender flux and good old-fashioned Scandinavian despair give Let the Right One In a grace and a complexity that are all too rare even in contemporary films with gentler dispositions.



If not as consistently compelling, Repo! The Genetic Opera (***; Oct. 18, 8:45pm) also bravely ventures into territory that even genre audiences seldom travel. Directed by Saw franchise vet Darren Lynn Bousman, this rock opera takes it way past 11 with its lurid production design, Bizarroworld casting (never before has a single frame contained Paul Sorvino, Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre and Paris Hilton!) and mystifying plotline about organ repossession and patricidal ambitions. Though the target audience may seem to be those of us who wanted Moulin Rouge to climax with Nicole Kidman’s disembowelment, it’s surprisingly faithful to its operatic antecedents — imagine Rigoletto as performed at the Grand Guignol with Ministry’s Al Jourgenson as musical director.



If you prefer your bloodletting to come without song-and-dance numbers, you will be more than pleased with Tokyo Gore Police (***; Oct. 23, 7pm). A spectacularly disgusting splatter flick by Japan’s Yoshihiro Nishimura, this story of mutant-hunting Tokyo cops steals liberally from the collected works of Shinya Tsukamoto, David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven but goes further into the sick shit than even those miscreants are willing to go.



The same is true of Christopher Denham and his debut feature Home Movie (***; Oct. 23, 9:45pm), comprised of faux-home-vid entries by a perfectly nice couple who slowly realize their kids are thoroughly evil. Denham recharges the character-cam clichés of everything from The Blair Witch Project to [REC] by increasing the acting calibre (Heroes and Near Dark star Adrian Pasdar is terrific as the pops) and upping the nastiness factor considerably.

Next to all that, fest closer I Sell the Dead (***; Oct. 24, 7pm) is bound to seem restrained. Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden (who also co-produced) star as scallywag graverobbers who get in over their soon-to-be-removed heads. With writer-director Glenn McQuaid emulating an earlier strain of the horror comedy, the ghoulish and goofy proceedings could have come straight off the pages of some long-gone EC Comics title.

While horror and suspense are the still-bloody meat and pink potatoes of Toronto After Dark, the fest includes movies that aren’t so easy to categorize — unless, of course, low-budget South American superhero movies qualify as a category. Even if they did, MirageMan (****; Oct. 18, 6:15pm) would count as a superlative example. In this Chilean take on the masked vigilante saga that remains a firm favorite in Hollywood, fleet-footed would-be action hero Marko Zaror dons a blue mask in order to make sure (as the trailer promises) “delinquency is kicked in the face.” Plenty of Ong Bak-inspired action scenes and perfectly judged deadpan humour make me want to see way more of this particular man in tights.



A more low-key kind of genre mash-up takes place in South of Heaven (***; Oct. 22, 9:45pm), an oddball American indie best described as a Poverty Row pastiche due to writer-director J.L. Vara’s penchant for patching together references to ’40s westerns, melodramas and crime pics. The somewhat precious but often inspired air of lunacy is enhanced by the appearance of two players from Hal Hartley’s old posse, Elina Lowensohn and Thomas Jay Ryan and, more mystifyingly, lyrics from songs by The Smiths and The Cure. Might Vara have a goth-rock opera in his future?

Then again, he might have a better time lampooning the pretensions of the indie urbanite hipsters who come under fire in Who Is KK Downey (****; Oct 21, 9:45pm), an enjoyably vicious satire by the wiseassed Montrealers in Kidnapper Films. Readers of last week’s EYE WEEKLY cover story on the aftermath of the JT LeRoy hoax will get the gist of this comedy about two middle-class wannabes who get on the road to fame, fortune and fagina by inventing their own junkie-hustler lit sensation, someone with far more cred than they could ever have. The movie might be Toronto After Dark’s least gory offering, but local scenesters guilty of the foibles so well-skewered on screen will still have something to fear.