Stake Land (2010) + The Selling (2011)
Mourir après de toi (2011). Spike Jonze, Simon Cahn. France. 6 min
Bunny the Killer Thing (2011). Joonas Makkonen. Finland. 17 min
STAKE LAND (2010). Jim Mickle. USA. 98 min
Vampires! But new stock. Nothing to do with the Count or boys from New Orleans. A million miles from the Carpenter ones, the good guys and bad guys in Twilight or any appearing in I Am Legend or Blade. They are a new race, absolute excrescence of our own. We'd bet our jugular that they were also ready for ambush in their gutters when McCarthy wrote The Road and Hillcoat filmed it. They are even crueller vampires than in 30 Days of Night. Disgusting. Ragged. Like Zombies. They don't suck, they don't slurp: they slit throats, they use machetes, they squeeze, they yank off and they gut. And they do all this in this fantastic film by Jim Mickle, who was the cameraman for movies such as Pride and Glory or Transamerica. A desperate western, a film set in the woods, an Apocalypse starring marvellous beings of the type that go down killing: Damici, Connor Paolo, Danielle Harris and Kelly McGillis.
THE SELLING (2011). Emily Lou. USA. 95 min
For an estate agent, there is nothing more difficult to sell than a possessed house. When Richard and his partner Dave receive the call from a colleague trying to pass on a house to them that's proving tricky to shift, despite its apparent good condition, they realise straight away that there's something weird going on. When they go to visit the place and start to hear shouts imploring them to leave, doors that open and close, toilets that block and then leak red substances... they realise that they've got a problem on their hands. First work by marathon fan Emily Lou, produced, written by and starring Gabriel Diani who has worked in a comedy duo with Etta Devine (also acting in the film) for many years. This partnership spawned the production company Diani & Devine, responsible for this extremely funny look at the world of houses inhabited by beings from another world (or from this world but not in a hurry to leave it).
