Violent Delights (2020)

 

Director: Edin Martinez

Screenplay: Edin Martinez

Cast: Ana Paulina Martinez as Alani; Guillermo Zapata as Gabriel; Ernesto Salinas as Javier; Jitzel Galicia as Lizbeth; Paola Hernandez as Claudia; Olivia Adriana Pérez as Vania

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

This was a disappointment. A Mexican made erotic vampire film which plays out as a melodrama in plot, it sounds absolutely to my tastes, and with respect to those involved, shows this at times only to have lost this particular viewer, whilst others may have appreciated its wavelength further. Alani (Ana Paulina Martinez) is a red headed vampire who hooks up and bites on patrons in bars and clubs, connected to another vampire named Gabriel (Guillermo Zapata) she is romantically tied to. He is an older balding lover who has an air of a Satanist even if he was not a vampire, and makes one night stands with younger men potentially more uncomfortable for appearing in the room with nothing below the belt, even when wearing an opened dressing gown, and bringing other women into the room to feed off the blood of.

Alani has her hooks into a young man Javier (Ernesto Salinas) who is an expecting father with his girlfriend Lizbeth (Jitzel Galicia), but it becomes clear Javier and Alani are falling in love much to the anger of their significant others. This is where the melodrama is there, and a thing that I wished had been more prominent through Violent Delights in the end, as whilst Gabriel is a traditional anti-God vampire, he also does not want kids. Even as an immortal vampire, this is something Alani wants. Gabriel instead prefers his theatrical side hobby to children, of an onstage feeding on victims which leaves a lot to be imagined, unless you like languid erotic pawing and reminiscences of Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive (2001), even down to wondering where the singing is coming from.

In a position, of the modern day genre film, of digital filmmaking and its own idiosyncratic chances to be distinct, Violent Delight does at least have its own distinct personality just in its huge emphasis on garish neon colours, but honestly, a lot of my issue with this is that, as a horror drama as Javier is being seduced by Alani, but will lead to a grotesque tragedy, it feels conventional and too serious at times from what the tone would ask for. And it does get grotesque, including a scene which requires a warning involving a foetus being brought to the night's air which is extreme. But barring that this does have a vampire ripping his own skin off, involving a lot of goo and Vaseline, this feel conventional even in terms of its desire to be shocking and upsetting in the final act.

It did feel like by the halfway point, I had drifted off, in mind to this being entirely subjective opinion. There is in the film something distinct to it, even in terms of its enclosed, even claustrophobic settings swallowed in the colour lighting scheme, from apartments to bars, and as an erotic vampire film, which equal opportunity nudity, that in itself even if pure titillation has its own mood setting whatever the type of film and from what era. This is a film whose most prominent scene, and the one which catches you off-guard in a good way, and sets the profane tone off in a way that should have been continued, is when Gabriel is trying to seduce and corrupt Lizbeth 's two female friends. It is not that one is turned into a vampire, wishing to feed off the other, but the joke which comes out of nowhere beforehand involving a clitoris cake of all things. It looks as delicious as it is anatomically accurate, truthfully, and that alongside a vampire ripping his own skin off should have set the tone of the film fully.

Maybe this was the case of being in the wrong mood, but there was a sense that, even when Violent Delights was being transgressive with its finale, in its death and blasphemy and the foetus scene, it was doing something obvious rather than escalating this to a tone I would have liked. The tone comes closer to the 2000s into the 2010s transgressive horror film, in its tone, than the histrionics melodrama this did hint at early on. That type of "edgy" film is not as interesting to me, this production's seriousness to its detriment as embracing a campier side as colourful as the lighting scheme would have won me over.

Piñata: Survival Island (2002)

 

a.k.a. Demon Island

Director: David and Scott Hillenbrand

Screenplay: David and Scott Hillenbrand

Cast: Nicholas Brendon as Kyle; Jaime Pressly as Tina; Eugene Byrd as Doug; Casey Fallo as Monica; Lara Wickes as Lisa; Garrett Wang as Paul; Julia Mendoza as Carmen; Daphne Duplaix as Julie; Nate Richert as Jake; Aeryk Egan as Larry; Tressa DiFiglia as Connie; Robert Tena as Bob; Ed Gale as the Piñata

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Here, in the past, a piñata was not a friendly celebratory object to knock sweets from its fluffy insides. In the back-story setting up this film, a shaman in an ancient village struck with the plague believed it was caused by the villagers sins, and created a clay piñata to seal the curse within, even sealing within its hollow form a freshly sacrificed pig's heart to absorb all the tribe's evil. The most prominent thing for me about this film, even over certain lead cast members, is that the piñata is the creation of the Chiodo Brothers, a trio of siblings (Charles, Stephen and Edward Chiodo) who I know for Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), their directorial horror film which was a production show their craft, from claymation to practical effects, in all its bizarre and wonderful fashion. Known for working on a variety of projects, their creation here is Survival Island's best part, as this sealed object was floated down the river by the villagers, celebrating with a good luck piñata closer to the modern day equivalent was created to celebrate this act. Unfortunately, being a slasher film with a supernatural slant, we know that, in 2001, the bad piñata will be found on an island by a group of bikini and swimming trunk clad young partiers.

On said island, a female sorority and a male fraternity are going face-to-face in a scavenger hunt. Consisting of acquiring as many men's and women's underwear as they can, scattered around, the rules do admittedly make no sense as one sorority and one fraternity member are handcuffed together to collect items, despite them being face to face to get the most undergarments from each other. The prize at least, a cash sum half given to charity but the other half to the winners, is worth the game, but has to be discarded quickly when someone confuses the bad piñata, found in the open, for one of the many tiny modern ones the group have hung off trees full of hotel sized bottles of liquor like tequila. There are enough people here to effectively call them most red shirts, and thus there will be a body count.

Evil or not, you would be pissed off if a guy hit your chest open with a rock and cracked your piñata form open. And whilst piñatas are not a cultural object in Britain, though can be bought in stores like Wilko in a form, it is significant that this premise is what it is though never explored, of a Latin American cultural object of the piñata being involved, an item especially in Mexican culture of significance, and symbolic in Catholicism of a symbol of sins broken by the blindfolded person's faith. With North Americans wandering this island, this could have been even as a lurid slasher movie a work subconsciously about those from the USA's colonial history finding themselves succumbing to a very angry artefact from the landmass' past. However this is a conventional late era slasher, told straight, and I will admit here this was a slasher film where their glee in picking people off felt weird. This is a trait I have always had with slasher films and especially with a gory one like this, where the vicarious pleasure is in very one dimensional archetypes being picked off, and not even in plot. Demon Island as most know it was a frequent visitor to the IMDB Bottom 100 list¹, the worst ever films, and was why I came to this. But it says much of how my tastes are unlike the mainstream and how bad cinema can be from this specific level, in that Survival Island is on a technical level is pretty standard and not the lowest in cinema. Paradoxically it is also not of interest for me in the slightest in terms of entertainment value, always the one who has preferred slasher films for their tangents than their plot tropes, which this has none of and is streamlined of.

Barring the two leads, hand cuffed together briefly and with bad blood over their past relationship, this has little personality for me barring how of the early 2000s this is. Most may know this, if not for its negative reputation, for Nicholas Brendon and Jaime Pressly as these leads, Nicholas Brendon already known for a key role in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV franchise, Jaime Pressly in 2005 reaching prominence as a key role in My Name is Earl, another popular television series. For a film with a ridiculous villain, a piñata demon, this is a dry horror film for me which just goes through the kills and plot beats with not much else, and the CGI used for the character even back then was a terrible decision for how dated it looked already at the time. Credit must be given to this film for one plot trope it swerves on, that the seniors running the game still take it seriously a Bob had been injured, even if the girl involved is ranting of a piñata demon bashing his head, and try to get everyone safely back to camp with intentions to leave. Horror films, let alone slashers, normally do not do this, and it is sad the film was not this smart or going to embrace the silly concept. What you get is the traditions of the slasher with the creation just in the kills, such as testicular trauma or the piñata cheating by pretending to be a normal one hung off a tree.

It cannot stop however that, with not a lot happening beyond the process of death after death, and the skeletal structure of the surviving cast trying to escape the piñata, this is a film which screams for a strange and silly work to have been created for the premise, but never did. This should have been closer to the Chiodo Brothers creation itself, getting the point of their role and making a monster appropriately exaggerated and mean looking even if most of their creation is sidelined with CGI instead. If this does have to be among one of the worst horror films ever made, the sin should be how much wasted potential even with this premise there was.

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1) As of August 17th 2022, Survival Island is no longer on the list. Its existence on there can be evidenced however in a review like the following, for Misan[trope]y, written on October 20th 2014 in a series of reviews about IMDB Bottom 100 denizens.

Yellow Cat (2020)

 

Director: Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Screenplay: Inna Smailova and Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Cast: Azamat Nigmanov as Kermek; Kamila Nugmanova as Eva; Sanjar Madi as Zhambas; Yerzhan Zhamankulov as Bozoy; Yerken Gubashev as Baldyr; Arslan Akubaev as Kubych

Ephemeral Waves

 

Buy the balloon. You have money.

In the middle of nowhere, in Kazakhstan's countryside, so silent there is not even non-diegetic music, Kermek (Azamat Nigmanov ) tries to get a job at a diner by the road. His only credentials for the work is being part of the construction battalion in the army, and being able to act out whole scenes from Le Samourai (1967), with the claim he looks like Alain Delon. Even when he becomes a security guard, he is also an ex-con whose cop relation challenges the choice on those grounds, forcing from his hands a safe life. In the middle of modern Kazakhstan, where there are phones, Wi-Fi and Bruce Lee t-shirts, this environment is still isolated to the point, as in any country, you would go strange from living within it long enough, and the cop is clearly crooked, working with a crime boss in this place and effectively forcing Kermek to join their goon squad in collecting money from people.

Yellow Cat, until more seriousness comes it as the plot goes on, is very deadpan, set in a multi-cultural world even in the middle of nowhere, of arguments that German tiles are superior to Czeck ones for house building, and the Le Samourai references, apparently shown on television in this world when Kermek grew up, which makes me personally glad I was finally able to see that Jean-Pierre Melville film when Criterion finally made it available in the United Kingdom at some point and be able to appreciate the references here. Whilst a lot of the humour is openly dead pan, Yellow Cat has these idiosyncratic cinema references as a French co-production. This does indeed, from director /co-writer Adilkhan Yerzhanov, feel like a pastiche of crime films from abroad, the plot line, and even that Kermek is very much a simplistic man in his own world, seen many times before. The story is timeless too however, able to be told in many different ways, which is why we retell these stories, especially here as for a film which ends bittersweet, Yellow Cat also embraces the absurd, as goons cannot stop a man with a shotgun and a trampoline he can leap on, as high as a storage container, able to keep them off for a short while.

The story told many times before is also that Kermek will find love with another lost soul, even if theirs will be a tragic one, in this case meeting Eva (Kamila Nugmanova), a young woman forced in sex work by a madam, but off in her own clouds, with vibrant red hair, blue dress and vibrant smile. She has also seen Le Samourai, if like Kermek snippets as neither may have seen the whole film. Truthfully, even if one of the henchmen on his side includes a man obsessed with Robert De Niro, quoting Casino (1995) and Taxi Driver (1976), Kermek really wants to build a movie theatre in the mountains like an amateur Fitzcarraldo (1982), with Eva an assistant when she is not travelling the world, a match made in heaven. Love, humanity and asking what Alain Delon would do, in the middle of trying to get money from someone who has not paid, leads to Kermek popping the cop in both hands, taking half of the money from the person they were meant to collect from, and fleeing.

This is a world where an evil crime boss appears on an electric scooter, in the middle of the countryside freeway, for a dispute, but Yellow Cat's narrative does becomes more tragic, as the cracks of a sadder reality intermingle with the humour and brightness, a brightness so clear between Kermek and Eva even non-diegetic music starts to appear in their lives. This is mind to a story, as it goes, we learn Eva was raped by her step father when a child, and forced into sex work, and that like many crime stories, stealing from the criminals to get a happy life does not usually end well at all. Even in this deadpan comedy, it is about people in the middle of nowhere, forced into these scenarios, trying to survive, and Adilkhan Yerzhanov manages with this to succeed, as it is clear Yerzhanov is referring to cinema's history as much in mind to them as a medium of escape which also reflect reality, both in films themselves and we viewing them as viewers. This is both in the references to crime films of the past, and in how the ending also includes an abrupt performance of content from Singing in the Rain (1952) in the middle of deserted landscape. I hope as much, when there is a scene of the leads buying a red balloon from a man trying to sell it for money, it is a reference to Albert Lamorisse's legendary 1956 short film The Red Balloon, considering the film references throughout.

The fleeting moments of playfulness, the cops accidentally shooting each other, or the robot monkey toy laid by two people dead/injured on the floor, eventually contrast the bleak reality of the situation, but contrasted by its vibrant colour, of the Kazakhstan landscape or details like the poster yellow car --- and Eva use for their fleeing, Yellow Cat manages to have a perfect balance which makes it work perfectly. Sadly, a film like this, among many world cinema productions, will be lost in the shuffle without greater attention, a shame as this, for a true compliment, feels like the type of films I saw from the 2000s era getting into world cinema. That era of films from Tartan Film and Artificial Eye, whose unpredictability and whose use of tropes as here led a sense of creativeness to cinema for the better, can be felt throughout Yellow Cat, and it comes with recommendation as a result for this.

Invasion from Inner Earth (1974)

 

Director: Bill Rebane

Screenplay: Barbara J. Rebane

Cast: Paul Bentzen as Stan; Debbi Pick as Sarah; Nick Holt as Jake; Karl Wallace as Eric; Robert Arkens as Andy; Arnold Didrickson as Sam

Ephemeral Waves

 

People running in the streets, red smoke in the Wisconsin woodland, and pie plate UFOs belie what Invasion from Inner Earth actually is. About an alien illness decimating the Earth's population, and likely alien involvement too, the UFOs themselves are never explained or become directly involved. Instead, quite soon into the film, we enter the snowy woodlands into a conversation about growing up and getting married between an adult brother and sister living in isolation.

In-between a main theme re-appropriated for Lady Street Fighter (1981) and weird seventies trippy effects being seen occasionally, what the film actually is involves referencing film and genre film critic Kim Newman's observation, from Arrow Video's blu ray set Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection. In his appreciation of Bill Rebane, even Newman expressed reluctance with Invasion from Inner Earth as a "difficult" film to watch, where he suggests in comparison what happens when community theatre interconnected with these types of independent genre films made for drive-ins in this period. Invasion from the Inner Earth is a drama first, a lot of talking about the end of the world, where travelling inland, the brother and his male friends by a small plane are blissfully unaware of what has transpired with the world and an alien plague, beginning their own journey and the death of those close even when they travel back to isolation at home.

Beyond this, with the exception of an ominous glowing red light, their story including his sister is a lot of conversation which is not connected to a progression of events or fleshing the characters out. Barring a stint with a small personal airplane, most of the production is told in rooms with dialogue talking about the apocalyptic tale. As a result, and unlike a BBC Quatermass production from the fifties, which worked around budgetary limitations and had Nigel Kneale as a screenwriter of considerable talent, this is a sluggish film to watch, the comparison apt if against this theatrical film's disfavour. It is about its subject in how it is talked of, not of showing it, and yet the dialogue is closer to a film here you would get gratuitous UFO sightings even if the pie tins on string, rather than occasionally. It feels a chamber piece that is felt severely of its length, and it is damning to say that even next to the feature film Bill Rebane made before, the infamous Monster A-Go Go (1965) that Herschell Gordon Lewis put the unfinished footage together of, that film hailed as one of the worst ever made was far more easier to watch.

This has its quirks, mood boosters that show reward for truly patient. A strange gag about Channel 9's Post Terminus, because even in the post-apocalypse, where UFOs and alien diseases exist, local TV shows with a host in a Butlin's red jacket still exist, where testimonies on being picked up by aliens are recounted before the show gets frazzled off the air. There is a freak-out psychedelic moment where a plane explodes, and we see a radio DJ losing his mind in his recording booth, believing he is the last living person and speaking out into the perceived void on air. Also, the ending is weird, about the last two actual people, a man and a woman, being reborn as kids, which is not a spoiler as it really does not make sense at all in context.

Most of the film however will be unbearable for people. I see what the point is, a group in the isolated snow covered woods of Wisconsin experiencing the loneliness and paranoia when the world ends, but it feels like the aforementioned Quatermass concept without the shine and character building of those work. It is a concept instead made into the most lethargic possible of tones and with clear improvisation, one character entirely the MVP because Bill Rebane let him, as the likable joker and potential love interest to the sister character, ab-lib silly voices. My younger self would have not gotten through this film; now, I watched this as a pleasingly lacksidasical curiosity, but one I cannot recommend with significant caution over.

Out of Time (1988)

 

Director: Robert Butler

Screenplay: Brian Alan Lane, John J. Sakmar and Kerry Lenhart

Cast: Bruce Abbott as Channing Taylor; Bill Maher as Maxwell Taylor; Rebecca Schaeffer as Pam Wallace; Kristian Alfonso as Cassandra Barber; Leo Rossi as Ed Hawkins; Ray Girardin as Capt. Krones; Adam Ant as Richard Marcus

Ephemeral Waves

 

One among many feature length television pilots to shows that never came to be, Out of Time instead exists just as an NBC TV movie, one which never became the series it intended to be, and opens up with matte shots of a cyberpunk state in 2088. Thermo vision/night vision glasses are standard for police, looking like a pair of 3D paper glasses, in a world where there was a nuclear ban in 2012 and police work has changed radically to using technology and cerebral methods of stopping crime. Unfortunately, the great grandfather of Channing Taylor (Bruce Abbott), the man who innovated this new policing system and is held as a divine figure in police work named Maxwell Taylor (Bill Maher), is a shadow whose weight it too heavy for Channing. Channing is also a classic cop who shots first and asks questions later, now as a result in this different world a a "departmental hemorrhoid" suspended for not living up to a grandfather who was more careful in his police work. When trying to catch Richard Marcus, who in the many curious casting choices here is played by Adam Ant of all people, he first is suspended, then when Marcus is found having tried to acquire experimental time travel technology, Channing tracks him down and ends up back in 1988 as a result trying to find his man.

The cast is one of the most prominent aspects of the entire production. Born Stuart Goddard, Adam Ant's music went over in the USA, but here in Britain, a certain age group will have to think of songs like Prince Charming and Stand and Deliver, will know him as a musical icon at one point, and may not known Ant went into acting. Channing as our lead, who will be transported from 2088 to 1988 by a time machine Adam Ant wants to use for nefarious leads, is Bruce Abbott, who most know in cult circles for Re-Animator (1985), and his grandfather Maxwell is Bill Maher, an actor-comedian who would go on to be a political pundit, in hindsight a strange choice for a geeky put-upon cop his own colleagues laugh at, also played like a frankly sexist man who will use the sci-fi x-ray glasses on a woman's clothes, and is meant to be the underdog promoting non-violent and cerebal policing techniques.

Leaving behind a girlfriend, an NBC news reporter, for the past, Channing is going to effectively play out Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) of a future person being befuddled by the then modern world. That when there was the Big Library Fire in his timeline, with books a rare possession, and 107 Stephen King books having been written, suddenly he returns to 1988 where a library exists. Plutonium batteries from the future are naturally unavailable and even pre-marital sex and cigarettes baffle Channing. Honestly, barring the sombre finale, where it becomes clear he will not see his girlfriend far in the future, Out of Time does pad its length with a light comedy tone which for some will not be that interesting, unless you look at this as another curiosity of weird television premises. There was an obsession with cop shows in particular, over decades, in having cops' souls transmogrify into British bulldogs, cops who can grow toys with their dead son's souls in them really big, or serious cop shows which are also musicals, all examples of real premises and pilots which came to be, coming off as attempts to refresh a genre which on television was recycled greatly. Watching more of these, I wish a new program existed that remade all these premises within it in the same world. The grandson from the future is apt among the same police division, even if in its original context of Out of Time, some will find it a sluggish production.

It is a work whose sci-fi tropes are also clearly worked around by setting it in 1988, jettisoning most of all the opening quarter barring the sci-fi guns. The one aspect which tries to fit its sci-fi premise are some of its odder techniques in editing, especially with the time travel, where the screen distorts and shakes for long periods at a time as if, having to view this from a VHS rip, the version a viewer may see effected the content unintentionally. It is trippy, and it is the one aspect to a conventional narrative, in the end, of a nerd cop and a future cop left partially dim-witted in the past which plays out very conventionally. Even that Adam Ant is here, a flamboyant factor as an English musician dressed as if he should be in Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985) does not really stand out, and only a sombre ending, involving a copy of Shakespeare's' Sonnets with a torn page which will travel through time, which does have a surprising level of tragedy to it, has anything which stands out as strong or distinct here. The TV movie exists as a fascinating curiosity, but as that, one which managed to get even a British VHS release, but is an obscurity nowadays.

Whether it could have lead to a good series or not is up-in-the-air, though there is sadly a grim reality at hand that the romantic female lead, Rebecca Schaeffer, would be killed by a stalker a year after this premiered in 1989, which adds an uncomfortable "what if" to history that is to be discretely ignored.  As it stands, there was the true likelihood, in one reality, Out of Time would have still been cancelled after one season, as unless more science fiction tropes were brought in, the time travel machine is erased as a quantity by the end of this pilot, with only the idea of Maxwell beginning to design the technology his great-grandson Channel would use, as well as find his true brave self, the last semblance of the prologue. Again, so many of these types of productions exist, were never successful, and end up fished off of YouTube and VHS rips, and with only speculation to consider, just from this one entry, it is watchable but a production which is, to use one word, "okay" with all the average connotations that suggest.

Cosmos (1996)

 

Directors: Jennifer Alleyn, Manon Briand, Marie-Julie Dallaire, Arto Paragamian, André Turpin and Denis Villeneuve

Screenplays: Marie-Julie Dallaire and Sebastien Joannette (segment "The Individual"); Denis Villeneuve (segment "The Technetium")

Cast: Igor Ovadis as Cosmos; Marie-Hélène Montpetit as Yannie (segment: Boost); Pascal Contamine as Joel (segment: Boost); Marie-France Lambert as Fanny (segment: Jules & Fanny); Alexis Martin as Jules (segment: Jules & Fanny); Stéphane Crête as Antoine (segment: Jules & Fanny); Sebastien Joannette as L'individu (segment: L'individu); Eve Gadouas as La jeune fille dans le corridor (segment: L'individu); David La Haye as Morille (segment: Le Technétium); Audrey Benoit as Nadja, l'animatrice (segment: Le Technétium); Carl Alacchi as Tekno (segment: Le Technétium); Marc Jeanty as Janvier (segment: Cosmos & Agriculture); Gabriel Gascon as Crépuscule (segment: Aurore & Crépuscule); Sarah-Jeanne Salvy as Aurore

Ephemeral Waves

 

I told you. Everything started with agriculture.

Most will come to Cosmos, unless you are well versed in Canadian and French Canadian cinema, because this is an anthology work with Denis Villeneuve very early in his career among the list of directors. A list of what segments are what is wiser to have ahead of time, as instead of a traditional segment followed by a segment structure, these all interlink around Greek-Canadian cab driver Cosmos (Igor Ovadis), whose work intertwines the stories. These are: Boost by Manon Briand; Jules & Fanny by André Turpin; L'Individu by Marie-Julie Dallaire; Le Technétium, which is Denis Villeneuve's entry; Aurore et Crépuscule, by Jennifer Alleyn; and Cosmos & Agriculture, Cosmos' own segment by Arto Paragamian.

All shot in monochrome, there is many segments which juggle between each other in priority. For the most part, the set up focuses on most of them, the last two mentioned being introduced much later into the film. Le Technétium's lead, a filmmaker named Morille (David La Haye), is drinking espresso after espresso in a cafe, hesitant before an interview for an art television show as he writes about cinema and war, so on edge he is even adding chemical stimulants to the caffeine, enough for the female cafe staff member to ask, frankly, whether he is planning to fuck a gorilla. Cosmos, an older cab driver of Greek heritage, is the interlocking titular figure, who crosses paths with all. That includes the film director Morille; that includes a man with flowers from L'Individu, the vaguest of the narratives as he may be the man killing young women across town and leaving flowers with the bodies after he also molests them; a lawyer named Fanny (Marie-France Lambert), from Jules & Fanny, involved with a legal dispute; and Cosmos helps jumpstart the car Yannie (Marie-Hélène Montpetit) has acquired for a friend, by jumpstarting the battery, who is in a depressed mood.

Barring L'Individu, which feels so much grimmer as a premise to the rest of the segments, and has no real resolution, with a trip in an underground parking complex which was apparently installed near Hel with the noises on the soundtrack, Cosmos whilst having serious moments is much lighter in tone. Some of it is serious, but a lot is lighter hearted, more openly humorous and playful as character pieces. The filmmaker is traumatised by thoughts of Cambodia and war, especially of the woman dear in his life connected to his work on the film on this, but his story is one of the more absurd tales. With Cosmos once in the militia and offering a discount haircut at $15 because he likes him, the interview is at Tekno's Hair Shop, an underground television show which, ran by Tekno (Carl Alacchi), is more interesting about styling the guests' hair even against their will, and talking about the products used on camera than Morille's art. That is until Morille snaps and threatens someone by shaving his or her hair off.

Julian ("Jules") (Alexis Martin) is helping a deaf woman in a court case, whilst pontificating with Antoine (Stéphane Crête), one of the staff at the hotel he is at, about a dream he had about atoms being made of energy, and matter, alongside being chased by hit men. That is until he bumps into Fanny, an old girlfriend and the lawyer against his client in the case, offering him to see her newly acquired breast implants if he deliberately sabotages translating his client in court. There is Yannie and her male friend Joel (Pascal Contamine), in the segment Boost, the later gay and hinting at a serious medical fear he is waiting on, such as a HIV test result, the car Yannie has acquired evoking nostalgia for him and to try to help in this extremely stressful moment as they bond.

The two segments that come later are Aurore et Crépuscule, Aurore (Sarah-Jeanne Salvy) a twenty year old girl who, because her boyfriend did not bother to get to a theatrical performance on time, finds herself bonding with a significantly older man named Crépuscule (Gabriel Gascon). This episode does not get into an uncomfortable territory, the cliché of older men wooing a younger woman, even if there is a romantic chemistry; that cliché for me is only a problem in that they ended up being a trope especially in Hollywood cinema, a fantasy and a casting cliché of always having older male actors with a newer and significantly younger female star with them just to be the love interest. For me, any spring-winter relationship regardless of the genders of those involved should not be viewed as wrong in a story or real life, when at least here, it is a chemistry between two people, not becoming sexual, where they get to bond and having a friendship for one night even if with an undercurrent of flirting. It is a huge credit to the leads, and it is to note, in mind to what I have said, that this is a segment by one of the female directors, so I would not be surprised if Jennifer Alleyn came with this possessing far more nuance in tackling the subject than a fantasy. Cosmos & Agriculture is a great send off to the feature, in which two bank robbers steal Cosmos' taxi cab for a getaway vehicle whilst he is with a friend and fellow cabbie, one pontificating that the world's ills, whilst also a good thing, can be blamed as far back as to when the species developed agriculture. The car chase that ensures is a fun comedic short.

Out of all of them, you can see Denis Villeneuve at his beginning, as the final breakdown for Morille involves the kind of distortion of the screen which evokes the styles he would change between, but truthfully, alongside other segments for me being far more interesting, all baring the one involving a potential serial killer were interesting. Like a good anthology, it is a variety and for me, I am more forgiving for this genre for seeing the idiosyncratic tones and styles at hand, here deliberately existing in the same world and tone perfectly, all Canadian filmmakers showing their skills and the anthology altogether being of worth. Villeneuve's career out of all of them managed to become that of a Hollywood filmmaker, but one who managed to keep his own style.

Jennifer Alleyn is an artist, filmmaker, writer and photographer, so whilst her filmography from this is smaller, she works in multiple art forms. The filmography of Manon Briand is smaller sadly, but she had started before Cosmos in filmmaking up to Liverpool (2012). Marie-Julie Dallaire works more in documentaries, such as Big Giant Wave (2020), but was a Second Unit Director on Villeneuve's own Arrival (2016). Arto Paragamian's filmography sadly only has two films and this segment as a director, but they are working to this day still. André Turpin became a director, but is more prolific as a cinematographer, for the likes of Denis Villeneuve early in his career, but especially for Xavier Dolan, a big name in Canadian art cinema. He was also cinematographer on Playmobil: The Movie (2019), because why not end this review, recommending Cosmos, on something tonally alien but yet befitting. That all these figures worked on this collaborative effort, all work in a variety of areas from then on, and all of them work, be it toy tie-in animated films to Denis Villeneuve ending up directing sequels to Blade Runner and a reboot of Frank Herbert's Dune. In itself, like all anthologies, you can also see the way cinema works in all the fascinating tangents everyone here ended up within as they continued.