North Bend Film Festival Reviews: Cryptozoo, Tailgate, and Superior
By: Joseph Perry (Twitter - Uphill Both Ways Podcast)
Fans of hand-drawn animation (a rarity these days in the time of computer-generated animation), cryptozoology, and/or trippy cinema should find plenty to enjoy in writer/director Dash Shaw’s Cryptozoo. The 1960s-set film focuses on drama and such social messages as capitalism and the exploitation of animals and nature, but there is plenty of intrigue as as the owner (voiced by Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks fame) of the titular haven for every kind of mysterious or mythological creature from winged horses to a kraken and the conservationist who helps collect cryptids for safekeeping there (voiced by Lake Bell) find themselves pitted against military forces who want to use the crytpids’ powers for psychological warfare purposes as both sides try to track down the dream-eating baku.
The animation is splendid, the story is ambitious, and the voice acting cast members — which also include Michael Cera and Peter Stormare, among many others — all do a terrific job of bringing the multilayered characters to life. It’s a fantastical tale of monsters and misunderstood creatures, and the humans who either love, misunderstand, or hate them, or want to use them for their own nefarious purposes. It’s a wild 95-minute head trip that is well worth the ride.
Prepare for a lot of fingernail chewing and hand wringing while you watch the Dutch/Belgian thriller Tailgate (Bumperkleef; 2019). Writer/director Lodewijk Crijns has crafted a doozy of a road rage chiller that takes a scathing look at toxic masculinity as it pits a hot-headed jerk of a husband and father named Hans (Jeroen Spitzenberger) against the calmly demeanored but quite deadly older driver Ed (Willem de Wolf). Ed followed the rules of the road, making Hans angry, and when Ed asks for an apology, Hans refuses. Viewers already knows from the beginning of the film what Ed is capable of, and that Han’s ego is setting his family — which includes his wife Diana (Anniek Pheifer) and two very young daughters (Roosmarijn van der Hoek and Liz Vergeer, who are excellent in conveying their characters’ fear) up for a terrifying, deadly time.
The adult protagonists are not easy to root for — it’s the two daughters that most viewers will really hope survive the ordeal — and they make some idiotic decisions, but how many horror or thriller films don’t have something of that ilk? Crijns wrings maximum suspense out of his set-up, and there is a rather slow-motion but highly effective car chase through a neighborhood that firmly sets the film in Dutch territory in more ways than one.
Director Erin Vassilopoulos’ Superior blurs the line between drama and thriller — with plenty of humor sprinkled throughout — as the lives of its identical twin sister protagonists morph into each others’. Wild child Marian (Alessandra Mesa, who cowrote the screenplay with Vassilopoulos) visits her straight-laced twin Vivian (Ani Mesa) for the first time in six years when she runs away from her abusive husband Robert (Pico Alexander). Marian is dishonest about why she is at her sister’s home and what she has been up to for all that time, and when the two swap identities so that Marian can blow off her new job at an ice cream stand, things get uneasy for both sisters and for viewers.
It’s pretty easy to guess where things are going early on with Superior, but getting there is more than half the fun as the Mesa sisters give superb performances and Vassilopoulos sets up plenty of funny moments and creepy possibilities before the tension of the third act takes hold. If you ever wanted to trade places with someone else to escape your either awful or awfully dull life, Superior will make you think twice about that decision.
Cryptozoo, Tailgate, and Superior screen as part of North Bend Film Festival, which ran from July 15–18, 2021.
Magnolia Pictures will release Crytpozoo everywhere on August 20. Tailgate premieres in the U.S. in theatrical venues and on Virtual Cinema, VOD, and Digital on July 30, and on DVD from Film Movement on August 3.
Joseph Perry is one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast (whenitwascool.com/up-hill-both-ways-podcast/) and Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast (decadesofhorror.com/category/classicera/). He also writes for the film websites Diabolique Magazine (diaboliquemagazine.com), Gruesome Magazine (gruesomemagazine.com), The Scariest Things (scariesthings.com), Ghastly Grinning (ghastlygrinning.com), and Horror Fuel (horrorfuel.com), and film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope (videoscopemag.com) and Drive-In Asylum (etsy.com/shop/GroovyDoom).
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