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TIFF 2010 Preview: The Wan and The Carpenter Lead Midnight Madness Herd
As the Toronto International Film Festival gradually unveils its programming, we’ll be providing cheat sheets with each major announcement.
Josh Hartnett and Woody Harrelson in Guy Moshe’s Bunraku. Still courtesy of TIFF.
CATEGORY: Midnight Madness, i.e. horror, sci-fi, and all other kinds of aspiring cult films.
HEAVY-HITTERS: For one of the world’s most respected, and sometimes too self-serious film festivals, TIFF offers something refreshing with Midnight Madness. Comparable to Sundance’s Park City at Midnight program (or the currently underway Toronto After Dark Film Festival), Midnight Madness serves up the finest genre movies months before they have a chance to flounder at the box office or get dumped directly to DVD. This year brings in plenty of big talents, including master of horror John Carpenter, who is presenting the world premiere of his latest, The Ward. In the past decade, it seems like Carpenter has been coasting by on the cash generated by recent remakes of his films (Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, etc.), with The Ward marking his first directorial effort since 2001’s much-reviled Ghosts of Mars (which was itself basically a remake of Assault on Precinct 13, except, you know, set on the planet Mars). It’ll be interesting to see if The Ward, a film about a mental hospital patient (model-cum-actress Amber Heard) being tormented by ghosts, will mark a return to form for Carpenter. Then again, the very mention of ghosts leads us to believe it won’t.
Speaking of coasting by on production credits, Saw director James Wan is set to premiere his latest, Insidious, in a Midnight Madness slot. Starring Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, the film sees Wan moving out of the torture porn trappings (no pun intended) of Saw and into the realm of more cerebral, supernatural horror (to wit: one of the film’s working titles was The Astral).
OF NOTE: Also worth checking out is James Gunn’s superhero flick SUPER, which in positing that Rainn Wilson would ever be married to Liv Tyler proves itself a cheeky high-fantasy picture worthy of Midnight Madness. Guy Moshe’s Bunraku, a genre-bending samurai/film noir/Western starring Woody Harrelson, Josh Hartnett and Ron Perlman also premieres at TIFF. The film has a bunch of hype surrounding it, mostly stemming from its extensively detailed Wikipedia entry, which is likely either maintained by a) Guy Moshe or b) one of Guy Moshe’s interns.
EVEN MORE: As previously reported, the Midnight Madness program will kick off September 9 with the premiere of Mike Dowse’s much-anticipated Fubar II.