[SShaw]

The Infinite Man

Fantasia 2014 seems to be the year of the time-travel film (the previous night had already seen the screening of Predestination). Australia's The Infinite Man follows the efforts of Dean a control-freak who tries to create the perfect anniversary for his girlfriend by recreating their perfect holiday of the year before. Unfortunately everything goes pear-shaped from the get-go as the hotel where they plan to stay has closed down. Things go from bad to worse when his girlfriends ex, Terry, turns up and attempts to win her back. Fortunately Dean is a physicist and cobbles together a time travel machine that ail allow him to travel back in time and iron out the bugs in his plan.

The Infinite Man manages to do something quite different with its Groundhog Day setup. Rather than becoming a lightweight rom-com it takes a sharp right turn onto a much bleaker darker side road. By retelling each scene repeatedly from the perspective of each character (and this being a time travel film from the point of view of each character multiple times) the film fully explores the possibilities of time travel paradoxes to do something that is wholly original. Predestination will probably go on to be the more successful film at the box-office but it is The Infinite Man that is the more deserving film. Now if I could just find a limbic helmet perhaps I could do something about that.

A Knife With Legs

Micro-budget feature A knife with legs is a film that defies classification. Bennet Jones, who seems to have had a hand in every production department, plays European popstar Bene. The film opens with Bene awaiting an assassin (whose faux French pronunciation S-S-N leads to much confusion later in the story) in a Los Angeles apartment. His life has come to a crashing stop after his girlfriend, and backing singer, Baguette is killed by a suicide bomber and to compound his troubles he has become the subject of a Fatwa.

Told with crude animation and video footage A knife with legs, is an energetic surreal stream-of-consciousness that transcends its technical limitations to find considerable humour in its limited plot. It is a film that will divide its audience into a majority who will switch off after a few minutes and a (very small) minority who will give themselves fully to the absurdity of the film and its songs. Whether this minority will be large enough to justify a cult tag and a home video release remains to be seen. I hope so, because I for one need to see this film again.

Goal of the Dead

Alban Lenoir is a seasoned football player who after nearly 20 years returns to Caplongue, his small provincial hometown, with his Olympique de Paris teammates for a cup game. But in a doping scandal that is likely to make quite different headlines, his former childhood friend and the oppositions star player has been given a chemical enhancement that has transformed him into a vomiting zombie. Patient zero, or should that be Player Zero, infects his fellow teammates and the hostile home supporters leading to the zombie apocalypse. In a series of sub-plots Sam assembles his own team (the young star forward of Olympique Paris and his unscrupulous manager, the teams coach, his estranged father, a reporter with whom he shared a moment at a previous game, three old friends and a 17 year old girl) who must work together to survive the Zombieapocalypse.

Originally released as two separate movies in France, Goal of the Dead combines the directorial efforts of Benjamin Rocher and Thierry Poiraud into a buttock numbing single feature of 140 minutes. Borrowing heavily from Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead for both its narrative structure and much of its tone the film manages to crowbar almost every imaginable horror cliche into the plot, but it does so with a style and wit. It's a film not without problems, a lack of focus, too much plot and that near two and a half hour running time but it manages to do just enough to create a near perfect midnight festival horror film.