Jason goes to Holehead--Day 8

Through a combination of late work and bad traffic, I got to the first night of the festival at the New People Center about 10 minutes late. Once again, if it had been at the Roxie, I would've been there in plenty of time.

Anyway, I got into THE HOUSE OF GOOD AND EVIL right when the married couple Chris and Maggie Conley are buying their house. It's a nice secluded place, where they can start a new life (I learned from talking to friends afterwards that this was after an accident incident of domestic abuse where she had a miscarriage.) The house is maybe too secluded. There's no phone signal. They hardly ever see the neighbor couple. And Maggie is having bad dreams and strange visions. Add to that the fact that Chris is leaving for work (he's a forest firefighter, and is away on training.) So Maggie is all alone with her seclusion...and is not competent enough to start a generator, or ride a bike, or pick up a shoe when it falls off. Apparently had I seen the beginning some of this would have made more sense. As it was I was a little confused and bored. And if it was just me, it would be very unfair of me to say that. But in talking to several friends who were there from the beginning, the consensus seems to be my reaction was appropriate.

And then...more adventures in Holehead Screwups. The film programmed for that time slot--SENGOKU: BLOODY AGENT never arrived (there is apparently only one copy with English subtitles, and the festival that was supposed to forward it to Holehead just...didn't.) So instead we finally got to see BUCK WILD, once they had an actual physical copy of the film. Here's what I said when they tried to play it a week before:

...the copy of the movie never arrived. So we watched a screener--an online screener via Vimeo. And it started out okay, despite poor audio and a watermark across the bottom, it actually looked okay. We met the main characters--a group of young men off on a hunting trip on Buck Wild ranch in Texas. There's the leader, the horny one, the glasses-wearing nerd, and the crazy cousin. And we meet the bad guys--Billy Ray (who we are assured is a bad-ass despite dressing like a gay pimp and speaking in a British accent) and his gang. And we're introduced to the concept of the Chupacabra. And then...the movie freezes up. And we fuck around with getting Vimeo to play it. And we switch to non-HD. And it works some more. The video quality isn't that great, but it's still watchable. And the horny friend is attacked by the Chupacabra-infected ranch owner's daughter. And they accidentally shoot the ranch owner, and the crazy cousin totally non-accidentally drugs the ranger, and the nerd accidentally drives his 4x4 onto Billy Ray's property and...the movie freezes again. And this time they just can't get it to play. So we call it a night. Too bad, because it was looking pretty promising, had a good mix of comedy and horror, and wacky characters that kept your interest even if they were over-the-top, unrealistic, and one-dimensional. But, those are the breaks, and they've become a bit too common at Holehead.

Yup, it looked pretty promising, and ultimately delivered on that promise. I have no idea if SENGOKU was any good (I might never know) but BUCK WILD was a heck of a lot of fun.

Total Running Time: 195 minutes
My Total Minutes: 344,733