Blunt feast
Viva la Cinemuerte International Fantastic Film Festival!

By Johnny Ray Huston

YET ANOTHER INTERNATIONAL film festival is coming to town. You know what that means: Time for more challenging tales of hope and survival from around the globe. Time for more splintered boards piercing eyeballs and jugular veins being pulled licorice-style from open necks. Time for more underwater battles between sharks, zombies, and topless female scuba divers. Time for more glowing Cadillacs that descend from the sky, more synchronized dance numbers on escalators, more kaleidoscopic drug-drag orgy sequences. Time for more images of heads being trampled by stampeding horses and people being sewn up within the carcasses of recently slaughtered bulls. Time for more flaming nuns.

If such scenes don't sound like typical triumphs of the human spirit, that's because they come from movies in the Cinemuerte International Fantastic Film Festival. Originating in Vancouver, where it recently celebrated a fifth birthday – you could say it's now old enough to massacre its kindergarten playmates – Cinemuerte is the twisted brainchild of Kier-La Janisse, a video store employee whose horror passions have mutated from Scooby-Doo monsters to Hammer (the film studio, not the rapper) to Dario Argento and beyond over the years. The San Francisco version of Cinemuerte turns two this week. It's ready to step out of its diapers and grab a switchblade. Brace yourself: it may be small, but it knows how to jolt you.

The festival's origins stem partly from Janisse's previous project, a magazine called Cannibal Culture that branched out from initial Italian horror terrain to explore art obscurities and very specific themes (one issue contained essays on deformed-baby films and samurai-parenting films). "People who read it would say, 'This is great, except we can never see any of the movies you're talking about,' " Janisse explains. "Vancouver is very different from San Francisco in that there are no repertory houses here." Kicking off with a screening of Janisse's favorite Argento film, Deep Red, Cinemuerte's first incarnation in 1999 was an especially low-budget affair: "The festival started really small, at a microcinema that houses 100 people and only plays 16mm film VHS video. It was a hack job – but everyone loved it."

As Cinemuerte grew, Janisse was able to move it to another venue and invite guests such as Jörg Buttgereit and Udo Kier; the 2003 Vancouver fest featured an appearance by John Saxon, best known for his roles in Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street (he's the cop father figure) and Argento's Tenebrae. Janisse's tastes and Cinemuerte's film roster have tested the geographical and stylistic boundaries of genre definition; recently, she's highlighted Spain and Scandinavia more often than well-known horror havens such as Japan and Italy. This year is the first that the word horror is absent from the fest's name, replaced by fantastic. "The big complaint that I get from people is that the films I program aren't even horror movies," Janisse says with a laugh.

Janisse views the smaller San Francisco version of Cinemuerte as a kind of "reward"; cocurated by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts film programmer Joel Shepard, it gives her a break from funding and piloting an entire film festival primarily on her own. Her favorite movie among this year's S.F. edition might be Alucarda, a 1975 tale of fierce female bonding and satanic possession in a Mexican convent. Alucarda builds to pyrotechnic displays similar to Carrie- and The Fury-era De Palma. Beginning with the sound of a baby crying, the film boasts an unusually high quota of (on-screen) shrieks per minute. "I just love women who scream intensely," Janisse says. "My favorite subgenre might be films about completely unbalanced women – that's why I love [Michael Haneke's] The Piano Teacher."

Abandoned by her mother at infancy, Alucarda's title character has issues. She wastes no time forging blood ties with beautiful females: one minute after "Hello," she's posing questions such as "Do you know how small creatures love each other?" and demanding, "You must love me to death!" Needless to say, suspicion and hysteria soon follow. Directed by Juan López Moctezuma, Alucarda is the more linear of two films by Alejandro Jodorowsky associates in 2003's Cinemuerte. The other ricochets nicely off the name of Janisse's fest: Fernando Arrabal's 1972 Viva la muerte is an extremely disturbed variation of the 400 Blows boy-alone strain of European art film, tracing the hallucinatory misadventures of a 12-year-old in Franco's fascist Spain. Part Bosch and part bosh (to paraphrase Jonathan Rosenbaum), the coming-of-age narrative in Arrabal's film is less refined than that of Víctor Erice's similarly horror-haunted anti-Franco masterpiece Spirit of the Beehive, and its scatological protests haven't dated as well as those found in Juan Goytisolo's banned fiction from the same era. Still, for fans of Jodorowsky's blunt(ed) surrealism, Viva la muerte is a must-see.

For all those who've been craving another Egyptian feast catered by Fuad Ramses, Cinemuerte serves up the decades-later sequel to 1963's "almost mentally retarded" (as Shepard puts it) Blood Feast; featuring a cameo by John Waters, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat – note to Prince: what do u think of that title? – marks the directorial return of gutsy trailblazer Herschell Gordon Lewis. Shepard has also selected a new print of Lucio Fulci's 1979 Zombie, which stars Mia Farrow's unhealthy-looking sister Tisa. (The zombie-shark battle mentioned earlier comes from Fulci's movie: apparently unsatisfied with ripping off both George Romero and I Walked with a Zombie, he decided to throw in a Creature from the Black Lagoon-meets-Jaws sequence as well.)

A case could be made that Cinemuerte's scariest offering isn't even a horror film. Menahem Golan's The Apple is a pop musical odyssey that makes Xanadu seem butch and Tommy seem subtle. Made in 1980 but set in the future – 1994, to be precise – The Apple opens at the Worldvision Song Contest (a fictional variant of the Eurovision contest that introduced ABBA), as evil pop svengali Mr. Boogalow plots U.S. domination with the help of a glam anthem titled "Do the BIM." Golan's vision of futurism involves sparkly G-strings, see-through suitcases (how chic), monorails, and a hyper onslaught of songs with lyrics that have to be heard to be believed. "It's such an inept, interesting film," Shepard says. "It's so layered, and you start feeling sorry for the people in it. It has a biblical subtext and a gay subtext. And like the best exploitation films, you can't tell what's intentional and what isn't."