The Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre Festival 2016 - Preview

The Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre "Festival internacional de cine de terror, fantástico y bizarro" (its full name) will have its 17th edition from October 27th to November 6th 2016 at the Multiplex Lavalle in the beautiful Argentinian capital. JoRafCinema will be proud to follow it for a couple of days, our first festival outside of Europe, and here is a short preview about the festival. As usual all the movies we see there will be reviewed on this blog and we will post a summary article at the end of the Festival.

We first learned about this Festival thanks to the useful Wikipedia page collecting the film Festivals of the World and of South America in particular, and we mentioned it in the Festival overview of our fourth anniversary Article.

The poster for the 17th edition of the Festival.

The website of the Festival is the following: http://rojosangre.quintadimension.com/
In particular the schedule has been revealed very recently, as can be found under this link: http://rojosangre.quintadimension.com/2.0/programacion/ or summarized in the table below.

Timetable for the 17th edition of the Festival.

On the timetable one can notice the various categories of Recent Releases, International and Ibero-American Competitions, Bizarre movies, Documentaries, Shorts as well as some retrospectives.
A few notes about the movies presented during the days we will be present. In the International competition:

• Daylight's End seems like a relatively big American production, could be easy to watch, and it stars Lance Henriksen from Alien!
• The Polono-American Embers could be nice with its story of amnesic post-apocalyptic World
• The Canadian Let her Out could deliver some Cronenbergian flesh horror
• Tonight she comes looks like a classic Slasher
• Cold Moon is a thriller with Christopher Lloyd (from Back to the Future and Piranha 3D)
• Peelers and Bad Blood appear from their trailers to be cheaper gore flicks that I will avoid
• The story of the Swiss Origin has a taste of Flatliners
• The Argentinian La Valija de Benavidez is the only Hispanic-speaking movie that we can see in this selection
• The Japanese Karate Kill (with some American actors) could be entertaining
• I can't seriously miss the Austrian Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies!!
• The Filipino The Entity (Nilalang in OV) features the Japanese porn actress Maria Ozawa. 'nuf said.

In the Recent Releases:

• The Italian My Little Sister looks cheap (better watch again the excellent Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot)
• You should already know what I think about the health of the French Genre to which Revenge belongs...
• The trailer of the Canadian The Northlander reminds me a bit of Bone Tomahawk, Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising and The 13th Warrior. Unfortunately it may be a mix of the worst of all three...
• The Islando-American Child Eater is the adaptation by the director of his own 2012 short movie of the same name. A children boogeyman story that could be nice, if anything as good as The Babadook
• Colonel Panics is a Japanese SF story that could be fun, and it lasts only 90 minutes!
• The British Good Tidings could complete the sub-genre of killer Santas with Sint and Rare Exports, but it looks much too cheap to watch
• Assassination Classroom: Graduation looks like the perfect example of what not to watch in Japanese Cinema: a sequel of a movie probably adapted from a Manga, with teenage "actors" more likely pop stars, a painful soundtrack and a duration of 120 minutes. Avoid at all costs if you are not Japanese!
• The Windmill Massacre is directed by the producer of Frankenstein's Army and could be a nice European (Dutch) Slasher
• Creepy by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Kairo) is the only movie of the Festival that we have already seen... and disliked.

In the other categories it is very difficult to find information about the movies. I only spotted: 

• In the Ibero-American Competition the Argentinian El dia que prohibieron el asado (eating BBQ becomes forbidden in the future, with the consequences you can imagine for those meat-lovers) could be very funny although the trailer looks cheap. The other Argentinian Phil Marcus, investigador privado has an interesting concept of a Private eye Humphrey Bogard-style. The Brazilian Através da Sombra (Through The Shadow) by veteran Walter Lima Jr. is a haunted house thriller that looks well done.

• In the retrospective The Crypt we could find The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971), the only cinema movie by a Bob Wynn and starring Leslie Nielsen (Forbidden Planet, The Naked Gun)! a curiosity not to miss... The Phantom Planet (1961) and Invasion (1966) look like Black & White SF classics from respectively the USA and Great Britain.
• All the movies in the categories Bizarre and Reposiciones look cheap and risky to watch.
• Available Documentaries are Fantasticozzi about the life and career of Italian director Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash) and his obsession with Science Fiction and Fantasy, Blackhearts taking a fresh look at the notorious Norwegian black metal music scene, and the Argentinian Alto Bardo by Osvaldo Sudak which I don't really understand what it is...
• We may try a session of Short movies which are organized by topics: Fantastic, Z, Horror...

At the end of this article you can find some nice posters I found during my research. Stay tuned for the movie reviews and our Article about the Festival in a couple of weeks!