Fantastic Fest 2025: Primate, wife of Reanimator | Festivals and awards

Fantastic Fest, a wonderfully inclusive and unpredictable event in September in Austin, will be 20 years old this year. To launch the 20^th Edition Thursday evening, one of the co-founders began to shout “Chaos Reigns!” In a microphone, refusing to stop until everyone in the theater rose and chanted with him. It was a great reminder of the spirit of this celebration, one of the community and, well, chaos.

And then, I do not think that by coincidence, I saw two films that most of the Bible belt would call outright chaotic blasphetically. From a chimpanzee tearing the faces of people with shameless madness of the follow-up of Brian Yuzna to a horror masterpiece, Night, one of Fantastic Fest also had an interesting dynamic for my specific double feature film, in this film will not be released before 2026, and the other was initially released 15 years before this festival. We could almost consider the 20 years of FF the link between the two. That and some kills Gnarly.

Johannes Roberts presented its creature / Monster film functionality “Primate” With the playful hope that this would compensate for his “Resident Evil: Welcome: Welcome to Raccoon City”. Yes, he is at the top of this slightly shortened film through his excellent makeup effects and some performances engaged. He ends up becoming pretty knotty (and probably a little cruel in his brutality), but he suffers because it takes too much time to get there, feeling much longer than his short time of execution. However, those who like to see the lost art of faces turn into red goo will eventually have a good time with what is essentially a return to a time when makeup reigned as a master on CGI.

Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her house in Hawaii for the summer holidays, where she finds her sister Erin, Papa Adam (Troy Kotsur, bringing an essential warmth to a cold film), and their Chimpanzee of Ben. She brought a few friends for a little party while her father author goes to a book signature event, but they do not know that Ben was bitten by a rabid mangouste the previous night, and, well, it is about to become weird. After Ben’s attacks, adolescents shine in the pool – children cannot swim – and try to understand how they can possibly escape the strong claws of this primate killer.

Roberts struggles a little with a tone, making a survival thriller in one place that turns into a Slasher film with a chimpanzee instead of Jason Voorhees. To say that Ben is irrationally intelligent in his hunt for these adolescents would be an understatement, but it is the kind of film that requires the suspension of disbelief, which is easier to make at FF than on Paramount +. I don’t mind giving in to the concept of a film if he performs it well, but I found myself outside of “primate”, trying to understand things like why this house has a million dollars has no alarm with a panic button. It is a product of the rhythm of soft in the middle, which only makes time killing the time before chaos tearing from the flesh of the final act. It is at this point that “Primate” really reigns.

Another story of evolutionary violence takes place in the madman of Brian Yuzna “The wife of resuscitator”, “ An even more eccentric film than you remember in a new 4K restoration. A series of the brilliant film from 1985 by Stuart Gordon “Re-Animator”, it does not reproduce the Lovecraftian tension of the original, but it is a high bar to meet. It works better than many horror suites of the 80s and 90s under the will of Yuzna and Woody Keith & Rick Fry writers to go where most Hollywood films refuse to go. It is not every day that you see a flying head with bat wings or a merged arm and leg and to become sensitive and homicide. And do not forget the creature which is only a globe with five fingers for the legs. (“Alien: Earth” inspiration, maybe?) It’s really clumsy, but it is impossible not to admire the pure ridiculous “Bride of Reanimator”, and Austin was the ideal place to revive it.

Logly based on episodes in serial history Herbert West-Reanimator By HP Lovecraft, “Bride of Reanimator” catches up with Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), continuing to play God. Dan is still worried, in mourning the loss of Meg of the first film and the imminent death of a patient to which he is attached, but West is Frankenstein, considering each human body as a potential grain for his mill. Combs is wonderfully disturbed in this film, making fun of the FF crowd with some of its memorable line readings which sometimes make him look like Jim Carrey played a crazy scientist. It is the best thing about the film, but it is surrounded by a set which rarely corresponds to its temperature. Abbott is a particularly flat interpreter.

What is not flat is the work of makeup and the effects that seems even better in 4K. When “Bride of Re-Animator” arrives at her final scenes from Super-Sang, the whole film feels disadvantaged in a way that can be better appreciated at Fantastic Fest.

That there are at least 20 years more of this type of chaos.