Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011

It’s been a long 14 months since the last edition of Toronto’s best genre film festival. Toronto After Dark decided to move back to their traditional October (think Hallowe’en!) time slot after a couple of years in August. It was just too hot to wear zombie makeup in the summer, I expect.

Although the fall can be pretty crowded with film events in our city, After Dark attracts a fiercely loyal audience. Even the move to a new venue (all screenings are being held at the Toronto Underground Cinema while the storied Bloor Cinema undergoes renovations) shouldn’t hurt attendance. It also helps that Adam Lopez and his crack team of programmers have put together a very solid-looking lineup of horror, sci-fi and other genre cinema. Here are a few I’m excited about:

  • Friday October 21, 7:00pm Exit Humanity – a zombie western? Why not? It seems like blending genres is the thing to do now, and this promises to be more campy fun than Cowboys & Aliens.
  • Saturday October 22, 4:15pm Redline – a Japanese anime film seven years in the making, with character designs from the truly wacky Katsuhito Ishii (Funky Forest), this film promises Speed Racer thrills in its story about a high-stakes race that takes place on a distant planet.
  • Sunday October 23, 4:15pm Love – a cerebral sci-fi tale about an astronaut stranded on the International Space Station after he hears that civilization on Earth has been destroyed. If this reaches the heights of Moon or Silent Running, I’ll be very pleased indeed.
  • Monday October 24, 9:45pm A Lonely Place to Die – Drawing comparisons to The Descent, this film is about a group of young mountaineers climbing in the Scottish highlands who stumble across a kidnapping plot and soon find themselves on the run from a pair of professional killers when they try to save the young victim.
  • Tuesday October 25, 7:00pm The Divide – Eight people survive the Apocalypse in the basement of their apartment building only to slowly turn on each other. Promises to be suitably bleak for a film about the end of the world.
  • Tuesday October 25, 9:45pm Manborg – at After Dark a few years ago, I saw a short called Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Lazer Cove from director Steven Kostanski and thought it was just brilliant. Hilariously campy and yet affectionate, his work is here extended to feature length in a Robocop homage/sendup about a dead soldier brought back to life as a cyborg killing machine.

The fun starts tonight, so what are you waiting for? See you AFTER DARK!

This entry was posted in After Dark, Film Festivals and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011

  1. Danielle says:

    You chose most of the ones I did! Will you be at many films? I’m super excited for Love above all.

  2. Yeah, after I read your BlogTO piece, I realized that our tastes must align pretty well. I’m going to do my best to get to all the stuff I’m interested in and maybe more, but the weeknights are tough because of my new day job, which is wearing me out. You’ve also given me a great new motto:

    “I’m super excited for Love above all.”

    🙂

Comments are closed.