Sure, we get goodies all the time like the premiere of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich and the upcoming Mandy starring Nicholas Cage with a chainsaw, here in LA. I didn't report on Mandy, because it sold out in 4 hours when the tickets went up. We get a trickle down of the films from Fantastic Fest for the LA or West Coast Premiere going into to our own Beyond Fest. I'm not entirely sure Beyond Fest doesn't come from some people involved with Alamo Drafthouse as the website doesn't really give great details on who runs it.
Just today, the second wave of features for Fantastic Fest were announced and already blew me away. They get the brand new Halloween as the premiere film that starts the festival. Girls with Balls, a story of a team volleyball girls fighting off rednecks when they get stuck in the middle of nowhere. Deadly Games, now this one might be the TTDILA Christmas Party movie, it's Home Alone, but an evil Santa is trying to break in and it's not a new film it's from 1990. That's only a small list of the films. I'll share the rest with a link below.
Second Wave of Films
Now they're satellite events for the festival, but those aren't the real deal. They're basically the left overs for the real thing.
We live in LA, we should be the place that other film festivals look up to. The LA Film Festival is fun, but it's nowhere as fun as Fantastic Fest. Film Independent tries it's best. But they don't reach far enough with cult, horror, fantasy and so on. There weird jump into VR at some place not near the festival is cute at best this year. This year's selection isn't that enticing compared to Fantastic Fest and not nearly as fun. We need to combine festivals or change our strategy here to pull off a much better bigger film festival or our film festivals need to amp up what they do. We should have Fantastic Fest or having something even greater than it.
