Pix from Fantastic Fest and few quick words

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Fantastic Fest 2006The Fantastic Fest screening schedule is kicking my ass, but I've taken a few decent photos for your perusal and here are a few super-mini-capsules up to tide you over until the next lightning round.

More pleasant surprises: Simon Says appears to be very, very bad in the first ten minutes but if you can jump on board it's one of the most entertaining flicks at the Fest. Crispin Glover wigs out for about ninety minutes as twin psycho killers Simon and Stanley, and the rest of the cast blunders around the movie like the cast of Scooby Doo 90210, minus the dog. Q&A with the filmmakers was both revealing and amusing.

The Host was probably the film I was looking forward to the most; you could probably have guessed that the co-founder of a site called Stomp Tokyo was ready to dig the token giant monster movie. The Host delivers on the giant monster action (think Graboids, not Godzilla) but it is a fundamentally different picture than the one I expected based on the trailers. I'm not as head over heels in love with it as emcee Matt Dentler professes himself to be, but it is a damn fine creature feature.

A late-night showing of Severance was probably the biggest and most pleasant surprise for me of the week thus far. An uncannily smart script combines with professional production and a talented cast to assemble the most satisfying horror film I've seen this year. It's being compared to Shaun of the Dead (mostly, I suspect, for its British origins) but for my money it's a better movie.

That's all I've got time for tonight but you can expect more thorough capsules of these and other Fantastic Fest flicks later this week.