International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival 2008

As our world suffers the ravages of humankind, scientists look for ways to sustain life. When one of them falls ill and a chrysalis forms around him, a tug of war ensues about the future of the stricken scientist… and ultimately the fate of the Earth. A compelling thriller from a story by Ray Bradbury.

A medical student and his girlfriend become involved in a bizarre experiment into reanimating the dead conducted by the student's incorrigible housemate in this campy sendup of an H.P. Lovecraft story. The emphasis is on humour but once the dead walk, there is gore aplenty.

Sam wakes up in a cold, metal covered room with a long streak of blood flowing from the door. She stays in the room as punishment, and how long until she gets out she doesn't know. Hours become days. Days become weeks. Sam finds solace in taking her 12 year old sister, through a latch built into the bottom of the room's floor. This keeps her occupied and her mind focused to prevent reoccuring flashes she has of her late mother's death. Sam slowly pieces together fragmented memoreies she has from her past, and begins to understand why she stays locked in the room, for what lies inside of her cannot be set free.

This Sci-Fi Shorts Program includes: Terrafarmer Outsource Probed Final Journey Things Last FUN ON EARTH D-I-M, Deus in Machina

LES FRANKEN (Michael Rapaport) leads a painfully unremarkable life as a metermaid until he enrolls in a drug study for an experimental anti-depressant. An unexpected side effect of the drug convinces Les he is developing special powers and must quit his job to answer his new calling in life... Superhero. A very select group of people in life are truly gifted. Special is a movie about everyone else.

Closing night film! "Japanese maverick Takashi Miike has one of his wildest ideas yet - and that's saying something - in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO." (Variety) Lurid, over-the-top, bizarre, outrageous, completely hilarious and that's just Quentin Tarantino's performance in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO. Takashi Miike's English-language spaghetti western is a remake of Sergio Corbucci's 1966 classic, DJANGO, about a hard-bitten gun runner who wanders into a desert town with a gatling gun hidden in a coffin. A huge sensation when it was released (spawning over thirty unofficial sequels and remakes) here Takashi Miike teleports the story to 19th Century Japan and mixes it with liberal doses of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and YOJIMBO, then adds generous helpings of female gunslingers, samurai cowboys and plants that grow babies. A nameless gunman (Hideaki Ito) rides into Yuta, Nebada, a dusty flyspeck of a town that's caught in the middle of a gang war between the Heiki (in red, and led by hot-headed madman, Koichi Sato) and the Genji (in cool white, led by baby-faced bad boy, Yusuke Iseya). Setting the two gangs against each other and hoping he can pick up the cash left on the table after they wipe each other out, our hero soon finds things are a bit more complicated than he assumed. There's the mother of a half-Genji, half-Heiki kid, played by Yoshino Kimura who is out for revenge against the Heiki; her mother, who runs the local general store and who is secretly a legendary gunslinger herself (played by Kaori Momoi, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA), an indestructible sheriff and more mind-bending, cartoonish ultra-violence than you thought could ever possibly exist, all scored to a thundering, electrifying spaghetti western soundtrack. Speaking a "Hooked on Phonics" version of English, the cast wades into this cross-cultural mash-up with guns blazing, slaughtering anything that moves and taking no prisoners in this off the hook Western that manages to load a missile with everything cool about samurai movies, westerns, spaghetti westerns and Takashi Miike movies and launch it into your eyes. -Review from New York Asian Film Festival

A lone astronaut attempts to terraform a hostile planet with a malfunctioning robot as his only companion. Every small success the Terrafarmer enjoys is decimated by the robot's stupidity in a classic chalk and cheese comedy double-act.

Humans have a few fatal weaknesses. Imperfection in everything they do and they don't pay attention to the consequences of their actions. Man always invent things beyond their control and find out much too late that something is seriously wrong. When action is being taken to solve the problem, things often get out of hand even more. Even in the year 2135, when the human soul is being used as an infinite power source in machines, the last man alive will set his own death into motion by his own stupidity.