IFC Festival Direct

Tormented first caught my eye two months ago when Trailer Addict posted an excellent clip from the movie that had me covering an eye with one hand by the time it was done. Now that IFC's Festival Direct program is bringing the British slasher to the US of A, we've got a full length trailer for the film and a slick little plot description on the Independent Film Channel's website:

"A sexy, scary high school horror movie that smells like teen spirit...with a hint of rotting flesh! From classrooms and cafeterias, to school ties and pool parties, teenage traumas full of promise, pimples and panic get a terrifying makeover as the best days of your lives become your worst nightmare."

The trailer definitely does a good job of selling the 'rich high schoolers up to no good' angle, so if you need selling on the horror angle I've happily embedded the aforementioned clip below along with the trailer. If Tormented looks like a good time, and I think it does, you can catch the film on IFC's On-Demand platform starting October 21st.

When I was in Seoul for work back in January I stopped at the first DVD stand I could find and picked out every recent release disc they had that looked even vaguely like a horror movie. No clue on the titles, no clue on the plots, but if it had a blood splatter on the cover (the international sign for horror movie), it came home with me. One of the titles in the stack happened to be Death Bell, a crazy little film about students who spend the weekend at their vacant school in order to cram for an upcoming intellectual decathlon against a rival school. Except all of the kids soon find it hard to study when someone starts kidnapping them and setting them inside Saw-esque traps that can only be escaped if the remaining students solve a brain teaser in time.

As with most Asian films, though, the "That sounds cool, why can't I find it anywhere?" barrier in the past has always been a lack of distribution in the US, but now thanks to IFC On-Demand, a good chunk of us Yanks will be able to plop down on a couch and give the student-killing film a shot on October 14th as part of IFC's Festival Direct program. Which is great news, because Death Bell is just insane enough (and, distinctly non-American enough) to warrant a watch for fans of Asian horror movies, even despite a few zany script problems.

Check out the trailer below.

If you're anything like me, then you like fiddling around with the buttons on your cable remote. It used to be that you KNEW of all the options your remote could provide, but nowadays I have cable channels and VOD options I never knew existed. So a little while ago I clicked on a button that said IFC Festival Direct, which delivered unto me a pair of options: IFC Showcase and IFC Midnight. Yeah, try and guess where I started.

I saw a few familiar titles: Left Bank and Sauna, both of which I saw (and liked) at Fantastic Fest '08, as well as well-reviewed genre fare like The Chaser, Zift, and a Brit import called Hush that I may watch this very afternoon. Also on the docket for IFC Midnight: the indie thriller Dark Mirror, a gory South Korean offering called Cadaver, and a Dutch psycho story called Fear Me Not. Oh, and two I can definitely vouch for: the strange Canadian horror known as Pontypool and a Norwegian nazi-zombie fest called Dead Snow.

If you're looking for recent festival fare that's not horrific in nature, then you can sift through Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last, the steamy erotica of L A'ventura, Sam Neill in Angel, or worthwhile options like Paper Covers Rock, Rain, or Three Blind Mice. Apparently this "VOD" thing is the wave of the future, and I find it very satisfying to know that the flick YOU just saw at the Florida Film Festival is also available from my own cable box for about six bucks. For a whole lot more on IFC's home-demand offerings, I suggest you click right here and flick around a bit. (They also offer some rather fine programming that's free with the IFC service, don't forget.)