Originally published at Green Cine Daily, whose hyperlinks are left intact here.

Most film festivals are just film festivals. Fantastic Fest is a different beast. The premier American outpost on the global “fantastic cinema” circuit of festivals—devoted to all things action, horror, sci-fi and cult—FF spurts forth like a bottomless fountain of arterial spray for a week every autumn. This mutant brainchild of gonzo exhibitor Tim League and Ain’t It Cool News geek guru Harry Knowles has evolved over the past five years into a singular cinematic freak magnet.

What other major American film festival gives its prize for “best film” to something called The Human Centipede?

Where else do audience members inquire of a director at the post-screening Q&A (in this case, for Yoshihiro Nishimura’s romantic splatterfest Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl) not details of budget or shooting ratio but: “Is there any body part you have not yet weaponized?” (Answer: “Yes. Nose hairs.”)

And what sane festival director promotes as a late-night party attraction a debate between himself and a filmmaker guest (German exploitation iconoclast Uwe Boll) that ends in a boxing match? Can you imagine the New York Film Festival’s Richard Peña staring down, say, Steven Soderbergh in the squared circle? I think not (although Clooney might be up for it).

Of course, it helps that the fest’s host city is Austin, Texas—a.k.a Slackerwood—where League and his wife Karrie run a sprawling mini-empire of drafthouses (theaters that serve beers and bar food while you watch). A town stuffed with thousands of University of Texas students, homegrown auteurs like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez, and a legacy of pop-culture eccentricism that gave the world the Butthole Surfers, Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson, Austin is the perfect petri dish for Fantastic Fest. To paraphrase League, it’s like a big-ass nacho platter “drizzled in bat-shit crazy syrup.”

What does that mean, exactly? Instead of catching a screening at noon on my first day of arrival, I found myself on a gun range in the vast open wilds of Texas hill country, blasting a 12-gauge shotgun, along with about 40 other guests and journalists. Why merely watch the true-to-life New Zealand cannibal prison epic Van Dieman’s Land, when you can join one of the film’s stars in the thrill of the kill? I even managed to work through my long-lingering teenage PTSD from Last House on the Left while hanging with its chief rapist David Hess (writer of various Elvis Presley hits, among other things, and now the homicidal helmsman in Smash Cut). Hess drew first blood, nailing a pair of clay pigeons. I, sadly, went 0-for-15.

If Fantastic Fest is where movie geeks man (or woman)-up, an Outward Bound adventure for jaded culture vultures looking to get their groove back, it’s wildly successful. And the movies are pretty good, too. The 70 features and 50 shorts unspool, mostly, in the Leagues’ cinematheque-of-the-outre, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a wonderland of model spaceships, microbrews and midnight movie madness anchored in a crummy ’70s-era strip mall on Austin’s southside. The joint looks like what would happen if a 14-year-old sci-fi fanboy, stoked on Japanese monster flicks and Night of the Living Dead, won the MacArthur Grant and blew it all constructing a Xanadu stocked with his every celluloid obsession.

This year’s slate included the now-staple secret screenings (the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam) and Hollwood galas, staged downtown at the vintage Paramount (celeb-studded stuff like Zombieland and Jared Hess‘ amusing-but-labored dorkfest Gentlemen Broncos). Those are great for buzz, but the real fun is in chasing down all the wayward tangents the fest spins together in its vortex of genre ecstasy.

Anyone taken with the New York Asian Film Festival, whose top selections were reprised in Austin, would have reveled in the unofficial world premiere of RoboGeisha. Noboru (Machine Girl) Iguchi’s latest opus to female empowerment via mutant transformation playfully (and, um, literally) explodes Japanese cultural and gender-role clichés, opening up the biggest can of she-devil whup-ass since the glory days of Russ Meyer. The film’s Verhoeven-on-crack-flavored-Ramen-noodle insanity is best captured by a popular trailer circulating on the Internet. But on the big screen it’s more emotionally surprising (believe it or not), as the story chronicles sibling rivals who must become semi-cyborg assassins before ultimately embracing each other to save Japan from a diabolical military-industrial cult.

Colleagues Nishimura and Iguchi, along with League and NYAFF’s Marc Walkow, engaged in a post-screening fundoshi parade—yes, those are ass-baring Japanese sumo diapers—and then submitted to a humiliation ritual at the hands of the movie’s formidable Tengu Twins, embodiments of traditional Japanese demons played by samurai sword-brandishing actresses Cay Izumi and Asami (garbed in latex bikinis and red tengu masks with large phallic noses). Later, Izumi showed off her professional pole-dancing skills at The Highball, League’s brand new combo bowling alley/karaoke lounge/Mad Men-chic liquor bar, adjacent to the Alamo.

Despite all the crazy juice, some of the fest’s best entries weren’t so much fantastic as extraordinarily well-crafted. Aleksey Balabanov’s Morphia, based on the memoirs of Mikhail Bulgakov, concerns a Russian country doctor’s spiral into drug addiction on the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s an immaculate period piece laden with frosty hardship and a dank, sepia-toned palette. Slow-moving and episodic, and given to often visceral realism, it was almost counter-programming amidst the surplus of zombie hayrides.

Likewise, the deadpan Down Terrace offered a detour from the undead, the oversexed, and the extremely graphically violent. This left-field charmer from British writer-director Ben Wheatley and writer-actor-editor Rob Hill took the prizes for best film and best screenplay in the Next Wave category in an underdog triumph. It’s a gangster movie with most of the gangster stuff left out. Hill’s Karl, a bespectacled 30-something who looks more like a computer programmer than a killer, is sprung from jail back into the tortured bosom of his middle-class Brighton crime family. Everyone turns massively paranoid as the rat is sought out and relationships slowly melt down. It’s a bit like Mike Leigh doing The Sopranos— Hill’s real-life, non-actor parents play the Mum and Dad with casual incisiveness—sans left-wing politics or Journey hits. Although, Robert Hill’s stoner patriarch gets off a spacey improv on the death of the 1960s and plays a lot of sincerely amateur acoustic slide guitar. As events turn more blackly comic, ’60s British folk classics brim on the soundtrack, setting a tone of dreamy melancholy that cuts against expectations, creating just the right amount of emotional undertow. Perhaps most surprising is the film’s producer: Mondo Macabro, a UK DVD outfit best-known for its essential Indonesian flying monkey head epics.

Other crowdpleasers were a tad more anticipated: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, with Tom Hardy in an Oscar-bait performance as England’s most violent prison inmate, was a sure thing, grandly theatrical if too stingily minimalist. Ti West’s The House of the Devil gave fans of 1970s and early ‘80s horror a welcome shiver of déjà vu. All slow zooms, freeze frames, cheesy ’80s hits and feathered hair, the film’s meticulous build-up strands a pretty coed in an old, dark house owned by a creepy couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, deliciously diabolical) and beset with strange rumblings that may, or may not, imply a looming Satanic sacrifice during a lunar eclipse. All lensed in gloriously grainy 16mm, no less, the film makes an effective reminder of the importance of the lingering take in horror. Sometimes nothing is scarier than anything.

Crazy Racer, from China’s mainland, achieves the giddy momentum of Kung Fu Hustle with hardly any of the CGI and very little of the kung-fu. At its delirious best, the film suggests that the only thing wrong with Guy Ritchie’s caper movies these days is that they aren’t in a Chinese dialect. Hao Ning’s jittery exercise in triple-cross gangster lowlife mania follows a champion bicyclist out to avenge his exile from the sport after making an unfortunate arrangement with a sleazy virility drug manufacturer. That’s about all I could figure out, but maybe all anyone needs to know, as the director filters a Three Stooges-intense commitment to physical comedy through whiz-bang edits and framing effects.

The film was a lot like Fantastic Fest itself: Way too much going on to keep track of, including a Jess Franco retrospective with the 79-year-old Euro-sploitation director happily holding forth from his wheelchair, and the local premiere of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, a film that might seem mind-blowingly provocative anywhere else but here. The film prompted an offhand review, in pure King of the Hill cadence, from a late-night karaoke contestant at the Highball: “How ‘bout that Antichrist? Bustin’ balls! Yee-haw!”

It also supplied some last minute inspiration for the Alamo’s in-house T-shirt vendors, who honored the festival’s main meme in a commemorative garment:

Chaos reigns!