There is an escalating game of one-upsmanship that Midnight Madness plays with itself every year. Renowned for bringing the nasty back to Toronto screens again and again, each year's programme is set the task of finding a flick that out-ickies last year's most upsetting feature film. When 2007's closing show, Inside, proved to be one of the most gruesome films ever shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, finding a topper for 2008 was always going to be a challenge.

Martyrs has been brought in to fit the bill, a neo-horror picture so extreme, Midnight programmer Colin Geddes described it as "a suckerpunch." And if you can suckerpunch that guy, you've certainly earned a place in the program. After disappointing with Deadgirl and The Burrowers but hitting the nail on the head with Acolytes, how did Martyrs fare?

TIFF '08 is off to a rocky start with rescheduled screenings, finicky projectors, and at least one pissed off Toronto Sun writer. Midnight Madness, however, continues apace after last night's ear-throbbingly awesome screening of Detroit Metal City.

Programmer Colin Geddes has been calling Wednesday night's Martyrs "one of the most controversial titles in the history of Midnight Madness," but it was this evening's Deadgirl that had the most on-the-ground buzz for its queasy, I-don't-know-if-I-want-to-see-that subject matter. Hardly surprising: the film's potentially awesome, potentially awful, definitely troubling premise concerns two teenage boys who discover the body of a dead, naked girl... and proceed to "take advantage of the situation."

Midnight Madness kicked off at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight with the zero hour premiere of JCVD, Mabrouk El Mechri's Being John Malkovichesque look into the mind and machismo of has-been ass-kicker Jean-Claude Van Damme. When the Muscles from Brussels stumbles into a hostage situation, life collides with art (well, none of JCVD's previous films could really be called "art," could they?) in a mindbending mashup of the actor vs. the ideal.

The expectant crowd which had circled the block around the Ryerson Theatre for this year's opening show was disappointed by the announcement that the Bringer of Van Dammage would not be attending the screening, due to an ongoing film shoot in Thailand. Van Damme did, however, record a brief, cutesey intro monologue which was piped into the Ryerson on video before the feature film.

moviesTO returns with host Matthew Brown and special guest star Matthew Price, your guides for the Toronto International Film Festival 2008! Join us as we investigate the musts, must-nots, and many madnesses of the movie extravaganza about to lay claim to Toronto for ten star-filled, film-obsessed days in September.



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It's one of the nasty realities of Hollywood: sometimes, great movies get lost in the deal-making shuffle. Mark Palansky's feature film debut, Penelope, premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, only to sit on the shelf for the next year and a half after its distributing studio, IFC, decided not to put it out there.

This sort of thing happens all the time with movies lacking an obvious marketing angle, or with movies that just aren't that good; Penelope might qualify for the former, but certainly not the latter. In this case, the protracted delay in release happened because IFC's mission statement changed shortly after purchasing the film, when they decided to focus their efforts on marketing smaller independent films.

When I boarded the subway yesterday morning (Christie Station, known to me as The One Without A Starbucks) and saw the headlines splashed all over the Metro and the Star - "TTC drivers in crisis!" - it was fairly hard to crawl out from under my Monday morning blahs to do anything other than conjure some surly words I would hurl at any TTC employee who dared suggest to me that his or her grief was on par with a soldier just back from Afghanistan.

Later in the day, though, I started really thinking about the issue. Yes, I would personally describe my feelings towards the majority of the TTC employees who have served me in the past ten years as being something akin to outright loathing - never, of course, suggesting that the majority represents the total, and that there aren't some truly outstanding drivers, operators, and other staff members in the organization. Let's face it: the TTC is the ultimate example of a system we only notice when it doesn't work. Although there have been literally thousands of days when a TTC staffer hasn't screamed at me for taking a digital photo on an RT platform, the only day that counts to me is the day when one of them did.