Over 12 weeks some incredibly talented industry pros took time out of their busy schedules to personally announce our filmmaker missions and we at CineCoup can't thank them enough. Every week filmmakers complete new mission assignments and Crowd and Critic favourites are chosen.
Canadian genre films of the past and how they relate to our weekly Crowd and Critic. By film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal.
There’s no tradition of fantasy films in Canada, so The Sad Prince can’t help but feel a little alien. The trailer cast my mind back to an odd bit of Canadiana from 1976, Shadow of the Hawk, wherein Jan Michael Vincent plays a Métis executive living in Vancouver. Turns out a witch has poxed his old village and has sent tribal masks to haunt his condo. Shortly thereafter, Vincent’s grandfather, played by Chief Dan George, arrives to entice his citified kinsman to return to the village and help get rid of the sorceress.
Shadow of the Hawk is largely a road movie, with Vincent and George traveling to the village, fighting hexes all the way. Like The Sad Prince, Shadow of the Hawk trades in picturesque photography, bird imagery, and a sense of greater forces at play.
Canada doesn’t have many war movies to boast of, nor many movies about damaged vets returning home. But we’ve got more of them than you’d think, and if The Wounded moves ahead, we’ll have one more. The Wounded hearkens back to a William Fruet joint from 1979, Search and Destroy, in which a squad of Vietnam veterans is being knocked off one by one.
American imports Perry King and Don Stroud play two of the veterans, who start off just trying to figure out what’s been happening to their old Army buddies; after Stroud has the shit kicked out of him, the movie becomes a cat-and-mouse game in and around the tourist traps of Niagara Falls. We get stunts, gunfire, kung-fu kicking and explosions: is there any person alive who’ll say we can’t use more of that on our screens?
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