Sunday, March 30

2025 PFF & IHSFF Festival Recap – Saturday, March 29th



 Coda’s ongoing coverage of the 2025 Phoenix Film Festival & International Horror Sci-Fi Film Festival. I'll be using these posts to recap the films I've experienced as part of these festivals.

  

By Emery Snyder - @leeroy711


STATE OF EMERGENCY (Výjimecný stav) – Directed by Jan Hrebejk


 

This is a Czech comedy that tells the story of Czech news radio correspondent, Karel (Ondřej Vetchý) in the Middle East who hastily returns to Prague for a personal errand, just as revolution breaks out. He’s left to continue his updates of the war torn and bloody revolution within the confines of his kitchen, as though he were still on assignment.

The Czech have a long tradition of making light of dark geopolitical issues and histories. The films of the Czech New Wave movement had a beautiful tradition of this. Ján Kadár’s THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET uses buffoonery and oafness to tell a story about Fascist Slovakia taking over Jewish shops for “Aryan controllers.” Juraj Herz’s THE CREMATOR uses absurdism and dark comedy similarly. And my favorite, Jirí Menzel’s CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS takes place amid the backdrop of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia but focuses on the personal tragedy of one young man’s desperation to just get laid.

The similarities between those films and this new entry might be a bit of a stretch. But I found at least a bit of spiritual commonalities while I was in the screening. This film however, is content to focus is mocking gaze at the new era of media sensationalism, fake news and our new obsession with giving equal weight to completely unqualified opinions (see Joe Rogan.)

As a farcical comedy, this film works perfectly. I found the plot to remind me, more than once at some of Hollywood’s “sex comedies” of Wilder or Hawks even. Almost Shakespearean in its nonsensical miscues and misunderstandings.

Ultimately, this just turns out to be a thoroughly enjoyable romp. Great comedic performances all around and the plot moves forward at a clip that keeps the audience fully engaged.

 STATE OF EMERGENCY plays again on Sunday, March 30th at 1:40 PM

 

 

BLACK THETA – Directed by Tim Connolly

 


 A survivor of a home invasion is haunted (and possibly hunted) by the murderous cult that failed to kill him the first time.

Another slasher flick that cold opens with its characters giving bad takes on trivial cinematic opinions. This one involves the remakes of the FRIDAY THE 13th franchise. I don’t mind this at all. It succeeds in engaging its target audience and this film will spend the rest of its runtime showing an ability to keep this up.

This is obviously a film shot on a restricted budget with a cast and crew of limited experience. And it ends up serving as a great example of how a firm grasp on the vernacular of the genre can make up for these otherwise limiting factors.

Every performance here is full of intent. Choices were made and deliberately written into the personalities of even the most inconsequential characters. This is what I like to refer to as the economy of storytelling. The filmmaker respects the time of his audience enough to not waste it with meaningless placeholders of eventual knife fodder for the killers. I have tons of appreciation for this type of attention and hope it translates into a future trajectory for this filmmaker.

It's fun and well composed and this is obviously not by accident.

 

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