THE THEATRE BIZARRE, the anthology horror film that makes its world premiere tomorrow night at Montreal’s Fantasia festival, occasioned a couple of comeback stories for the filmmakers involved. One of them is Buddy Giovinazzo, whose debut feature COMBAT SHOCK—a spectacle of grim post-Vietnam disillusionment and nihilistic urban disgust—turns 25 (!) this year.

Fango caught up with Giovinazzo to get the basics of his THEATRE BIZARRE piece, a “tender tale” (or not!) called I LOVE YOU. “It’s about the destruction and unraveling of a marriage,” the writer/director tells Fango. “One person—the husband—is obsessively, psychotically in love with his wife, and cannot bear to accept that it’s over.” To put him off, the wife callously confesses to having committed innumerable hideous and horrible deeds, but nothing can deter his blind devotion. “At the very end, it explodes into madness”—like, he jokes, “a typical Buddy Giovinazzo film.”

Part of what attracted him to THEATRE BIZARRE was the complete freedom he had to make it as intense as a Buddy Giovinazzo film typically gets. “My contract with David [Gregory, producer and co-director] says, ‘It can’t be stronger than an NC-17,’ which I just want to frame and put up on the wall,” he reveals. “That’s my favorite clause I’ve ever had in any contract. When I read that, I was on board.” See THEATRE BIZARRE’s trailer below, track back through our previous coverage starting here and look for more from Fantasia on this site over the weekend.

---

News - Latest