The two films I ended up being most excited for, among the amazing line up at this year’s Toronto After Dark Film Festival, were both made by Winnipeg collective Astron 6: FATHER’S DAY and MANBORG.  With all due respect to the rest of the pack, festival director Adam Lopez appears to have done a stellar job once again in curating the 6th annual showcase, but those were the two that really spoke to me.

I decided to dig into the team behind the two flicks, and the result has been so far, about twenty minutes of YouTube video retro-future madness so compelling I can’t help but think I’ve seen something important. The imagery is both so utterly familiar and yet so brilliantly novel that it feels like a horde of angry dwarves pounding on some dank, primal Ur-geek pleasure button somewhere in your reptilian forebrain. You are mesmerized.

It’s like a window into the coma dreams of a 12 year old boy, circa 1989.

It’s rare you watch something new to you and immediately get that rush that comes with realizing you are watching the development of the future language of pop culture. The first time you see All Your Base Are Belong to Us or Star Wars Kid or a Kurosawa movie, and realize you are seeing something that will inform everything that follows. That’s what my first look at the work of Astron 6 was like.

Astron 6 may never be a household name but their style will get bitten off by imitators in the popular sphere for the next decade.

So go ahead, don’t buy their DVD collection. Be bewildered by everything over the next five years of cool.

Until then, I leave you with their 2007 bit of inspired lunacy, LAZER GHOSTS 2: RETURN TO LASER COVE.

 

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