Slamdance 2025 Part Two
Reviews of Richard Hunter's Foul Evil Deeds and Bean McKee's Fanboy
The 31st edition of the Slamdance Film Festival takes place in Los Angeles, California between February 20 and 26, 2025. The festival lineup will also be available to view virtually from February 24 to March 7 at https://www.slamdancechannel.com. You can buy a virtual pass for Slamdance over at the festival’s official website.
Foul Evil Deeds (dir. Richard Hunter)
It starts with establishing as much distance as possible between viewer and film. A title card reads “The events depicted in this film are all based on true stories” before a fisheye lens shot of a theatre from the stage. The lights turn on to reveal an empty audience, then a cut to a green curtain pulling back to the film’s “first” shot. The rest of the film doesn’t take place on a stage, although the theatrical context makes it clear we have to look at Richard Hunter’s film at a remove.
That choice might have borne out of Hunter and cinematographer John Fisher’s decision to shoot on a miniDV camcorder from the 1990s, a format that had a brief flash of popularity in the early 2000s with a handful of prominent filmmakers like David Lynch and Agnes Varda. Its fuzzy, standard definition visuals and consumer-grade status associates it with the roughness and intimacy of home videos, yet Foul Evil Deeds does everything it can to avoid that association through precise, locked down compositions and slow, deliberate pans and zooms. Once the opening contextualization establishes the amount of distance between the film and audience, the style maintains it.
These are logical choices, given Foul Evil Deeds’ structure. The film unfolds through six vignettes, all set in London but none of them ever crossing paths. Hunter cuts back and forth between them, separating each sequence with a hard cut to black that brings to mind Michael Haneke’s films like 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and Code Unknown. And while Hunter takes his film into some bleak and uncomfortable directions, the overall tone leans more into dry comedy like the films of Roy Andersson. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Hunter cited Haneke and Andersson as influences on his film.
What Hunter brings to his film outside of the obvious reference points coalesces into a shallow and disappointing statement given all of the effort in developing the film’s visual language. Not every storyline gets the same amount of attention, so several emerge as the primary narratives. These stories play out in a straight line, with Hunter chopping them up into smaller fragments and putting other stories between them. The secondary stories, which include an accountant who enjoys the services of a dominatrix and a group of teens whose prank on their friend literally backfires, function as little more than dull buildups to a single punchline.
All of these tales showcase Hunter’s single point, which amounts to the ways human beings engage in the eponymous acts on a daily basis. Whether it’s teens mocking a man with a prosthetic limb, shouting at someone for no reason, adultery, poisoning animals, or murder, all of these behaviours represent levels on a scale of our capacity to do harm. For some reason, Hunter sees value in this alone, and Foul Evil Deeds saps out any economic, political, or social contexts for these actions. That results in an incomplete picture, one that’s broadly drawn but missing the different shadings that can define motivation. Hunter collapses everything into his lone idea that, by the end, turns out to be nothing more than a truism.
Fanboy (dir. Bean Mckee)
Something I didn’t expect to find myself recalling was Robert D. Siegel’s 2009 film Big Fan, where Patton Oswalt played an obsessive New York Giants fan who goes down a Taxi Driver-esque spiral. Bean Mckee’s Fanboy similarly follows a football-obsessed man named Allen (Jon Washington), who moves from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio in 2014 to be close to the centre of the action for his favourite team during college football season. Allen doesn’t attend Ohio State University, but his passion runs so deep he hopes to find other like-minded individuals there while he learns to live on his own and establish his independence.
Allen’s decision to move with no real plans other than hanging around frats and bars during football games only leads him further into isolation and a state of anxiety. The worried tone of his mother during their phone calls, along with his tendency to get violent whenever someone disagrees with him about football, spells out that something is off with Allen’s mental health, and as time goes on his precarious state only worsens.
Mckee’s direction stays close to Allen for the entirety of Fanboy but maintains some distance, as we never get an understanding of his psychology or motivations for his intense love of college football. The problem is that Mckee’s script is too schematic to make this character piece have much impact. Every piece of information, whether it’s a plot development or an expositional breadcrumb about Allen, is too deliberate in its functionality to ever give off a sense of the naturalism the film wants to achieve. These details don’t provide a sense of Allen or anyone who enters his orbit as well-rounded people. They only exist as pieces laid down in a specific order so they can lock into place at a later point.