Last night, stood in the rain for forty-five minutes waiting to get into “Trapped Ashes”. The usual trenchcoat crowd showed great enthusiasm for the nostalgic 80’s “Tales From The Crypt” setup that framed five horror shorts by five different directors. The wraparound, directed by Joe Dante drew me back to the days of campy horror flicks that started on craneshots over suburban row houses in the Valley and led to all sorts of ghoulish mayhem. The best of the bunch was John Gaeta’s thought piece on the six foot tapeworm, as well as Monte Hellman’s period piece on a hundred year old witch.

Tonight we saw the Gala screening for Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book”, an epic tale with an epic starlette, Carice van Houten, that was clearly a labor of love for the writer/director. I happen to be a huge fan of Verhoeven’s and this piece was imbued with the same larger than life, visceral impact of his canon of works. He made a brief disclaimer before the film concerning the work he had done via Hollywood to support his career, and that this film represented a homecoming to his native Netherlands, and interestingly enough his first Gala at TIFF since The Fourth Man also in his native Dutch twenty-three years ago. A brilliant and utterly engaging film with a tour de force performance by van Houten that could very well become a classic.

Gonna try for the Jon Waters bio-pic “This Filthy World” at the Ryerson tomorow at 9pm.