For all our coverage of SXSW Film 2017, click here.
What a great South By Southwest it was. There were some truly incredible premieres, some mild disappointments, and a truly excellent television pilot shown at this year’s festival. Here’s almost everything else I saw there this year (we’ll have some reviews of the SXSW films showing at the Boston Underground Film Festival coming later this week), excepting the one movie I walked out of, A Critically Endangered Species, whose first 30 minutes had experienced a combo of pretentious and boring that I didn’t exactly find palatable.
Mayhem
Joe Lynch, the lovable underachieving horror director most notable for getting screwed by his production company on his 2013 film, Knights of Badassdom, is back with an office-set action comedy about a junior account executive at a generic consulting firm who gets framed by his superiors for their mistakes. However, before this gets too close to Mamet territory, a virus that completely removes their inhibitions is released into the building, and what follows is a loud, bloody quest for our protagonist and his small-time lawyer partner (who just wants her house back) to get to the top of the building and “have a chat” with the CEO. Lynch and the cast obviously had a lot of fun on this project, and it shows in the hilariously exaggerated acting and the nutty action that takes place over the course of the film (seriously, you won’t believe how many power tools are used to off people here). It’s a little slight (and occasionally the characters get cacophonous in an annoying way), but a lot of fun to watch, especially in a packed theater.