15 movies, one day: that sums up the second day of the Toronto After Dark FF. By beginning at the end, I’ll share the best first:

After a gruelling day, I was well past exhausted. The late night programming was the best short/full length feature combination of the festival so far.

Short Please Stand By is set in a dystopian future where giant lobsters have invaded the world. The off-beat film delivers the laughs and is the perfect lead-in for the bizarre and off-beat Blood Car.

Distributors, Take Note
Hands down Blood Car is one of the funniest films of the year. A reworking of The Little Shop of Horrors, but instead of a plant it’s a car that runs on blood. A muddled collection of dark humour and political satire (“Killing people for fuel is patriotic.”), the film breaks the boundaries that studio films are too scared to cross, capturing the spirit of young America.

If you are a distributor pick this film up: it’s bound to be the next Napoleon Dynamite.

A quick take on the rest of today’s collection includes:

A gruesome modern-day reworking of the Todd Sweeney story, which will leave sensitive viewers with a phobia of the toilet.

A young man’s perfect day ruined by a bizarre facial blemish that leads to his death

Waking up after a crazy night in-between a disgusting glutton and a freak in a gas mask. How far would you go to escape before the pair wakes up? Coyote ugly far?

“Curiosity killed the cat” when a school teacher gets involved in a possible child abuse case at her school.

The shorts closed with the delightful It Came From the West (Denmark) a muppet zombie western. West erupts with both blood and jokes and is being made into a feature film.

After the shorts I made my way to Bloor Cinema to watch Aachi and Ssipak an absurd South Korean cartoon that is fuelled by profanity and ridiculous violence in a future where oil has run dry -- human excrement is now the source of power. The government offers addictive narcotics bars to people as a reward for making their “deposit.”

The film is a highly pleasurable thrill ride filled with pop culture references and an explosive 2D/3D synthesis of animation.

Dear Beautiful (USA) and the international premiere of From Inside (USA) were both animations with apocalyptic undertones. Both make use of 2D and 3D elements and use a number of artistic stills instead of fluid motion. The Zombie-like Beautiful is the superior of the two in terms of animation, however, From Inside, based on the graphic novel by John Bergin, is my pick for best horror short, with its endless rivers of blood and powerful narration. It’s being made into a feature length production.

Two gothic films: Akai (Brazil) explores the depression and loneliness of a vampire, which is not all that exciting; and Ange (Belgium) is about a doll maker who sprouts a strange obsession for a girl with no spine.

The Pit and the Pendulum a stop-animation version of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic tale thrilled audiences as it has been doing at many festivals.

Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. It is never a good thing when a fantasy epic fills a cinema with laughter. Boll is bound to get slaughtered by the press when the film is finally released wide in January.

After the screening of King, Boll had a special audience Q&A. Boll is certainly a personality with his dry German humour and unabridged passion; it’s a shame that his films are not better.

PHOTO BY DEBORAH KANFER, Freelance Photographer