VS movie review – World Premiere at Toronto After Dark Film Festival

Oct 26 2011- Tonight we attended the world premiere screening of VS at the Toronto After Dark (TAD) Film Festival. If you have not yet read our preview of the films showing there, we highly recommend spending a few minutes looking at the overview of the lineup.

VS was directed by Jason Trost who also wrote and starred in it. The premise is that four superheroes (Sophie Merkley, Lucas Till, Jason Trost, Lee Valmassy) wake up in various different locations and realize their powers have been stripped. They are being taunted by Rickshaw (James Remar aka. Dexter’s father) who did an incredible job as a psychotic throwback to The Riddler. Rickshaw has set up 100 bomb charges throughout the town and the heroes need to go through a bunch of challenges to prevent them from being exploded (along with innocent civilians that were tied to the charges). The challenges themselves are fairly simple but that does not make them less deadly. In fact this is one movie where you know superheroes will die right from the beginning.  The mood of the movie gave me a vibe of the old 60’s Batman TV show redone in present times. None of the cheezy “Pow” bubbles or anything but there certainly was something there that was reminiscent of the feel of the TV show.

The director was in attendance after the screening to take Q&A (video of the Q&A is below). During the Q&A we find out that there is no distribution plans at this point and the world premiere is an opportunity for a distributor to pick it up. The concept behind the movie is, according to Trost, “If you strip peoples’s super powers away what are they really“. Will they make the same decisions they did when they had their powers or would they be humans. “Powers don’t make you super is the moral of the movie” claims Trost. The movie was shot primarily on Canon EOS-1D digital SLR’s in 15 days. Note – the TAD film festival is over for this year, but next year get out there and support good independent movies and follow their Twitter for updates.

VERDICT: Overall it was an OK movie, but nothing that will go down on my favorites list of the year. The trailer really makes the movie seem allot better than it is (see it below). 6 out of 10.