The 33rd annual Philadelphia Film Festival runs October 17-27, 2024 and features over 100 films this year. Most films play twice and our own Justin Nordell will be sharing “Philly Film Fest Fast Reviews” to give you a taste of the festival so you can pick and choose which films to make for the second screenings!
Where do urban legends come from? Are they born from an actual event or are they merely an amalgamation of different stories over time? In the world of Dead Talents Society, the answer is much simpler than that: urban legends are just ghosts with their haunting license scaring the living and meeting their quotas (think Monsters Inc but with Taiwanese ghosts). Catherine (Sandrine Pinna, Yang Yang) has been the award-winning top scarer for years now, with her signature haunted hotel room scare. Catherine is featured prominently on ghost talk shows and ghost beauty product advertisements, looked up to by the entire scare community… even though she looks down on all of them. But when her protege Jessica (Yi Ti Yao, Yaksha: Ruthless Operations) develops an internet scare that starts going viral in the human world and usurps her spotlight, a rivalry is born between these two top scarers.
Meanwhile, a new ghost known only as The Rookie (Gingle Wang, Netflix’s Marry My Dead Body) has a hard time finding her reason to scare, choosing to hang out in a haunted park with her friend Camilla (a scene stealing Bai Jing Yi, Netflix’s Miss Shampoo) most nights. When her family accidentally throws out an award from when she was alive, something that anchored her memory to the human world, it activates a 30-day clock for The Rookie to get her haunting license or else she’ll disappear forever.
Bombing her audition to join a scare team, the only one who will take a chance on her is Makoto (Bo-lin Chen, Silk) a ghost deemed too handsome to be scary, who takes pity on her and wants to prevent her from disappearing. Too bad the head of his scare team is none other than Catherine and she couldn’t care less if The Rookie fades away or not. With the days ticking by and The Rookie no closer to figuring out how to scare at all let alone her signature fright, can her team come together and save her or will it be up to her to find the scary within and save herself.
Director and co-writer John Hsu’s last film Detention (streaming on Tubi) was a genuine chiller, so it is an absolute delight to see him switch gears to craft one of the best horror comedies that we’ve gotten in years. With a non-stop barrage of jokes and allusions to famous Asian horror films, Dead Talents Society shows that being dead can suck just as much as being alive, but that these ghosts have a lot of heart.
Grade: B+
Catch it at PFF33: Saturday, October 26th at 10:00pm at the PFS East
Tickets Available Here: https://prod5.agileticketing.net/websales/pages/ticketsearchcriteria.aspx?evtinfo=429912
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