On his first night, Zachary is seduced by hot, brash student Danny (Richard Harmon of AMC's The Killing). It turns out Danny is one of the film contest's finalists.
Worse, he is Zachary's younger self. And his student film, a brutal, autobiographical depiction of an abusive father, is the same kind of short that made the young Zachary such a hot Hollywood commodity.
As one of his old professors tells him, it's Zachary's job to make sure Danny doesn't make his mistakes: The older man went for fame and fortune rather than developing his craft. Fifteen years later, he's a wedding videographer.
Judas Kiss boasts brilliant production values, clever use of locations, and excellent casting. David and Harmon are ably assisted by costars Timo Descamps, Julia Morizawa, and Sean Paul Lockhart (who is due to receive QFest's Rising Star Award on Friday).
Tepnapa's briskly-paced film has its magic-realist heart in the right place. But it falters when it tries to marry its sentimental, naive moral lesson with the soaked-in-irony, hipper-than-thou attitude of its aesthete characters.
Judas Kiss is paired with a "female" film Thursday night, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, a delightfully kooky - if severely limited - off-the-wall romantic sci-fi spoof from Madeleine Olnek.
A clever homage to the special effects-challenged flying-saucer movies of the 1950s, this black-and-white feature opens on the planet Zots, which is on the brink of an environmental apocalypse.
See, the ozone layer has been severely depleted because of "big feelings." Love, as one Zots counselor explains in Olnek's trippy alien language, transcends the boundaries of the individual, thus rising up into the ozone layer. (Hatred is fine, since it destroys the person.)
