Conor Sweeney has an outstanding penis. Long, solid, beautifully designed, you can’t help but admire it. Luckily for you and me, it gets a lot of exposure in The Editor. “That’s not a prosthetic. He’s happy to let people know what he’s got to offer,” says writer-director-actor Matthew Kennedy, speaking to the Straight from his home in Kenora, Ontario. Along with Sweeney, Kennedy is one of the five mad geniuses behind Astron-6, the film collective that gave us screwball festival faves like Father’s Day and Manborg (both 2011). With The Editor—written and directed by Kennedy with costar Adam Brooks—the group brings a stunningly accurate spoof of late-’70s/early-’80s Italian horror film to the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Altered States series, along with gallons of deep-red blood and a perv’s banquet of delicious full frontal nudity. That set must have reeked.

“Yeah, it just smelled like genitals everywhere,” remarks Kennedy, fresh from a trip to Austin’s Fantastic Fest. “No, it didn’t get stinky. It got cold. We shot in Winnipeg, and we shot in a lot of basements. We had every kind of weather. When we shot the climax in the police station, it was 35 degrees, everyone was packed in, with lights. Some people passed out. But the nudity? I guess we just know a lot of people who are comfortable with being nude.” Vancouver’s burlesque queen Tristan Risk is among those people, in a cast that also features cult hero Udo Kier, Enter the Void’s Paz de la Huerta, and Laurence R. Harvey of The Human Centipede II. Besides enduring hours hanging in a harness for her death scene (“She threw up at one point,” reports Kennedy. “Such a trooper”), the arachnophobic Risk also let a tarantula crawl across her boob in a scene that lovingly recalls Lucio Fulci’s unhinged 1980 masterpiece The Beyond.

“The Beyond is all over this movie,” admits Kennedy eagerly. “The New York Ripper, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Suspiria, Inferno we referenced a lot. And then we’d just go for other ’70s films that aren’t necessarily giallos. Adam’s whole look as Rey Ciso is based on Franco Nero’s look in Hitch-Hike, which is a great Italian film. Franco Nero was his inspiration on all fronts.” As Ciso, the brilliantly deadpan Brooks plays a once-great film editor driven to madness and self-mutilation by his work. When The Editor begins, he’s toiling miserably on cheap Italian horror films for an even cheaper Italian producer who constantly refers to Ciso as a cripple (thanks to his wooden hand). He’s the number one suspect when a black-gloved killer wielding a straight razor very stylishly begins to dispatch everyone. The genre details are beautifully (and hilariously) observed, down to the jarringly strange cadences of the dubbing, but it’s the inspired silliness of the film that makes it work. And all that nudity.

Also screening as part of Altered States, the Vancouver-made Bloody Knuckles takes more of a splatter-punk approach to its assault on the viewer, while mind-benders like time-travel comedy The Infinite Man and the Phil Dick–ian fable The Incident will please anyone who likes a little quantum weirdness with their midnight movies. Straight-up horror fans, meanwhile, are urged to catch perverse possession flick It Follows and New Zealand crowd-pleaser Housebound.

Georgia Straight, September 2014