CIFF 2016: Black Carpet Gala

The second event I was able to attend during the Calgary International Film Festival or CIFF 2016 was the Black Carpet Gala event. This is apparently the only event of its kind and I can't imagine why as horror or wacky Sci-Fi movies are awesome. With that the choice of film for the evening was two episodes from the Van Helsing TV Show on SyFy that has a different take on the iconic character.

In this universe the Van Helsing mantle is headed by a female named Vanessa Helsing (Kelly Overton) which has been brought back to fight the new vampire threat that's taken over the world, or at least the United States. The screening took place at the Globe Cinema in downtown Calgary and there were some friendly vampires to get the crowd ready. There was also a Q&A after the screening of the two episodes and an after party. I was a bit disappointed to see it wasn't directly available in Canada despite being filmed there though they did mention Netflix was a partner among other options for it to come here in the future.

Now to talk about the actual episodes I was quite impressed by the gore and it did some nice setup for the universe its building. The first episode particularly built this up with great brief mentions of what happened during the "rising" and the current point in time that the series resides. This was greatly opposed by the second episode which was the events mentioned in the first one and it was odd since the first episode touched on it enough.

I'm not entirely complaining, I just felt it was unnecessary and I was hoping to see where the show was moving towards. I was instead fed some more background and now I have little idea where the show is headed, but I was interested in it enough that I'm looking forward to viewing the rest of the season when I can. It was definitely a great choice for the horror night of the Black Gala and I'd be quite interested in checking out a similar event in the future as it was fun. There was also an after party that followed the Q&A which was a good time and helped round out the evening.

Our CIFF 2016 Hub