Last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, I saw two of the strangest films I’ve seen all year: Control Alt Delete and Deadgirl. One film involves a guy who drills a hole in his computer tower and literally has sex with his computer. The other tells the story of a group of high school kids which find a zombie and turn her into their sex slave. You’ve read the reviews, but I thought you might want to see what I was talking about. Check out the trailers below.

Control Alt Delete

Written and Directed by: Cameron Labine
Starring: Sonja Bennett, Laura Bertram, Tyler Labine
Official Plot Synopsis: A moody romantic comedy exploring fetishism, addiction and love in the information age. As our hero Lewis struggles to integrate his public and private persona’s, he realizes he may not be the only one harboring a dirty little secret.

Directors: Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel
Screenwriter: Trent Haaga
Cast: Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan, Candice Accola, Michael Bowen, Andrew DiPalma, Eric Podnar, Nolan Funk and Jennifer Spain

Official Plot Synopsis: Daringly original and genre-busting, DEADGIRL is an odyssey into the soul of our alienated youth. But by injecting familiar teen moorings deep into something fantastical and terrifying, the film takes the conventions of the horror and coming-of-age movies and turns them on their heads.

When high school misfits Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) decide to cut school and find themselves lost in the crumbling facility of a nearby abandoned hospital, they come face-to-face with a gruesome discovery: a woman whose body has been stripped naked, chained to a table and covered in plastic. When both react to the situation in extremely different ways, the boys soon find themselves embarking on a twisted yet poignant journey that forces them to decide just how far they’re willing to stretch their understanding of right and wrong.

A no-holds-barred look at the horror of growing up, DEADGIRL stars Shiloh Fernandez (Red), Noah Segan (Brick), Michael Bowen (Kill Bill, Jackie Brown), and Candice Accola (Juno).

TIFF Review: Control Alt Delete

I might have started this review by telling you that Cameron Labine‘s Control Alt Delete is the strangest film I’ve seen all year, if I hadn’t screened a movie about a bunch of high school students who turned a zombie into their personal sex slave earlier in the week (you can read that review here). The official description calls Control Alt Delete “a moody romantic comedy exploring fetishism, addiction and love in the information age.” But really it is a love story of a man, a woman, and a computer.

It is November 1999, just months away from when the new millennium where the Y2K computer glitch might lead to the collapse of civilization. Lewis (Tyler Labine) is a programmer for Millenitech, a consulting company which is hired to retrofix the Y2K problem for various companies. Lewis’ girlfriend discovers a folder full of porn on his computer and dumps him. These are the wonderful days pre-video porn when gif images took a few seconds to load. Lonely Lewis has a crazy idea to drill a hole into his tower so that he can have sex with his computer. At work, a last minute account promotes Lewis to project manager. As the deadline grows near, Lewis becomes stressed and decides to have sex with a computer at work. As accusations begin to fly around the workspace, Lewis asks out the newly hired slightly handicap secretary (Sonja Bennett) for misdirection purposes. But as a relationship between them begins to grow, so does Lewis’ fear that someone will find out about his fetish.

While the office storyline could easily be compared to either Office Space or The Promotion, the relationship story is so completely originally that it defies comparison. Many people might recognize Tyler Labine as the lovable sidekick Bert on the television show Reaper. In Control Alt Delete, Labine takes center stage and out Jack Blacks Jack Black. Sonja Bennett provides a natural cuteness and sarcastic spunk not found in the States, and is a sure bet to break out of the Canadian film scene. My only complaint is that the misusage of tech terminology and incredibly fake computer screens tend to distract from a film which seems primarily directed at tech geeks. And it is a shame, because the film gets some of the inside geek references right.

/Film Rating: 7 out of 10