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Francis Galluppi’s crime thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County scooped both the top prize and audience award at the 28th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (Bifan) tonight (July 12) in South Korea.

The US feature won the Best of Bucheon award, which comes with a cash prize of $15,400 (KW20m), as well as the audience award.

Scroll down for full list of winners

The debut feature of US writer/director Galluppi received its Asian premiere at Bifan following its world premiere at Fantastic Fest last September and won best feature in the Orbita section of Sitges.

Richard Brake, Jim Cummings,...

American-made films took two top prizes at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) in South Korea, ahead of a slew of Korean and Taiwanese titles that took the lesser prizes.

“The Last Stop in Yuma County,” a crime thriller directed by Francis Galluppi and set around a restaurant in Arizona, won the KRW20 million Bucheon Choice feature award. The jury called it a, “profound exploration of human nature [with] characters traversing the boundary between righteousness and malevolence.”

Jt Mollner was named best director in the same section for his “Strange Darling,” a retro-feel, horror-romance with what the jury called, “an exhilarating and engaging narrative, challenging genre and character stereotypes and subverting implicit bias.”

The awards were presented Friday evening at a closing ceremony at the Bucheon City Hall. The ceremony was followed by a screening of Soi Cheang’s smash hit Hong Kong action film “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.”

Cheang,...

Jeong-hyun (Kim Ju-hyuk) celebrates the publication of his manuscript by taking his wife Yun-Hie (Choo Sang-mi) away for a vacation. At a stop, Yun-hie notices M (Park Joong-hoon) starring at her. As they both leave, Jeong-Hyun appears to accidentally reverse into M, and to defuse the situation, they accept his request of a lift. Increasingly unnerved by their passenger’s behaviour, they are relieved to reach the first destination of their trip and leave him behind them. After a night where a rock is thrown through their hotel bedroom, they leave only to have a dangerous encounter on the road with a 4×4. At the next town, the 4×4 again forces them to nearly have an accident. A furious Jeong-hyun gets out of the car to confront the driver who turns out to be M. This is just the start of a psychological game that will ultimately escalate to violence and murder.

Warning: You are not prepared for what this movie delivers. I watched The Villainess about a week after I saw Atomic Blonde — which was also part of Fantasia 2017 — and the two have a lot of similarities. On the surface level alone, they’re both about awesome, extremely dangerous women who are working for a shadowy organization, and both movies contain lengthy, seemingly one-take action sequences which are the highlight of the film. In fact, The Villainess has three of those action sequences. But the similarities pretty much end there as Atomic Blonde’s Cold War espionage is more akin to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, whereas The Villainess shares a lot of DNA (including one identical scene) with La Femme Nikita. So while Luc Besson was off making a bloated, sci-fi epic, Byung-gil Jung (Confession of Murder) was reworking the flick that put him on the map in the first place.

Writer/director Byung-gil Jung sure knows how to open an action flick. Think Oldboy‘s hallway scene from the first-person perspective of Hardcore Henry spilling over through a non-descript doorway into a wide-open setting for a one-on-twenty bloodbath a la Kill Bill‘s House of Blue Leaves sequence. Only when the orchestrator of this carnage is picked up and shoved headfirst into a mirror does the camera stumble backwards to show Sook-hee’s (Ok-bin Kim) bloodied face and grimace for more. It’s the type of over-the-top, out-of-control set piece most films work towards as a finale nobody will ever forget and we receive it as soon as the lights go down. A breathtaking jump through a window augmented by police sirens in the distance later and this party has only just begun.

If it wasn’t one-take, it was shot to look like it. You become so wrapped up...