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Fantasia never fails to offer up exciting action flicks knowing this is what their audiences crave. The World Premiere of Bob Colaers’s Attack On Paradise (2026) more than whets the appetite. Lead actor and co-writer Saïd Boumazoughe teams up as recently-released convict Suleyman with rookie cop Yasmine (Clara Cleymans) to maneuver bullet ballets and kinetically choreographed one-on-one combats floor by floor as they aim to take down drug lord Prince Hamza (Achmed Akkabi) who, of course, is sheltered high up in the penthouse.
Taking care of an elderly parent is hard enough but Suleyman doesn’t realize just how hard until he returns home to visit his mother after being locked away for several years. His committed mother-love makes vulnerable and humanizes his invincible rough guy reputation, such that you’re rooting for him to hug mama even though a multi-story apartment building full of criminal types keep getting in his way. What can he do but bring them down?
It’s a sentimental plot nested in a kick-ass narrative, successfully rendered, and just plain fun to watch. Fully identifying with Suleyman’s undeniably likeable character meant by film’s end I could barely walk! Ouch! The bruises!! The muscle aches!!
I’ll crib the synopsis from Rupert Bottenberg’s Fantasia program capsule because I couldn’t possibly do it any better: “Ada is a shy, gay hairdresser living in a small village, running a salon with the help of his boisterous assistant Didi. A history of heartbreak and harsh judgement has left Ada resigned to a life without love—despite a powerful crush on Dodong, the handsome storekeeper across the street. Everything changes for Ada when a pink meteorite punches a hole in his roof one night. At Didi’s insistence, Ada consumes the space rock and utters the mystical word inscribed on it—Zaturnnah! Didi’s ludicrous conviction that Ada will be transformed into a superhero proves to be correct. Ada now has incredible strength, speed, resilience—and a spectacular, Olympian woman’s body! These new powers prove immediately necessary, as the village is beset by giant mutant animals, wretched zombies from the local graveyard, and anything else that can be thrown at her by the militantly misandrist extraterrestrial invader Queen Feminah Suarestellar Baroux and the Amazonistas from Planet X. Can Zsazsa win against these fearsome foes? And, can Ada win Dodong’s heart?”
How’s that for a plot device? As outlandishly colorful and vibrant as ZsaZsa Zaturnnah is on its surface, I detect subtle undercurrents. Despite Ada being a stereotyped effeminate outcast hairdresser infatuated with the hunky bodybuilder across the street, he has no real interest in being a woman. He’s gay but he wants to be a guy. That swallowing a pink meteorite turns him into an Amazonian woman generates its own clutch of issues. Will he be loved for being the woman he’s actually not and never accepted as the gay man he is? A tinge of the political dynamite of transgender women in sports hovers over a provocative narrative that eschews heavy-handedness to deliver a sentimental tale where—despite who others think he is—Ada is ultimately loved for being exactly who he wants to be.
As Carolyn Mauricette writes in her Fantasia program capsule, Ancestral Beasts is “a haunted-house narrative mixed with character-driven commentary on how intergenerational trauma can reach beyond the grave and hold our hearts in its cold hands.” Configuring that trauma as a centipede-like creature (think The Tingler) is truly novel, intriguing, and creepy; but, by film’s end I was worn out with all the family dysfunction—sisters unloading on each other—and the heavy-handed treatment of mental illness in indigenous communities (not to say that isn’t extremely important). The World Premiere of Ancestral Beasts is a noteworthy if uneven first endeavor and I look forward to watching Riedel and his indigenous cast and crew develop their chops in future films.
