Movies

Ellen Hollman (THE MATRIX 4) headlines this indie thriller that plays on the trope of "band of criminals does the wrong person wrong." During a wilderness trek with her husband, Dillion (Matt Passmore), a police officer recovering from a recent attack, Brenner (Hollman) stumbles upon a band of backwoods clan of gun runners. The gang is led by Mama (Geraldine Singer), who rules with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Her men are mostly brutes, and the women are kept in cells, only brought out for subservient tasks or mating.

“…Thorolf, an early settler of the island, reappeared after his burial. Cattle that went near his tomb became mad and died. His haunting at home caused his wife’s death. His wanderings were stopped for a while by the removal of his body to a new location. But he returned and, finally, his new tomb was opened and his body burned and ashes scattered.” --From the Icelandic Eyrbyggia Saga,

Whether it’s severing limbs with a shovel or depicting shotgun blasts to the head, there’s something about an English accent that lends an air of sophistication to even the most intense displays of cinematic splatter. Indeed, that most revered of all British storytellers was renown for crafting gruesome set pieces, and like Shakespeare’s finest, 4Digital Media’s newest release, The Curse of Hobbes House, revels in the dramatic tension provided by supernatural underpinnings, treachery, murder and deliciously malicious mayhem.

“…Strange appearances and uncommon sounds had been seen and heard by different members of the family at times, some year or two before I knew anything about it…Even the knocking on the door, and the outer walls of the house, had been going on for some time before I knew of it.”

So goes an account written in the memoirs of Richard Williams Bell, one of the seven children born to John Bell Sr., an affluent Adams, Tennessee farmer who, two centuries ago, played host to one of the most infamous and thoroughly examined hauntings in southern American history, that of a violent, wrathful entity referred to as The Bell Witch. From 1817 to 1821 the Bell family endured one otherworldly assault after another, beginning with mysterious poltergeist-like noises, scratchings from within walls, to hideous disembodied voices, physical attacks and unexplained illnesses, culminating in the appearance of a fearsome female specter that called itself simply, "Kate Batts, witch."

Imagine a skin cream used by shamans in a remote jungle. It's derived from a rare flower, and it has miraculous healing properties for severe scarring. But there's a catch (of course there's a catch!) -- whatever you are in the inside, it brings to the outside at the stroke of midnight. If you are beautiful on the inside, you'll be beautiful on the outside.

But if you're a monster on the inside...

The cream is taken by force and, eventually, ends up in secret circles of Hollywood, coming to the attention of horror film producer Breen Nash (C. Thomas Howell). When Nash accidentally backs over his bad-boy leading man, Huckle Saxton (James Duval), he panics and hides the body. His primary fear is that the funding will be pulled from his newest film venture, BEAST MODE, and he tries to do a WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S with Huckle to put on a show for his primary backer, Pish Rudabaker (James Hong).

Science fiction has been one of the most fascinating and popular genres in popular culture. Movie franchises such as Star Wars, for example, have become billion-dollar series on the back of fantastical technologies and advanced developments which captured the imagination of millions of fans. In fact, sometimes we have seen those technological advancements featured in films come true in real life as well. One well-known example of this is seen in the Star Trek series, where creator Gene Rodenberry included flip phones, back in the day when mobile phones of any sort were a pipe dream. Lo and behold, flip phones were all the rage 20 years ago until the advent of the iPhone and touchscreen smartphones.

Thomas Smith directs BACKWOODS, a low-budget horror with some surprisingly good effects and a decent attempt at a plot twist. In fact, the post-credits ending is a rather neat payoff -- you just have to endure the entire movie before that. It's akin to watching Simone Biles stick the landing after drunkenly bumping around on the parallel bars.

The first thing you have to get used to is the film's penchant for nonlinear storytelling. It jumps back and forth, from the moment we first meet Molly (Isabella Alberti) tied up in the trunk of a vehicle, making her escape. Almost instantly we go back to the football game where she was cheering, then back to escaping the trunk, then back to the aftergame party, then back to Molly lost in the woods. You get the idea. There is a place -- one place -- where the technique is actually useful, and i understand the Macguffin the film is trying to keep covered by doing this, but it's overdone.

With much of the world being risk-averse to crowds of shoppers this year, it doesn't take a crystal ball to predict that online sales are going to be through the roof for Black Friday and beyond. And with shipping times factoring into the gift-buying (and sending) equation, the earlier you get started with your list the more likely it is you'll have everything wrapped and ready in time for Christmas.

In Jungian terms, the collective unconscious involves those concepts we humans instinctual identify regardless of cultural boundaries, and abstract symbols come to be imbued with deeper meaning: a flag becomes not merely colorful fabric, but an emblem of national identity, just as a cross represents spiritual salvation for a Christian adherent. In horror cinema, the mask, and indeed the slasher subgenre in particular, is the one most singularly representing silver screen terror in the minds of the general populous the world over. Sure, vampires, zombies, werewolves and Hell-born spawn may be catalysts for insomnia, but since the commercialization of the killer-run-amok tale in the late-70’s odds are more people at Halloween associate hockey with Jason Voorhees than the Stanley Cup.

Four years before DC Comics founded the Justice League team to take on the interstellar horror of Starro the Conqueror, screenwriter Hideo Oguni teamed up with artist Taro Okamoto to bring us the strangest, not-quite-kaiju of them all: the Pairans. These alien beings were slightly larger than humans, and looked like giant starfish with a large, unblinking eye in the middle.

Tis the season to lose control of your television to the more sentimental members of the family. So if you're going to watch anything from now through the end of the year, it's going to be a Christmas movie, and it's probably going to be either Lifetime or Hallmark (not that you'll be able to tell the difference). The romantic holiday genre has grown so pervasive that we even had to come up with an alternative a few years back, when we put out our Nine Christmas Movies for Guys Who Hate Christmas Movies.

This year, we may just have to round out that list to ten (or bump one off -- we'd hate to ruin the gestalt of our nine ladies dancing).

From Director Jake Horowitz comes CUP OF CHEER, a slightly bawdy sendup of just about every heartfelt holiday homecoming you've ever watched.

Thirty-one years ago, two righteous California teens with guitars and a dream had an excellent adventure in a time-traveling phone booth. It was so much fun, they had to do it again, but it ended up being a totally heinous bogus journey.

Along the way, Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) learned they had a destiny. Their band, Wild Stallynz, would create a song that would unite the world. But decades later, the band has fallen apart, but the boys still have the dream, even if they have fallen to playing wedding receptions. Their music skills are actually incredibly well-rounded, in every technique. But what they produce is the result of obviously trying too hard, seeking that special combination that will finally unite the world.

I've been fascinated with the paranormal almost since I knew how to read. Early influences on me were the television movie of the week that told the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story, and films like THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (not to mention the few appearances of Bigfoot on THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN). I clipped articles from the World Weekly News like it was gospel.

I'm pretty sure Bat-Boy isn't still out there waiting to attack, but I remain fascinated with UFOs and cryptids. And while the media has become suffused of late with multiple Bigfoot hunting series, they skew strongly to "reality entertainment" than anything remotely investigatory. If you need to do a CGI recreation of your Bigfoot encounter, I really don't ned to see it.

That's what makes Darcy Weir's SASQUATCH AMONG WILDMEN stand apart from this crowd. It's a true documentary, eschewing any sensationalism or fakery. 

“…When he captured Friola he ordered a massacre accompanied by torture. Everybody was to be blinded, have their noses removed and have arms and legs chopped off. After this, they were left to die in the open. He walled up a whole family of his enemies in their castle and left them to starve to death…”

Humankind has a macabre fascination with atrocity. From the above description of the thirteenth century Italian warlord Ezzelino de Romano to Eli Roth’s Hostel films, each of us possess a morbid voyeurism that easily explains the undying allure of horror cinema, and there’s a direct link between lurid tales of medieval torture and the depravity of movies like Tokyo Home Stay Massacre, the latest release from Tokyo Bay Films Entertainment.

The road to Hell, so the saying goes, is paved with good intentions. Nowhere is this more apparent than the world of cinema, which is littered with the corpses of well-meaning mega-buck misfires, inane studio fare and independent duds alike. Nothing leaves a bad taste in a collective audience’s mouth more than a movie marred by shabby directing, faulty performances or bland pacing when there was ample opportunity for success. Yet there are two strains of bad film: those that are of unintentional poor quality, and those that are not. For every hundred Plan 9 From Outer Space and Waterworld that aspires to greatness and fails, a Rocky Horror Picture Show (or, indeed, a Bad Taste) rises from the depths to celebrate its own campiness with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

The idea of utilizing toys, dolls and puppets as the antagonists in horror films is a risky endeavor for filmmakers. While it’s true that such figures oftentimes contain an inherent creepiness to them--who hasn’t been convinced the round, unblinking eyes of a doll have watched them from afar?--the absurdity in making a mere child’s bauble the vehicle for purest evil is frequently too great to overcome. From Chucky to Annabelle to Full Moon’s Puppetmaster series, every possible permutation of this (very) limited subgenre has seemingly been toyed with already to anemic effect, yet Hollywood still believes it can bleed another imaginative drop from the storytelling corpse.

Ahhhh, sweet nostalgia. To yearn for those simple, bygone days of Camaros with cassette decks, high school science projects and hopeless crushes, of listening to Heart LP’s and praying a freshly-resurrected demonic entity doesn’t possess your best friend. Who could forget such blood-splattered innocence?

Tony and Lisa are two awkward teenagers, stumbling through life cluelessly, interacting with peers mired down in their own quirks of hypersexuality and impulsivity. Among all of them, Tony and Lisa are perfect for each other. They're shy, inexperienced, and ready to take that next step with each other.

There's just one problem: they're siblings. Not "Greg and Marsha Brady" siblings. Not half-siblings. Full on same set of parents siblings.

CALL ME BROTHER is a slice of AMERICAN PIE, baked up by MALLRATS and served by NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. It's distinctly independent, and not as prurient as the plot may lead you to believe. While the film is full of sex acts and innuendo, it's off panel or well blocked -- not a stitch of nudity, so if you're looking for that, keep it in your pants, perv.

Fugue (fyoog), n, a period of amnesia which the affected person seems to be conscious and make rational decisions, yet upon recovery remembers nothing of the period.

There is an easily identifiable link between the remote location of the Rock Street Films North production, Fugue, and the foggy isolation associated with memory loss. When Malcolm (Jack Foley) awakes in the mid-afternoon, dressed in his pajamas and unaware of his identity, the vast secluded countryside surrounding his house mirrors his own deserted mental state, and the calm opening scenes as he gropes for tiny familiarity amid everyday routines eases viewers into a world where no one is who they seem and time itself becomes a puzzle.

Horror has always been a land of allegory. From the nervous awakenings of the sexual revolution in Rosemary’s Baby to the zombie-consumerist underpinnings of Dawn of the Dead and the politico-anarchism of The Purge, the darkest of all entertainment genres allows creators an outlet for societal commentary unmatched in other venues. Romantic comedies, after all, aren’t known for gazing deep into life’s abyss to see what stares back at them.