A Film Studies graduate with a very healthy obsession with all things Kubrick, here I am surfing an internet awash with opinions to add mine to the ocean.
Young adults Hannah (Janessa Floyd), Andrew (Aidan Hart) and Colin (Jeffrey Brabant) are heading into the remote Maryland woods to attend a Bible retreat. Hannah and Andrew are signed-up Christians. Colin is a skeptic, wishing to document their experience, and he holds their one and only camera. We’re in found footage country, folks. The initiates…
From Joe Lynch, director of “Everly,” comes Mayhem, an ugly mishmash of the zombie apocalypse and tower assault subgenres. Unwisely referencing “A Clockwork Orange” in the opening, with Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” overlaid on some stylized ultra-violence, Derek (Steven Yeun, “Okja”) explains the “IV7” virus via narration. It’s a condition which purportedly causes the sufferer…
Sometime in the 1990s, somewhere in Toronto, in the scuzzy Gemini Motel, a prostitute is raped. She becomes pregnant. Overcome with grief, she kills herself. Cut to 23 years later, and it seems the baby survived. Helen (Alanna LeVierge, “Mia and Me” TV series) is at a loss in the world. She’s drawn to the…
From Andrew Wiest, director of the Christian fable “The Adventures of Chris Fable” (no, really), a bargain bin supermarket exclusive from 2010, comes The Forlorned, an inept, micro-budget horror movie. It aims low and delivers; and although it fundamentally fails as a horror movie — or indeed any kind of a movie seeking to tell…
Released nearly two years ago, it turns out that Hell House LLC wasn’t the complete package. Some intended VFX shots for the final sequence were never completed, and investor anxiety over breaching the 100-minute mark meant eight minutes of characterization was shaved from the original release. This “director’s cut,” which I saw, reinstates some of…
Eat Locals begins with a group of vampires convening in an English country farmhouse. Like Mafioso, they’re here to discuss their turf. Saucy Vanessa (Eve Myles, “Keeping Faith” TV series) has seduced a young Romany bloke named Sebastian (Billy Cook, “Trespass Against Us”) and introduced him as a potential replacement for a rogue vampire who’s…
From “Black Christmas” through “Silent Night, Deadly Night” and onto “Krampus,” there is a fine tradition of Christmas-themed horrors running through the decades, and Red Christmas, the feature debut from writer-director Craig Anderson, fits comfortably into the canon. The Christian festival of family and giving is the perfect backdrop for an ultra-violent cautionary tale about…
