Christmas Blood is rather a bland title. Perhaps in translating from the native Norwegian — the snappier “Juleblod” — they could have jumped to the unused moniker of “Silent Night, Deadly Night”: “Slayride.” Reinert Kiil’s film is very much in the same ballpark as the 1984 seasonal “classic” (there aren’t that many slasher flicks where…
Dismissed, in a nutshell, is every teacher’s nightmare made flesh: A psychopathic student seeking revenge because he was given a poor grade (in this case a B+). Sidenote: I wish I could inspire such soaring ambition in my own students. In trying to sell this nightmare, the teacher becomes incredibly stupid. He does asinine things…
The Romanian found-footage movie Be My Cat: A Film for Anne is about an aspiring filmmaker who goes to some unusual lengths to convince actress Anne Hathaway to appear in one of his films. This sounds like a fine premise for a horror movie, but the result is more of an uninspired, tedious thriller wannabe…
The devastating, sharp The Anatomy of Monsters is the kind of movie that lures one into thinking it’s yet another exploitative woman-in-peril movie only to pivot into a seedy, multilayered labyrinth. Aside from an ineffectual first ten minutes, the movie is a solid — if somewhat claustrophobic — thriller. The film begins with Andrew (Jesse…
The movies enthusiastically embrace the cinema oddballs for our entertaining (and curious) purposes. Film freaks have always been the weird wonderment of big screen scrutiny and sometimes celebration. Who in this lifetime has not felt like an outsider at one time or another? The definition of being freaky can cover any spectrum or degree of…
As a kid, watching “Tom and Jerry” was must-see TV. Observing that poor blue cat getting outsmarted by a tiny brown mouse (episode after episode after episode) never — incredibly — got old. I always knew Jerry was going to get the last laugh, no matter how close Tom got to beating him. Cat and…
There is really but one image conjured up when one thinks about Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Predators. Men preying upon the underaged for sex. But this archaic social medium (when compared to the latest social networks) hosts other questionable types too. Some are hackers. Others pirate movies and software. And some can be described as…
