To describe the plot of One Cut of the Dead is to (slightly) spoil it, but it is also to highly recommend it. Without giving away too many details, director Shin’ichirô Ueda delivers a film within a film within a film (plus a bit extra), making it a gloriously meta-meta movie about movie making. If…
Dead Squad: Temple of the Undead is a full-fledged assault on your brain, particularly the pleasure center parts that produce serotonin and dopamine. If you have the endurance to stick it out to its conclusions, your only happiness will be derived from the arrival of the end credits. I know it seems like I’m hedging…
Mahal (Kelly Lou Dennis, “Three Tutus and a Gun”) is an aswang, an ancient race of vampires derived from Philippine folklore. But that aspect of her being is deeply repressed, and her role in present-day San Francisco is to be a member of an elite vampire-hunter squad. Mahal’s mission is to track down and kill…
Zombie films have always been hotbeds of teeth-gnashing, blood splatter and almost the origin of stellar gore effects in cinema. But classics of the subgenre such as Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” and George Romero’s “Dead Series” have equally served as sociological petri dishes in which the filmmakers examine our own societies. While this breed…
The one useful purpose that Night of Something Strange may provide is as an interesting counterpoint to another horror contemporary, “WTF!.” Both are modern takes on the 1970s and 1980s teen slasher model, and both depict shallow, reprehensible heroes getting slaughtered. But while “WTF!” succeeds as a critique of its protagonists’ vacuity, Night of Something…
Social media giant Instagram receives some light ribbing in Martin Sofiedal’s four minute short, Instapocalypse, which suggests that a world-ruining zombie apocalypse was actually caused by the public’s unhealthy obsession with their smartphones. This is all a comical setup, established in a clunky piece of expository dialogue, on which to hang a single scene where…
Allison Hillstead (Marie Barker, “Horror Hotel: The Webseries”) has enough on her plate handling the house she just inherited and trying to lock down a post graduation job. With a time sensitive interview in mere hours and a Wilderness Scout knocking on her door, the last thing she needs is any more problems, but apparently…
