The plot is lean and mean: Ismael (Martín Garabal), a veteran pilot with a world-weary edge, and his atypical, rookie co-pilot Daniela (Elena de Lara) are mid-flight when the sky decides to break. They aren’t just dealing with turbulence. They’ve stumbled into the front lines of an invasion by the Audryes, an interdimensional alien species looking to wipe out humanity. It’s up to our mismatched duo—trapped inside the cockpit—to keep the plane in the air and the universe from imploding.

Garabal brings a fantastic, grounded comedic timing to the role. He’s the anchor of this madness, delivering lines with the weary precision of a man who has seen it all and is now being asked to deal with things he wasn’t trained for in flight school. And as the trainee co-pilot, de Lara starts off shaky, perfectly capturing that thrown into the deep end energy. As the film progresses and the layers of her character peel back, she becomes the wild card that the movie desperately needs.

Despite being set almost entirely within the confines of a cockpit, the production team skipped the cheap, flat look of standard chroma key. Instead, they used LED technology to project interdimensional backgrounds in real time. This isn’t just window dressing; it bathes the actors in the actual, vibrant light of the horrors they are facing.

And for the true heads out there, pay attention to the alien evidence: the proof of the Audryes’ arrival is a mutant, man-eating peanut. It’s a hilarious, direct nod to the short film Gritos en el pasillo, directed by writer Juanjo Ramírez Mascaró, proving that this guy has a very specific, very welcome obsession with killer legumes.

La cosa en la niebla is a fast, punchy ride. While it’s a shame we don’t get more time with the secondary characters—especially the insufferable Borja—the central chemistry between Garabal and de Lara keeps the engine running. It’s a respectful, slightly absurd love letter to sixties sci-fi comics that treats the genre with both humor and heart. I love the neon.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

This is the feature-length debut from director Donnie Hobbie, and frankly, it’s a shot of adrenaline for anyone who misses the days when movies were built out of neon, smoke machines, bucket-loads of Karo syrup blood and wall-to-wall heavy metal.

Jump Scare, a struggling all-female metal band, hits the road in search of inspiration. They head to a remote desert shack—the same spot where their heroes, the legendary band Blitzgasm, mysteriously vanished years earlier. The band is a powder keg of personality clashes, featuring bassist Kye (Shannon Dang), Val (Chelsea Talmadge), Debbie (Madison Abbott), and Jen (Erin Ruth Walker). Keeping the chaos barely contained is their long-suffering roadie, Dale (Casey Morris).

Before the chainsaws come out, the movie spends a good chunk of time letting the band bicker. It’s a great dynamic. They’re constantly at each other’s throats, screaming about the purity of metal versus the sell-out temptation of sampling and pop hooks. It’s snappy, profane, and genuinely funny, which is a blessing, because it makes you actually care when things inevitably go south.

They quickly discover their neighbors are a clan of Bible-thumping cannibals. The family is led by the terrifyingly devout Karen (Natasha Estrada) and a group of very strange, very dumb men—including none other than genre legend Eric Roberts. Seeing Roberts pop up in a project like this is always a treat; he’s the king of the “I’ll do anything once” genre landscape, and he leans into the depravity here with his usual effortless, wild-eyed charm.

What elevates Jump Scare from a standard slasher is Hobbie’s visual confidence. He isn’t just telling a story; he’s crafting a drugged-out nightmare. The film uses disruptive text inserts and aggressive cutaways that scream The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, not just as an inspiration, but as a blueprint. There’s a meta-layer here where the band actually realizes they are living through the very slasher tropes they’ve seen on screen, which adds some cynicism that plays perfectly against the mindless brutality.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Alvin Lee makes a bloody mess of his life, catching his wife in bed with a lover and executing them both. Bleeding out and staring into the abyss, he begs for one final audience with his 13-year-old daughter, Lila Lee.

His daughter, 13-year-old Lila Lee (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith, Phantom of the Paradise, The Incredible Melting Man, Laserblast and short time member of The Runaways and drummer for Joan Jett) is the star of the church, where her voice and beauty draw attention — thanks to the peculiar beauty people from her hometown have, which is known as the “Astaroth Look” (inspired by the “Innsmouth look” from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth).

While the Reverend (director Richard Blackburn, who co-wrote and appeared in Eating Raoul, as well as appearing as the voice of Dr. Zaius in the Return to the Planet of the Apes cartoon and Stunt Rock) tries to shield her from the gossip of her father’s gangster past, the pull of the letter draws her toward the town of Astaroth. It’s a journey paved with red flags: a perverted ticket taker, a bus trip that turns into a midnight vampire ambush and the eerie realization that her religious guardians might have their own carnal designs on her.

Interestingly, that church is on a soundstage that was once Mayberry for TV’s Andy Griffith Show.

That said — the letter leads her to find the town of Astaroth, despite dealing with a young couple who discuss how the Reverend obviously wants to have sex with her, a ticket taker offering her strange candy and a broken-down bus ride that ends with a vampire attack.

Rescued by Lemora, the Queen of the Vampires, Lila is taken to an ancient stone estate. Here, the film sheds its skin; it’s not just about blood-drinking, but about the predatory nature of influence. Lemora feeds her wine that tastes suspiciously like copper, demands she sing for the children of the house, and subjects her to an unsettling, intimate grooming process. 

Lila goes to her room, and her father, now a vampire, attacks her. Lemora explains that over the last year, many people have become ugly and beast-like; they need to be killed. Lemora sucks the vampire blood out of the wound Lila has, then reads her a bedtime story and brushes her hair.

Tomorrow, there will be a blood ceremony that will make Lila and Lemora sisters, allowing them to share power. “Will it be in a church? Baptist?” asks Lila. “No, more ancient,” answers Lemora.

As Lila explores the house, she finds the diary of a girl who was in her shoes in the past. Turns out that Lemora is the queen of the vampires, feeding on her adopted children. So Lila escapes through the town, just as the Reverend comes to save her. As Lila’s father has become one of the monsters, she must kill him. Lila mourns, prompting Lemora to offer her a vampire’s kiss. When the Reverend finally arrives, Lila reaches out to him, wanting to embrace and kiss him, something that he had resisted in the past. Now, she overcomes him, and as they embrace, she bites into his neck as Lemora watches. We cut to Lila singing in church as the movie ends.

I’d compare this film — subtitled “A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural” — with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It’s richly dark, both in lighting and subject matter. It feels more like a dream or a children’s fable than a movie and is worth multiple viewings. It’s such a shame that this movie has been lost and forgotten for so long.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Enduring Destiny (2014): If you ever wanted to see what happens when the ambition of a film school student collides with the total lack of a budget and a massive amount of hubris, you’ve found it. Enduring Destiny is the reason to be for Thomas Reilly-King (TRK), a college student who has been in school for what could be a decade. He cared less about being a student and more about creating an auteur film — or vanity project, the line is so thin — that’s a sprawling, unclassifiable epic.

TRK plays the lead, writes the script and directs the madness, forcing his friends to inhabit his world. He approaches the lead role with the kind of unflappable intensity usually reserved for Method actors playing historical figures, not kids making movies in their dorms. He also insisted on an 80s-style theme song that sounds like it was recorded on a Casio keyboard in a wind tunnel. It is the perfect, misplaced anthem for a movie that doesn’t actually exist in the 80s but wishes that it could.

Max Kenner is our hero, a scholarship wrestler and aspiring C.I.A. agent. He has traveled from his suburban California home and is away from his high school sweetheart, Jessica Bateman (Ariel Vida). All alone during a bitterly cold semester at Michigan State University, he will endure triumphs, romance, comedy, mishaps and downright misery. Once a squeaky-clean, slightly cocky guy of privilege and self-determination, he is thrust into a humbling life of physical dependence after tragedy strikes. As a man in a wheelchair, Max’s masculinity is challenged by his reliance on others. 

Don’t step on my brakes, as the song sings. This feels like it lives in the same world as A Karate Christmas Miracle or the zero-budget religious movies that I love, except it’s secular and therefore somehow even more innocent, charming and just plain off. Or maybe a movie like Heard She Got Married, if it had no sense of collaboration. Anyway, whatever it is, it’s entertaining.

First Feature (2026): If you’ve ever spent your last dime on a roll of film, bullied your friends into acting in your magnum opus, or realized halfway through production that your vision is absolutely insane, then you know exactly what’s going on in First Feature. This isn’t just a documentary; it’s a time capsule of ambition, ego and the beautiful, messy reality of DIY filmmaking.

The film follows the journey of Thomas Reilly-King (TRK), an indefatigable student filmmaker with a singular goal: to birth his masterpiece, Enduring Destiny, into the world. Shot over several years, the documentary tracks TRK as he stretches his budget, his friendships and his sanity to the breaking point.

Intercut with this chaos is the perspective of his classmate and documentarian, Curtis Matzke. Looking back ten years later, Matzke provides the necessary distance to examine the absurdity of the original production. It’s a classic case of the tortured artist trope played out in a dorm room setting, capturing that specific, frantic energy of someone convinced they are making the next Citizen Kane while actually operating on a shoestring budget and sheer willpower.

The heart of this film is TRK himself. He serves as the writer, director and lead actor, the holy trinity of the independent filmmaker’s complex. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t just want to make a movie; he wants to build an empire. We watch as he calls in every favor available, treats his student crew like a Hollywood production team  and dives headfirst into the pitfalls of digital-age filmmaking. Watching him navigate the professional aspirations of a student filmmaker against the bizarre, homemade reality of Enduring Destiny is both painful and deeply relatable for anyone who has ever tried to create something out of nothing.

First Feature captures that unique moment in a filmmaker’s life when good doesn’t matter as much as getting it done. It’s a raw, funny and surprisingly poignant look at the obsessive nature of the creative process. If you’ve ever sat through a local screening of a movie that clearly meant everything to its director, you’ll find yourself nodding along to every frame of this documentary. It’s a love letter to the process, warts and all.

I love that TRK made talking action figures of himself and characters from the movie that cost $5,000, which is more than half of Enduring Destiny‘s budget.

This is an essential watch before or after Enduring Destiny.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.