Nelson Hibbert (Dave Foley) is the kind of corporate ladder-climber who thinks he’s a shark but is actually a goldfish. When he loses the executive promotion at Nagel Industries, despite marrying his boss’s daughter, he decides to storm the big boss’s office and unleash a tirade for the ages, yelling “Go to hell, you bastard! I swear. I will kill you! You are dead to me!”

Instead of a promotion, he finds Mr. Nagel slumped over with a knife in his back. Nelson’s brain immediately hits the panic button. He assumes that because he was angry and present, he’s Public Enemy Number One. He bolts and goes on the lam, changing his look, living in the woods and trying to survive off the grid.

The kicker? The office security cameras captured the entire murder, and the police have zero interest in Nelson. He is a fugitive running from a law that isn’t even looking for him, while simultaneously trying to stay one step ahead of the actual killer who starts tracking him down. It’s a farce of errors where the biggest threat to Nelson is his own panicked imagination.

Foley co-wrote the script with Jay Kogen (who wrote for The Simpsons) and Wallace Wolodarsky. You can feel the sharp, cynical humor of the Kids in the Hall era throughout the entire runtime. And David Steinberg was a massive influence on the comedy scene for decades. His background in stand-up and his work on shows like Designing Women and Seinfeld gave him the perfect sensibility to frame this film as a series of escalating, claustrophobic miscommunications.

There’s no way this movie was going to be a success. It’s too weird, too full of character actors I love (Joe Flaherty, Jennifer Tilly and, of course, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson in cameos; what was Bruce McCulloch, causing more cancer?), too all over the place. It’s like an episode of The Simpsons when you were a kid or Mad Magazine. It’s as dense as dense can be when it comes to jokes, and I laughed out loud like six times, which is more than I’ve laughed in weeks.

This never came out in theaters and barely made it to DVD. My kind of movie.

Also: You should know that as a kid, I totally wanted to grow up to be Joe Flaherty. He remains a hero.

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

In the video game Fatal Frame, you are Miku Hinasaki, a young woman with a sixth sense for the spectral. Her brother, Mafuyu, has gone missing while investigating the infamous Himuro Mansion. It’s a place so steeped in bad vibes and urban legend that the locals won’t even talk about it. Miku heads into the belly of the beast to find him, only to realize that the mansion is a sprawling, multi-dimensional trap filled with the vengeful spirits of those who died during a botched ritual. But instead of killing things, you capture their souls on film to banish them.

Director Makoto Shibata and producer Keisuke Kikuchi didn’t just want to make a game; they wanted to craft a sensory experience. They drew heavily on Japanese war films and classic ghost stories. They were obsessed with making this the scariest thing possible, to the point where they had to cut some of the more graphic ideas because they were just too intense.

When the game hit North American shelves, the marketing department went full exploitation-hustle, slapping “Based on a True Story” on the box. Did a real mansion in Japan have a creepy ritual? Maybe. Does it matter? Not really.

Mari Asato’s 2014 adaptation Fatal Frame: The Movie (or Gekijōban Zero) is going to throw you a curveball if you think it’s going to be based on the game. Instead of frantic survival horror, this is a much moodier, gothic-drenched melodrama that trades jump scares for a haunting, atmospheric exploration of isolation and forbidden love.

The story centers on Aya Tsukimori (Ayami Nakajō), the coolest girl at a strict Catholic boarding school, who suddenly barricades herself in her dorm room. She becomes an urban legend, as students who kiss a photo of Aya at midnight disappear, only to be found later, drowned. When Michi Kazato (Aoi Morikawa) begins digging into the vanishing of her classmates, she finds herself pulled into a supernatural web that is far older and more tragic than a simple schoolyard curse. The plot gets pretty convoluted, involving a photographer named Mary (Noriko Nakagoshi) who archives the past suicides of women who couldn’t face a society that rejected their love. I

So yes, while sold as a video game tie-in, this is based on Fatal Frame: A Curse Affecting Only Girls by Eiji Ohtsuka, which explains why this feels like a doomed romance influenced by lesbian vampire films. It was directed and written by Mari Asato.