If you have ever had a nightmare of being abducted by aliens, maybe avoid this movie. It’s harrowing and has one of the most brutal alien encounters scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.
Based on Travis Walton’s book The Walton Experience, which describes a “this really happened” extraterrestrial encounter, this movie features D.B. Sweeney as the author and Robert Patrick plays his brother-in-law. It also may be the second time Henry Thomas met an alien, but trust me, this one doesn’t go as well.
November 5, 1975. Snowflake, Arizona,. Loggers Travis Walton (Sweeney), Mike Rogers (Patrick), Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer, One Tree Hill), David Whitlock (Peter Berg, Very Bad Things), Greg Hayes (Thomas) and Bobby Cogdill (Bradley Gregg, Class of 1999) are out in the woods when a UFO blasts Walton away to, well, somewhere and the other men are accused of murder by Sheriff Blake Davis (Noble Willingham) and Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner).
However, Walton shows up alive days later, suffering from flashbacks to the nightmare that he has survived, one that no one believes. However, the filmmakers thought the real Walton’s story was boring, so they embellished. And by embellished, I mean they went into nightmare crazy world and made a movie that still scares me every time I watch it.
This movie holds the distinction of being some of Rick Baker’s first work. Made in Mexico, it was directed by Harry Essex, who wrote It Came from Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Dr. Rick Torres (Kerwin Mathews, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) and Susan Lowry (Pier Angeli in her final film, as she died during production of the film) has found not just too much radiation in the waters of a small Mexican town, but also a mutant octopus that can crawl on land.
The mainstream science community scoffs at this notion, so Torres must work with circus owner Johnny Caurso (Jerome Guardino, who in addition to acting, as also the second-unit director from Grave of the Vampire and Dream No Evil), who wants to take the octopus on the road.
There’s some ridiculousness here with David Essex (The Cremators) as Davido, a Mexican Indian who shares the legend of the half-serpent, half-man that lives in these waters. He’s able to escape just about any predicament due to his magical native powers.
The man in the Octaman suit was Read Morgan, who was The Car, Blood Beach, Dudes, Hollywood Hot Tubs and more. The suit was so fragile and the vision so limited, that led to the shambling, near drunken way that the creature moves.
Even if you haven’t seen this movie, you’ve seen it. In Fright Night, Peter Vincent shows the final scenes — where beauty does indeed kill the beast — as being from a movie called Mars Needs Flesh.
You know, I liked this movie more than I ever would have thought. I’ve disliked nearly everything Pete Davidson has done on Saturday Night Live, seeing him as, at best, a one-note stand-up jammed into a show where the best he can do is look sleepy and break in nearly every sketch.
Yet this movie, a semi-autobiography as Davidson’s father was also a firefighter who died on 9/11, was moving and well-done.
It’s not without its problems. Like every Judd Apatow movie, there’s no reason for it to be two hours and sixteen minutes. The guy has no idea how to end a movie on time.
Marisa Tomei again shows why she really did deserve that Oscar and wow, Bill Burr was a revelation. The guy is so natural and perfect here, as is Bel Powley as Davidson’s love interest.
Pamela Adlon, who plays Burr’s ex-wife, is actually the voice of Bobby Hill on King of the Hill, which is a shock. And Steve Buscemi, who was a firefighter while beginning his acting career, is great as usual.
I was expecting a self-indulgent mess and got a thoughtful film. I promise not to judge Davidson so harshly in the future.
Jack Smight directed Rod Steiger in this film and in the incredibly dark The Illustrated Man, a movie that he bought the rights to film from Ray Bradbury. He’d also direct Airport 1975and Damnation Alley.
George Segal, who is the hero of this film, told the Chicago Tribune, “It’s Steiger’s film. He runs around doing all sorts of different roles and I just stop by and watch him.”
He isn’t wrong.
Christopher Gill (Steiger) is obsessed with his late mother, a theater actress whose shadow still weighs on him long after her death. He hates her so much that he keeps killing versions of her again and again, using acting to win over the elder ladies before snuffing their lives out and leaving lipstick all over their faces.
Detective Morris Brummell (Segal) is the cop trying to find the killer, but he’s beaten up by his mother constantly and falling for Lee Remick. Who can blame him?
This was originally a William Goldman novel. Plenty of films have been, including Magic, The Princess Bride and Heat. He also wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives, Misery, Dreamcatcher and The General’s Daughter.
This movie was playing in Vallejo, California in April 1969. That’s when the Zodiac Killer was murdering his initial victims. It’s believed that the Zodiac loved movies and that he may have been influenced by the way that the killer in this movie taunted the cops.
This is one of Becca’s favorite movies, which is another of the many, many reasons why I love her so much.
Here’s the official description of this film from the fine folks at October Coast: “Weekend campers, an escaped convict, young lovers and a police officer experience a night of terror when a hostile visitor from another world descends on a small Arizona town.”
As for the title of this film, it doesn’t make sense until the end, which comes out of nowhere for a movie that up until then has felt like Without Warning 2020.
We covered director Joseph Mbah’s film Expo on the site and as I was looking back on it, I remember that I called out that that film had more than ten minutes of credits. This one started with nearly three and ends with eleven minutes or more. So, if you love credits, good news!
I really liked the design of the alien monster in this, which felt very 1950’s science fiction. I was expecting to not see any creatures in this, so I was pleasantly surprised to have so many creature effects.
Battlefield 2025 is available on demand from Uncork’d Entertainment, who was nice enough to send us a copy to review.
As a new student at an all-girls boarding school, Manuela has started to fall in love with her teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg. Manuela is played by Hertha Thiele, whose career, according to German film historians Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramman , was shaped by the fact that “her acting success may well have been based upon her image which met the homoerotic desires of both men and women, though perhaps more those of women.”
What’s even more astounding is that this tale of illicit first lesbian love was made in Germany during the Third Reich. It’s also an incredibly anti-fascist film made right under their noses.
Screenwriter Christa Winsloe based this movie on her life. Directly on her life, that is. Theile shared, “The whole of Mädchen in Uniform was set in the Empress Augusta boarding school, where Winsloe was educated. Actually there really was a Manuela, who remained lame all of her life after she threw herself down the stairs. She came to the premiere of the film. I saw her from a distance, and at the time Winsloe told me “The experience is one which I had to write from my heart.” Winsloe was a lesbian.”
The movie made its way around the world — Japan, the United States (where it was first banned, then released in a censored version after Eleanor Roosevelt championed it), England and France — before it was banned in Germany until a pro-Nazi ending was added. Finally, the film was just as seen as too decadent and banned again.
You can get this new release — as well as Victor, Victoria which we’ll get to tomorrow — from Kino Lorber. The blu ray comes compete with commentary by film historian Jenni Olson.
When David Roberts (Craig Lindquist), a successful man suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s wanders away from home a day before Thanksgiving, his already dysfunctional family, headed by his son Matthew (Kyler Steven Fisher), splintering under the financial and spiritual strain in caring for their patriarch, snaps.
Out on the streets alone, David comes to develop a spiritually-mending friendship with Christine (Shayla McCaffrey), a fatherless, thirteen-year-old homeless girl who saved him after a street beating. Through the faith and selflessness of their “father’s keeper,” the Roberts family comes to restore their own family and faith.
Our Father’s Keeper is admittedly different from the genres of films in the indie marketplace that we normally review here at B&S About Movies. And we know that faith-based films are not palpable subject matter for everyone. And in these current hard times, as we deal with a global pandemic, the last thing anyone wants to watch is a movie about a family struggling with a disease.
But it also the exact time that we need a movie like Our Father’s Keeper in the marketplace to affirm that there is a light at the end of even the darkest tunnels.
This intelligently-written feature film debut by screenwriter Chris Dallimore is directed by Rob Diamond. An award-winning writer and director in his own right, Diamond’s been behind the keyboard and lens since the late ’90s and amassed twenty-plus credits in both disciplines.
Fans of character actor Danny Trejo may already be familiar with Diamond’s work, as Trejo starred in two of his previous films: Justin Time, a 2010 family-adventure, and Propensity, a 2006 dramatic-thriller. Diamond’s forte is, of course, faith-based films and his works in that genre, The Last Straw, starring Corbin Bernsen, and Wayward: The Prodigal Son, won Utah Awards in 2013 and 2015.
Hopefully, based on that production pedigree and the fact that Diamond can bring familiar, quality actors such as Trejo and Bernsen onto his projects, it will encourage one to watch Our Father’s Keeper. Putting the faith-based subject matter aside, Our Father’s Keeper is a well-made film that features stellar performances from its unknown, new-to-the-streaming-screen cast. Craig Lindquist and Shayla McCaffrey, in particular, will each quickly expand their now slight resumes with larger, more mainstream projects. Thread reviewers name drop “Hallmark” in their comments on the film. I feel the subject matter of Our Father’s Keeper is a bit too heavy for that channel’s warm n’ fuzzy rom-com catalog. It is, however, deserving of wider exposure on the family-friendly Up cable channel (which began its broadcast life as Gospel Music Channel and GMC-TV).
Streaming in the online marketplace for several months on Amazon Prime and the You Tube channel of the faith and family-based Encourage TV (which also streams on Roku and Android TV), Our Father’s Keeper made its premiere as a free-with-ads stream this month on TubiTv.
Disclaimer: We weren’t provided an advanced screener or a review request by the film’s PR company, distributor, or director. We discovered this film all on our own via social media and genuinely enjoyed the movie.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Everyone dreams of second chances as they fight their demons of regret over past decisions and time wasted.
This is the quandary facing Nick (Mason Heidger, the upcoming psychological short, Tomorrow Is Yesterday), a loveable “mad scientist” obsessed with the concept of time travel. Now, seven years after his first experiments, his career and finances are in a shambles, his family and friends have abandoned him, and his marriage with Jess (Tori Titmas) has ended in divorce — which exacerbates his resolve to make the hypothetical a scientific reality. If he can make his machine work so he can get a government contract, he can get his life back. . . .
Nick’s fortunes change when a consortium realizes Nick is closer to success than Dr. Kent (Steve Berglund), their own frazzled, chief time travel physicist. Nick will receive the funding needed to finish the project and have a permanent job, provided he travels with Dr. Kent into the past. And it works . . . and the machine blows the home’s fuse box and leaves them stranded seven years in the past, as they wait several hours for the machine to recharge its mainframe.
The temptation to “break the rules of time travel,” i.e., not tampering with the past and altering the present, complicate the trip when Nick discovers he’s surrounded by the friends and family that once shunned him — on the night of his engagement party when he first proposed to Jess, the woman he just divorced.
As the tagline on the theatrical one-sheet states: Making Time was shot in two days. . . .
And the genesis of the film was . . . a home renovation.
Writer-director Grant Pichla and his wife, Lyndsay, were in the process of remodeling their suburban home, so Pichla “seized the day” by using the real life “set” as an opportunity to illustrate time travel. Principal photography of first half of the film — the past, with the house in a shambles — was filmed in “real time” over the course of one day. The second half of the film — the present, with the remodel completed — was film seven months later.
If you’re familiar with the intelligence of Shane Carruth’s low-budget time travel drama Primer and Charlie Kaufman’s (Adaptation) sci-fi romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (both 2004), then you’ll enjoy the character-driven premise of Grant Pichla’s sophomore feature film (his first was 2014’s Niner). If you connected with the scientific wanderlust of the recently released Red Rover, Shane Belcourt’s indie rom-com centered around the Mars One Project, you’ll enjoy this inventive time travel romance.
Making Time is, in fact, the second low-budget time travel movie I’ve watched this year: the other was the sci-fi rom-com Same Boat. And as with that utterly brilliant Chris Roberti-directed film, Making Time is the type of film that inspires mainstream A-List producers to take notice. And as with my prediction that we’ll be seeing more from Chris Roberti: we’ll be seeing more from Grant Pichla. It’s just a matter of time. And the clock will strike sooner, than later.
The same holds true for Michigan-based lead actor Mason Heidger, who’s appeared in an array of shorts and indie features (along with a dayplayer role as Officer Rucka in the Detroit-shot scenes of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). His co-star, Tori Titmas, recently made her feature film screenwriting debut with the comedy The Girls of Summer.
As I watched Heidger’s performance unfold, I was reminded of the acting brilliance of Jim Parsons in his portrayal of Sheldon Cooper in CBS-TV’s The Big Bang Theory. Heidger’s thespian skills in rattling off scientific expositional dialogue are on equal. Is the “science” of time accurately based in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics? Is it all just a screenwriting trick-of-the-keyboard? No matter. It is written and acted with such conviction by team Pichla-Heidger, that they convinced me — as I ponder what reading materials, besides filmmaking texts, sits on the shelves of Pichla’s remodeled house.
My only quibble (and it’s not a deal breaker) with the film is the time machine itself. In the lo-fi lands of indie film, we’re certainly not expecting a Robert Zemeckis-inspired DeLorean to appear . . . but what “sold” Shane Carruth’s Primer to indie-fans was the inventive construction of his lab and its related props on-a-budget. In Making Time, the time machine does appear, as one thread reviewer pointed out, to be a (black) sheet draped over a cone strung with Christmas lights (and a short stack of DVD decks/cable boxes “hooked” up to an iPad). But hey, actor Peter Fonda rigged up 8-Track players to send (nude) people through time in an underground desert bunker in Idaho Transfer — and Sam and I like that Mill Creek public domain ditty. And I enjoyed Making Time.
After a successful festival run — where it won awards for Best Acting Performance of the Year and Best Supporting Actress at the 2019 LA Actors Awards, and Best Indie Feature at the 2020 Vegas Movie Awards — Making Time began streaming in the online marketplace via Amazon Prime and premiered this month as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTV through Indie Rights Movies. You can learn more about the film at its official Facebook page.
You can learn more about IRM’s roster of films on their official website, along with their Facebook and You Tube pages. Back in March and April, we reviewed two of Indie Rights’ most recent releases: M.O.M: Mother of Monsters (starring Ed Asner of TV’s Lou Grant fame) and the equally intelligent and inventive sci-fi thriller Double Riddle. You can also watch Tori Titmas in The Girls of Summer — directed by . . . wait for it . . . only at B&S About Movies . . . John D. Hancock, the writer-director of the 1971 Drive-In psychological-horror classicLet’s Scare Jessica to Death — via IRM on TubiTV.
Update: April 2022: Persistence and time pays off for Mason Heidger. He booked his first network television gig on NBC-TVs Chicago P.D. with the Season 9: Episode 19 “Fool’s Gold.” You can now stream it online at NBC.com.
Disclaimer: We weren’t provided an advanced screener or a review request by the film’s PR company, distributor, or director. We discovered Making Time on our own via social media and genuinely enjoyed the movie.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
Turns out The Island of Dr. Moreau is the next one over from Blood Island. This Filipino-lensed production was directed by the always dependable Eddie Romero and stars the equally trustworthy John Ashley. It’s everything you want it to be — trashy, goofy, transcendent.
Matt Farrell (Ashley) is kidnapped by Neva Gordon (Pat Woodell, The Roommates) and Steinman and taken to an island where her father Dr. Gordon is making a super race of animals and humans. He wants Farrell to be his next hybrid, but his daughter falls for him and they decide to let all the animal people — including Pam Grier as Ayesa the Panther Woman and a truly insane looking bat person named Darmo — escape.
Didn’t Eddie Romero already make this movie and call it Terror Is A Man? Ah, quit being a know-it-all and just enjoy.
A formula, if you will: Clash of the Titans X made in the Philippines X werewolves + witches + a cyclops + vampires = Boy God, one of the strangest films I’ve seen (and just think what that entails).
Long story short: A young boy who has superpowers and is immortal battles to free his parents from the limbo where they are doing penance for their sins.
See, his parents got gunned down the night he was born and now, he’s super strong and can roll as a ball, except when he gets wet. Got it? He battles Dr. Meagele, then some werewolf witches — yes the same people — who want to cook him like a pig before a giant vampire bat attacks him and he meets the god Vulcan.
I also forgot that the Stone Boy/Boy God was of divine birth, but it feels more like The Entity than the Good News. Also: This is a kid movie.
Why Mondo Macabro hasn’t released this yet astounds me. I love those guys, but they gotta get on it. It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen where werewolf women baste a small boy while discussing how they can’t wait to eat him.
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