Isaac Ward is the first “hue” in a world that has only been black and white, learning that he is filled with color after being shot. As he begins to turn multiple colors, he is not alone, and as society begins to reel from this new development, they start to capture these unexplainable colors and war seems ready to break out at any moment as the result.
Written and directed by Kodi Zene*, consider this film a somewhat post-apocalyptic Pleasantville. This is but the first of many films planned in this series, along with comic books and merchandise.
This film has a really solid and striking visual look, as the colors and Hues themselves break the black and white pallette that this film creates. I’m excited to see where this story can go with a richer budget and more time. It’s definitely worth a watch.
You can learn more at the official page. Monochrome: The Chromism is available on demand from Tempest Studios.
Archibald Prize-winning artist Adam Cullen — the award is the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia — asked journalist Erik Jensen to write his biography. Jensen moved in with the artist and ended up stayed for about four years, during which Cullen spiraled into drug use and weapons possession. In fact, to show his commitment to telling Cullen’s story, Jensen was shot in the leg.
After Cullen’s death in 2012, Jensen completed and published Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen. The writer was pretty much traumatized by the experience, but felt that he had to finish writing the book to exorcise it from his soul.
Thomas M. Wright co-wrote, produced and directed this film, taking his acting knowledge and transforming it into a film that many considered one of Australia’s best films.
The film focuses on the complex relationship between the artist and his biographer. Wright wanted to not just make a biographical film or just make the movie of the story, but sought to question the book itself.
Authenticity was important to everyone involved. David Henshall, who plays Cullen, lost 49 pounds making the film. He wore Cullen’s actual clothes and used his paintbrushes in addition to meeting many of the people in the artist’s life.
While we don’t often cover films of this caliber, we recognize them when we do get to see them. If you’d like to learn the story behind the story, this is a worthwhile watch. This will be available on demand as of November 3.
As a young teen — with parent bought subscriptions to the National Lampoon and Spy — I was obsessed with all manner of strange religions and aberrant behavior, which starts as simply as Scientology and builds into lifelong obsessions with groups like the Jack Chick, Unarius UFO groups, the Process Church, the book Illuminatus! and, of course, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. Sadly, as everything good has been destroyed, even indulging in fringe conspiracy groups just gets sad these days. I was hoping that this documentary would show me a glimmer of hope and how slack could prevail against an increasingly darker world.
Originally called Slacking Towards Bethlehem: J.R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius, director Sandy K. Boone (this is his first film, yet he has produced several) explores this kind of sort of a church that took some smart, nerdy and even weird folks to examine the various ways that conspiracy and religion were crashing toward one another — which is where we are today — and then do nothing but make fun of it.
With a vast mythology that explains how Jehovah 1 gave salesman J.R. “Bob” Dobbs the secrets of the universe sometimes in the 50’s while containing references to Lovecraft and the ability to poke fun at other religions and exlaim that greed is good, the Subgenius ideals were pretty strong to my young mind. It didn’t hurt that adherents included de Mark Mothersbaugh, Mojo Nixon,Paul Reubens, Negativland, David Byrne, R. Crumb, Penn Jillette, Nick Offerman and Richard Linklater.
This movie does a decent job of setting up the path of this group and shows how that pre-internet, it was amazing to find people who shared the same values and interests that you did. Personal connections, while harder to come by, seemed to mean more.
Where my sadness with this film comes in — and this is for me only, perhaps — is that it really presented no answers as to how Bob fits in with our Q-Anon world of today. But perhaps that’s just slack in action, the idea of inaction and meaning nothing meaning everything. Here I was hoping for an explanation of everything, when the truth is that answer is that there is no answer. Things just are.
J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius is available on demand. We were sent a screener to watch and review, but that has no impact on our opinion of the film. Want to learn more about the Church of the Subgenius? They have an official site ready to indoctrinate you.
DAY. 20: HINDSIGHT IS 20/20: This one’s gotta have flashbacks in it (since looking ahead doesn’t seem to be working amirite?).
Don’t Look Now is the kind of movie that people should talk about in the same hushed tone that they reserve for The Exorcist and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and they don’t. That makes no sense to me, so perhaps these words will do something to change that.
Compared to Performance, director Nicolas Roeg’s directorial debut (he co-directed with Donald Cammell), this is a simple film. Compare it to anything else and it’s as complex as it gets. Roeg had already contributed to the horror genre with his director of photography work on The Masque of the Red Death, but this rumination on loss stands apart, using the genre itself to try and make sense out of the senseless.
In the same way that the giallo plays with themes of misinterpretation and mistaken identity often when it comes to sexual identity, this movie does the same when it comes to trying to get through the grief of losing a child and perhaps a marriage.
It’s also a deconstruction of how we perceive time through the lens of film. Instead of just flashbacks, this movie is filled with a fluid sense of time, in that we experience the past, present and the future almost simultaneously, as if we were Jon Osterman becoming the ubermensch Dr. Manhattan.
Real-life couple Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner (ironic, as this movie concerns a drowning death) were suggested for the leads of Laura and John Baxter, but Roeg only saw Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in his film. Sutherland was worried that the film gave a bad name to ESP, but Roeg told him this was the story they were telling.
John and Laura have come to Venice after the death of their daughter Christine in a drowning accident. While working to restore an ancient church, he meets two sisters. One of them, Heather (Hilary Mason, I Don’t Want to Be Born), is a psychic and she reveals that a great danger is coming for John. This danger — in all ways that we see time in the film — hangs as heavy as the death of his daughter, who the psychic reveals that she can see around the couple.
That night, before dinner, John and Laura finally make love after a long period of coolness, as she is relieved that her daughter seems to be at peace. This moment — the love scene is intercut with them getting ready for dinner afterward — plays with our notions of time, making this entire scene feel like a dream. It could also very well be an actual sex scene, as it was rumored for years that the acting couple was really having sex, to the consternation of Christie’s boyfriend Warren Beatty, who was usually the one doing the cucking.
At dinner, the couple is briefly separated and John sees what he believes to be his daughter. This image of her in the red coat she died in dominates the movie, luring him into more foreign places and deeper dangers. As their son is injured at boarding school, Laura must return home. Despite this, John sees her as part of a canal funeral procession. And oh yes — there’s also a serial killer on the loose.
I know that I often discuss the spoilers of films that are half a century old here, but in the hopes that you haven’t seen this film, I want you to enjoy the mystery that it presents for yourself. Roeg emerges as a consummate filmmaker here and this English giallo shot in Venice deserves so many more words than it has received.
If you don’t already own this — and you should — it’s on Amazon Prime.
Directed by Kendall Flanagan and Ollie Martin, the whole campaign for this movie pretty much seems to revolve around how bad it is. That said, I’ve seen plenty worse slashers, but I’m also someone who likes to eat the fruit out of the bottom of the broiler at the Melting Pot, as it were.
A rock band is making a movie on Lake Infinity and — as the title suggests — have a houseboat to live and work on. What follows is what you expect — red herrings as to the identity of the killer and what you don’t — a large portion of the movie is given to a hunt for mushrooms in the forest.
This is also pretty much Jason Vorhees down under, complete with a protective mom and harpooning lovers together just to make Mario Bava fans cry foul. It also uses plenty of music cues that sound exactly like they came from Crystal Lake. What it has that those movies don’t is a band that sounds like an Australian version of The Replacements at times and a killer named Acid Head.
What’s your tolerance for shot on video slashers? For movies where everyone has a mullet? Where continuity and lighting change within the very same scene? Allow this to determine whether or not you want to waste your time and watch this on YouTube.
Bill (Christopher George, taking a vacation from his wife, who is in nearly every movie with him), Jamie, Dan (Preston Pierce, Angels’ Wild Women) and Diana (Roberta Collins, Matilda the Hun from Death Race 2000) are on a treasure hunt deep in the Southern backwoods, seeking an inheritance of prices Civil War rifles. Sure, why not?
After thirty minutes of more of travelogue and dirt bike footage, you may wonder, “Has slasher month gone to Sam’s head? When are we going to get to the senseless violence?” Patience, slashawan.
The deeper into the South our protagonists find themselves, the less hospitality they get from the locals, but hey, there’s plenty of money on the other side of the rainbow on Whiskey Mountain, right? Well, there’s also a drug operation that runs everything around, even the cops, all headed up by Rudy (John Davis Chandler, probably the only actor I know that appeared in both Adventures In Babysitting and High Plains Drifter).
This is a movie that has all real marijuana as props and a soundtrack by the Charlie Daniels Band, along with the exact kind of horrors you know await them yankees when they ask too many questions and push too hard. It’s also filled with Peckinpah-esque slow motion — most effect with Heorge is double firing shotguns — to go with a brutal scene where we only hear the assault on the girls and see still evidence as it develops on Polaroids. Also — it’s 1977 and a technically a motorcycle movie. so that means that it also has a potential downer ending freeze frame.
I tell you what, William Grefé has never let me down. You can get this as part of the He Came from the Swamp box set that Arrow Video has just release. Diabolik DVD is a great bet to find a copy.
Witchouse is the kind of movie that I’d compromise with any girl I dated in 1999. The video store was closing, she wouldn’t watch a foreign film and it seemed like something close enough to what she wanted and that I could stomach. It is a film of, there’s that word again, compromise.
May Day 1998. Elizabeth Lafay — no relation to Abigail — has brought together the descendants of those that stopped her murderous Aunt Lilith by burning her at the stake three hundred years ago for a murderous party.
One of the party-goers is Janet, who is played by Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife (and friend to Paris Hilton) Brooke Mueller.
Filmed back to back with Retro Puppet Master, this is a Full Moon kind of movie, if you know what I’m saying and I think you do. That also means that there are two more in the series, if there wasn’t enough witch or house or witchouse here for you. It’s also kind of, sort of another installment of Night of the Demons if you were hoping for a third installment, filled with stock characters including one Linnea Quigley-ish lady who carries a guitar everywhere she goes so that we know she loves to rock and roll.
Four struggling band members stop at a lonely roadside cafe — blame low blood sugar — to grab some dinner and a slice of pie. However, they soon discover themselves trapped within the diner owner’s art collection and must now fight for their very souls.
Honey Lauren plays Ellinore in this. You may remember her from Vice Academy 5 and 6 or Wives of the Skies, the incredibly interesting film that she wrote and directed last year. She’s the one behind all of this mayhem, running “Elle’s Kountry Kitchen” in the town of Angel Falls, trapping the kids and planning even worse for her.
In fact, every photo in her restaurant contains the living souls of those who have dined there before. But Death itself is coming.
Directed by Terry Ross from a script by F. Scott Mudgett, my favorite part of this movie was the absolutely out there song that started off the film. It’s worth the price of this movie all by itself.
Renamed «Saw: The Beginning» in Russia while having nothing to do with that series of movies, this is the tale of two severely injured people — played by Thomas Cocquerel (Table 19) and Camille Stopps — who wake up to being tied down to an operating table in an abandoned sanitarium with only a deranged caretaker (Angus Macfadyen, who really was in the Saw series) to keep them alive and give them keys to their past.
There was also an alternate soundtrack to this movie made for Slipknot’s Knotfest by band member M Shawn Crahan.
It’s directed by Rob Grant, who made Mon Ami and the documentary Fake Blood that explores him investigating a disturbing movie sent to him after a fan watched that movie.
This is a pretty interesting film that has a twist that I did not see coming at all. It also has a really good look and isn’t strictly torture porn, despite what the Saw connection would lead you to believe.
DAY 19. BEYOND THE DARKNESS: Watch one with a love story in it. There’s more than one way to get mushy!
Inspired by the true story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the notorious “lonely hearts killers” of the 1940s, The Honeymoon Killers tells the tale with Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler, in her film debut, as the leads.
Ray starts the film by seducing Martha and stealing money from her, but it turns out that she may be every but his equal, using her wits to help him con and even kill numerous women from lonely hearts ads.
From relationship to relationship, Ray promises to never cheat on Martha, but there’s no way that he can keep up the con. Along the way, every one that crosses their path dies, often horribly.
Originally to be directed by Martin Scorsese, who was fired from the film, it was taken over by writer Leonard Kastle, who only created this one film. Named by François Truffaut as his “favorite American film,” it looks more like a grim documentary than an exploitation film.
American-International Pictures was going to distribute this, even making ad materials, but dropped it due to the film’s “extremely gruesome and misanthropic” tone. Their loss — it’s a work of art.
I’m enthused by the fact that an ad appeared in Variety at some point in the late 70’s announcing a sequel. Although never made, the story would have involved an imagined death row conjugal visit between Ray and Martha , resulting in the prison birth of brother/sister twins who were separated at birth. Years later, the pair meets and becomes adult murderers/lovers, never suspecting that they are siblings. This movie needs to be made.
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