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.
I always say that you should learn something new every day. Here’s what I learned today: the title of this film was invented just for the movie. According to its IMDB page, “It’s a portmanteau of the words ‘mneme’ and ‘schizophrenia’. In the film Mnemophrenia the word is defined as: “A condition or a state characterized by the coexistence of real and artificial memories, which affects the subject’s sense of identity.”
This is the debut feature of Eirini Kostantinidou, who said of making it, “For the past several years it has been my ambition to make a feature film around the subject of artificial memories. A humanistic, generation-spanning story asking questions about human identity, virtual reality and the future of cinema. A film that would delve into who we are and where we are going and imagine our species on the brink of its next evolutionary step.”
The way that this movie was made is incredibly intriguing. There was plenty of improvisation and each of the three parts was made separately, with the cast getting to watch each part before getting to take on the next chapter of the story. According to the film’s IMDB page, “This technique allows for an organic development of the characters and dialogue, which is a result of the creative collaboration between the actors and herself.”
As our world grows both larger in scope and smaller in the ways that we will get there, the issues that this film raises will become more important. This movie isn’t for everyone, but it is something you can watch and discuss long after it’s over.
Kino Lorber Studio Classics has steadily been releasing a number of classic film noir titles under its Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema series. This one, starring Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster, fits right into those box sets.
Former POW Bill Saunders (Lancaster) barely survived the war and is a man on the edge. This blows up when he kills a man in a bar fight and hides in the home of nurse Jane Wharton (Fontaine), telling her its all an accident. They fall in love and after some jail time for attacking a cop, he gets a straight job. That gets ruined when a gangster who saw the bar fight starts blackmailing him.
Fontaine and Lancaster would recreate their roles for the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on February 21, 1949 under the title The Unafraid, which was much less offensive of a title. Indeed, there was a fight where this movie was almost called Blood On My Hands and Blood On the Moon. Lancaster was a producer, so he really struggled to keep the original title, seeing as how it was based on a book by Gerald Butler.
Norman Foster mostly directed Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto films, so this is one of his few chances to strike out and make something unique, which he does. Also, the scene where Lancaster is whipped with a cat o’nine tails 18 times was voted #43 in the book Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies.
You can grab this blu ray from Kino Lorber, who sent us a review copy. It has a new 2K transfer and commentary by film historian Jeremy Arnold.
We previously reviewed Adam Weber’s movie The First Date and said that it was “a fun effort” with “decent FX.” Now he’s sent us his latest work, which is a quick little tale of two men and a dead — well, maybe — body.
Yes, these two characters have been asked to bury the body in the countryside, but things are never that simple when you have a corpse in the trunk.
Much like his last film, Adam knows how to use his production budget to make things look way better than they cost. I’m looking forward to the time when he moves past these short takes and attempts a longer narrative, as I want to see if he can sustain the same tension and humor across a longer story.
You can learn more at the official Facebook page. Thanks for sending us your films, Adam!
If you’re a regular reader at our humble, little corner of the web, you know how muchwe admirejourneyman-actor Eric Roberts around this neck of the wilds of Allegheny County. Yes, we will sit through a Lifetime damsel-in-distress movie—their Stalked by My Doctor franchise, now up to part 3—for our Eric Roberts fix. We’ll even watch Hallmark holiday movies (A Husband for Christmas and The Great Halloween Puppy Adventure) for our Eric Roberts blow with a shot of David DeCoteau.
Yes, that love goes even deeper into the celluloid thickets when Eric teams with our favorite directors, such as David DeCoteau (Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper, A Talking Cat), along with Mark Polonia (Amityville Death House) and Mark L. Lester (Hitman’s Run, Groupie, and Public Enemies). We even streamed Fred Olen Ray’s Boggy Creek: The Series on series on Amazon Prime just to listen to Eric’s voiceover narration. And Eric worked with Kent Wakeford (Power 98), the cinematographer on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and the Blaxploitation classic Black Belt Jones.
But how is it that across Eric’s 523 credits — with 60 more films in various stages of filming and pre-and-post production — Fred Olen Ray hasn’t done a live-action film with Eric? Eric’s not only done a Christmas movie with David DeCoteau (again, A Husband For Christmas), he’s made 14 movies with David DeCoteau*. How is it that Eric hasn’t appeared in at least one of Fred’s 11 X-Mas flicks?
Eric Roberts in a Fred Olen Ray movie . . . that would be the best X-Mas for Sam and I — ever. Even that Christmas when I got the Aurora Xcelerator race track. Even that Christmas when Becca gave Sam a Mayhem t-shirt.
However, until that dream Olen Ray-Roberts project comes to fruition, there’s more than enough Eric Roberts flicks to enjoy. These days, Eric’s a journeyman actor who truly enjoys traveling around the country helping helping both established filmmakers (but a bit down-and-out these days) and budding storytellers market their films. Some of the films from those undiscovered filmmakers that we’ve reviewed include The Arrangement, Angels Fallen, Clinton Road, and Lone Star Deception.
I know. I know. Off-the-rails with Eric Roberts love. Get back to the movie.
And to that end: Eric ended up in Asheville, North Carolina, to lend a thespian hand to screenwriter James Blankenfeld and director James Suttles. Blankenfeld is an established production assistant and cameraman (The Apprentice, Project Runway) making his feature film debut as a screenwriter with The Evil Inside Her. James Blankenfeld brings a more established career to the set as a cinematographer with his twenty-credits deep resume on a variety of indie shorts and features, as well as a half-dozen directing credits — with The Evil Inside Her as his third feature film.
Hopefully, based on that production pedigree, ye streamers of the digital divide will be inspired to watch, knowing that you’re getting production values above the usual norms for low-budget streaming movies and Roberts “starring” flicks, in general.
As with most of the films in his mindboggling oeuvre, we go into The Evil Inside Her with the knowledge that Eric’s role will be a small one (and sometimes, a pivotal one; it is, here), while the “lead actors” are unknown, mostly amateurs from the local theatre community who, while they give it their all, offer up the occasional awkward, strained moments.
As you can tell from the theatrical one-sheet, this is another in a long line of “cabin in the woods” thrillers about a group of 20-somethings’ vacation stay gone wrong, ala Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. And James Blankenfeld knows we’ve been in these foreboding woods before, with its wide array of home invasion sieges-by sexual deviants (Dead by Dawn and Cry for the Bad Man), flat-out demon possession (Reawakened), disturbed J or K-Horror onryōs, shiryō, or yūreis (0.0 Mhz), or their Euroized, yulyeong (hair ghost) counterparts (Evil River). Blankenfeld intelligently bypasses the “from the beyond” hocus pocus or supernatural deus ex machina tomfoolery. There’s no Paul Naschy out-of-left field zombie seige (Horror Rises from the Tomb). There’s no centuries-dead malevolent witch connected to trinkets. No basement-hidden reel-to-reel tape players. No bogus necronomicons. And, most importantly, there’s no “lone survivor” doped up in a hospital bed flashing us back with tortured dreams.
What Blankenfeld gives us, in a refreshing twist-of-the-keyboard, is an ominous, dapper chap that calls himself Clayton: but I like to refer to him as “The Chemist.” Yep, you guessed it: Eric Roberts, in a role that, for me, plays as a sequel, prequel, or sidequel to his ambiguous role as the foreboding “The Pitchman” in The Arrangement (released this month to streaming platforms).
When The Evil Inside Her opens, “it” has already been released: we see a daughter slaughter her elderly father over breakfast, which leads us to the opening titles montage of news clippings about a rash of unexplained domestic violence murders: suddenly for no reason, people snap and murder their friends and family.
The “reason” is The Chemist . . . and he’s using society as his personal lab. His newest lab rat is Vikki (Melissa Kunnap; good here in a spiraling, slow burn), doped-up at the local coffee shop on the way to the cabin: she begins a campaign of self-mutilation that progresses to murder in quick succession. As with The Pitchman in The Arrangement: The Chemist is Hell’s Geppetto, a bizarro Alfred Lord Tennyson pushing a little wonder drug that “helps” man see in the world what he carries in his heart: repressed immorality, anger and rage toward his fellow man. The Chemist removes one’s inhibitions to be their true selves: cold blooded killers.
Why?
Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.
On a release rollout since the spring of 2019 on DVD, VOD, and PPV in the worldwide marketplace, The Evil Inside Her is now available as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTv. You can learn more about the film with this interview from director James Suttles at Scared Stiff Reviews. You can also visit the film’s official website and SuttleFilm.
* For the Roberts-DeCoteau-Roberts completists, the rest of their resume (by the time you read this: it’s ever-expanding):
Bonnie & Clyde: Justified Doc Holliday’s Revenge Evil Exhumed Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft Snow White: A Deadly Summer Sorority Slaughterhouse Wolves of Wall Street The Wrong Mommy The Wrong Roommate The Wrong Teacher
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 as we went down an Eric Roberts-IMDb rabbit hole looking for online streams of his films. We 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.
Somehow over quarantine, this movie has played in our house more than three times. Yes, I know. Being stuck inside does weird things to you.
Oddly enough, this movie is based on the 1969 film Cactus Flower, which an adaptation of the 1965 Broadway stage play, which was based on the French play Fleur de Cactus.
It was directed by Dennis Dugan who, beyond Problem Child, has mostly directed star Adam Sandler in movies like Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Jack and Jill and two Grown Ups films. Another of Dugan’s non-Sandler films is Love, Weddings & Other Disasters. As an actor, Dugan appeared in everything, from The Girl Most Likely To… (1973) to The Howling (1980). He even had his own, short-lived TV series, Richie Brockelman, Private Eye, which spun off the more popular, long-running The Rockford Files starring James Gardner.
The Golden Raspberry people must have been licking their lips, ready to bestow this movie with awards. And so they did, giving this both Worst Actor and Worst Director.
Long story short: Sandler is a lifelong bachelor who really should be with his assistant, played by Jennifer Aniston. However, he’s in love with Brooklyn Decker, who thinks he’s married. As always, rather than the truth, hijinks rule the day. Otherwise, we’d have no movie.
I’m always amazed at the stars that will show up for a Sandler film, as Nicole Kidman is in this. I always think of her as an A-list star well above these matters, but here you go, as she’s interacting with Nick Swardson.
That said, Sandler films play on our screen often enough. And while they’re hated by critics, they’re innocuous enough and I always end up rooting for him every time he enters the third stage of the hero’s journey.
When I think of Leona Helmsley, who I remember from WOR commercials, I think of Suzanne Pleshette as her. This film is from that near-exploration sub-genre of made-for-TV films: the ripped from the headlines takedown of the fallen.
Somehow, they talked Lloyd Bridges into being in this movie. Don’t ask me how, but man, when he’s all out of it and can barely shave? Magic.
Director Richard Michaels did 55 episodes of Bewitched, which seems to me like the perfect start for a career of making TV movies just like this. It’s filled with so much sleaze
Somehow, no one on Letterboxd has reviewed this except me. This either makes me happy or makes me realize that I will watch anything and everything, then try and tell an uncaring world how the movies make me feel.
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