FANTASTIC FEST: Mlungu Wam (2021)
The title of this movie is Xhosa and translates as Good Madam, as the white madam is at the center of this film, a comatose woman being looked after by Mavis, the mother of Tisdi, this movie’s protagonist. As they live in the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town — yet always apart from the city — […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Masking Threshold (2021)
Masking Threshold is one of the stranger films I’ve seen in some time, almost a YouTube video filled with non-stop zoom-in screens and talking from a person we never see, an IT person (physically played by Johannes Grenzfurthner with spoken performance by Ethan Haslam) who has been dealing with non-stop ringing in his ears for […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Hellbender (2021)
Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu made The Deeper You Dig, a movie that divided Becca and me. For their follow-up, the Adams family has created a movie all about 16-year-old Izzy (Zelda), whose mother (Toby Poser) keeps isolated due to a rare illness. Yet as Izzy begins to grow as a woman — beyond playing metal […]
Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames (1986)
You can’t lie to us. There’s no breaking of the Ninth Commandment, allowed. Not this time. We know you’ve never seen or heard of this beautiful collision of a Christploitation flick and an ’80s SOV’er for the most epic, greatest SOV in the horror realms committed to video tape. And yes, video store owners, who […]
Fatal Exposure (1989)
Oh, this friggin’ SOV’er . . . it’s a bizarre gem that wastes no time and is everything that the SOV porn-backed Spine strove to be — and failed. It skips the opening title cards and gives us two 30-year-old virgin teenagers making out for the first time — well, Marybeth gives herself away for […]
Night Feeder (1988)
“Slit your wrists, you f**kin’ b**ch.” — The oh, so snotty and so punk DSZ, who, after the show, got their poseur arses tag-teamed by Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins in the back alley where Johnny Rotton urinates on them while Sid Vicious gives ’em a Doc Martin to the ribs. A brain-eating monster-mutant baby […]
Blue Murder (1985)
It is “films” such as Blue Murder that give our beloved SOV ’80s a bad reputation because, as with the lesson in apoc-tedium that is Survival: 1990 (yes, made by Emmeritus Productions, the Canadian studio that also made this; as well as the computer-takes-over-a-skyscraper romp, The Tower), this inert John Carpenter knock off is just […]
Murderlust (1985)
Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley was long gone by the time of 16mm and SOV backyard filmmaking. But his rule regarding quacking ducks applies: If it looks like an SOV and quacks like an SOV . . . well, I’ll call that 16mm bird an SOV duck. So, yeah. Technically speaking, Murderlust isn’t a shot-on-video […]
Mirror of Death (1987) and Bloodspell (1988)
Oh, R.D, you’re a real pain in the posterior and a kick in the lower abdominal area this week with your ‘squeezin’ the Charmin’, SOV fanboydom. Yes, I am a self-aware man: a man that fights his life of monotony on the highway to mediocrity by binge-watching SOV films. So, I’ve pretty much — with […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Dealer (2021)
Johnny is a street-smart kid who spends his weekdays in a group home but soon learns that he can no longer go home on the weekends. He’s a mover and shaker, though, as he sells cocaine and avoids getting caught because after all, he’s just a kid. Then he meets Antony, an actor whose pocket […]
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