FANTASTIC FEST 2022: The Third Saturday in October (2022)

I went all in on The Third Saturday in October V, loving the way that it had the look and feel of 90s direct to video slasher sequels, so I was beyond excited for the first installment which referenced slashers like Death Screams and Another Son of Sam, I got pretty excited.

Sadly, the final effort doesn’t match the other film. This feels like an approximation of the late 70s and early 80s slasher boom, where The Third Saturday in October V nearly could have arrived in our time via a rip in the time/space paradox and seemed like it really was a product of its era. It was kind of hard reading other reviewers saying how much this seemed like My Bloody Valentine and it felt like a game of, “Tell me that you haven’t really paid attention to slashers other than aping what everyone else writes about them without telling me.”

It’s too bright, too trying to be strange instead of being odd naturally — the endless meow dialogue is grating at best — and the football title feels forced whereas it naturally fits into the other film.

That’s not to say that there’s not some real talent here. Director, writer and editor Jay Burleson gets a lot out of his budget. Darius Willis and K.J. Baker are really good as the parents of victims who just want to put serial killer Harding into the ground once and for all. And there’s a great atmospheric graveyard scene that’s quite evocative of the early scenes of Halloween. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the characters of John Paul (Casey Aud), Denver (Kate Edmonds), Pam (Venna Black), Bobbi Jo (Libby Blake), Uncle Deeter (Richard Garner) and Ned (Dre Bravo) are never funny, constantly drag the film down and just seem like they’ve come out of Tromaville — never a good thing — and take the film from satiric to sophomoric.

It also doesn’t help that Denver’s headphones — the Walkman 2 which popularized the device didn’t come out in the U.S. until 1981, so this feels anachronistic — dancing scene just ended up reminding me of a much better throwback in The House of the Devil.

Creating slasher victims is hard — how much should we care about them? Do we just want them to die? This film never even ponders that, even if at heart it’s either a tribute or a pastiche of the past. That said, Allison Shrum’s Heather is a fine final girl and I enjoyed Lew Temple (31The Devil’s Rejects) as her father.

I really wish I had liked this more and even after a second viewing, worrying if I’d overhyped myself, I still struggled to finish it. One of the things that took me out of the film was seeing Harding have his mask on near the end with no scene explaining where it came from or why he had a mask, which is always the big moment in any slasher. And yes, I get that we rarely get much character development in these movies, but why is Jakkariah Harding so feared? I can accept The Shape being unkillable, but I also learned that he had the darkest eyes, the devil’s eyes. This film asks us to fill in the knowledge we have of slashers without rewarding us with touching on those moments and treating them in new and unique ways.

The slasher genre is ripe for being made light of but this film sadly doesn’t have much new to add to the conversation, which is a shame, as I can and will extol the virtues of its sequel/companion movie.

The Third Saturday In October V is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

FANTASTIC FEST 2022: The Third Saturday In October V (2022)

The Third Saturday in October V is a movie, sure, but it’s also a reference to the rivalry between the Crimson Tide of the University of Alabama and the Volunteers of the University of Tennessee, schools that are located around three hundred miles apart. Alabama leads the series 58–37–8 as of this year. So in case why you wondered, “Why is a slasher based around college football?” you have your answer.

Even wilder, this movie is being released at the very same time as The Third Saturday In October, which was supposedly made in 1980 as a slasher craze cash-in. This is the fourth sequel — I imagine Dimension got the rights — and it’s some point in the 90s, feeling like the shot in Utah Halloween sequels in that it’s centered around the relationship between PJ (Poppy Cunningham) and her babysitter Maggie (Kansas Bowling, Blue from Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood), which feels very Rachel and Jamie.

Director, writer and editor Jay Burleson also made The Nobodies, a mockumentary about Alabama-based amateur filmmaker Warren Werner, his first SOV film Pumpkin and the Satanic panic in his small town that led to the suicide of him and his girlfriend at the film’s premiere, as well as the fake trailer for Halloween: Harvest of Souls 1985. I get the feel from this movie that Jay really gets what’s at the heart of slashers.

It’s another Third Saturday in October and, as always, the hearse driving all-black — other than his white skull mask — giggling serial killer Jack Harding is back, slicing up toes, throats and more, like killing one girl with a blazing hot pizza to the face. There’s also a wheelchair-bound annoying teen that you can’t wait to see die — the genre lives and breathes by its decimation of the handicapable, I guess — and for some reason, a fully grown adult that dresses as a referee to come watch the game. To be fair, one of my best friends as a kid dressed as an umpire and would count pitches and render safe or out calls for every baseball game we ever watched. He did grow up to be an umpire though.

The house where the game at feels like it has the same level of bed swapping and sexual tension as that cabin in the woods back when Joe Zito directed Jason.

I love the idea that no one remembers the killings or even pays attention because of how important football is to the town. And most importantly, the film knows to set up a sequel before the credits crawl, because Jack Harding is never going to die.

Bonus points to padding the start of the movie with scenes from previous sequels that were never made.

I had an absolute blast with this. And if you have a love for slashers — let’s say you made a Letterboxd list of nearly seven hundred of them — you’re going to go crazy for this. They can make a hundred of these movies and I will watch every single one.

The Third Saturday In October V is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

FANTASTIC FEST 2022: Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters (2022)

Directed by Jim Demonakos (founder of Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con) and Kevin Konrad Hanna, this engaging documentary is about the world of Mike Mignola and the world he’s created around Hellboy.

Comic book and movie geeks — umm, speaking for myself, that’s the same audience — will enjoy hearing from Doug Jones, Guillermo del Toro, Patton Oswalt, Ron Perlman, Neil Gaiman, Mike Richardson, Art Adams and so many more about how the comic and movies came to life, but the true joy is in discovering how Adams bonded with Mignola and his brothers, how much of Hellboy is Mignola’s father (and himself) and how Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar was inspired to make Hellboy so personal.

There are also moments where the creator discusses how many times he felt defeated and how his family and later wife would help him overcome his fears. Even if you know nothing of the comics, the parts of this movie where Perlman breaks down remembering bonding with his father over movies (and getting the same opportunity to make something so personal as Hellboy), the way that Mignola and Del Toro overcame their artistic differences and how Mignola’s daughter ended up writing his favorite story (and how it keeps returning to his work), as well as how Mignola created a shared universe where others could have the same creative freedom that he found will emotionally reach you regardless of your level of comic or genre movie knowledge.

For those of us who know and love characters like Lobster Johnson and Ben Daimio, this is everything.

Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SLAUGHTER DAY FILMMAKERS BLAKE AND BRENT COUSINS

Slaughter Day may be thirty years old but it feels fresher and more original than any movie that’s come out in 2022. I had the amazing opportunity to chat with its creators, Brent and Blake Cousins, and discover they put their lives — and the lives of their friends — on the line to create their own blend of zombies, kung fu and great smelling gore, as well as how it rose from the grave to make its way to blu ray from Visual Vengeance.

B&S About Movies: So how did you get started making movies?

Brent Cousins: We had this new technology and we realized that we can actually make something out of a consumer camera and yeah, it shot like a potato but we wondered, “What’s the best thing to start experimenting with?” The horror genre, like all these other big directors started in.

So if we make a horror movie, we need a bad guy. We don’t have really much material in our neck of the woods here in Hawaii and as far as studios are concerned, anybody involved in any kind of moviemaking does not exist on the islands. We had to figure it out ourselves.

The idea was this bad guy was named John Jones and to figure out who he was, we kind of went to our deepest recesses because we were pretty traumatized with movies like Halloween. But we always wondered, “Why don’t they just cut this guy into pieces so he never comes back and be done with it?”

John Jones could still reattach and reanimate and be the ultimate bad guy but in our backyard.

And that’s how we started making our films.

B&S: So when was this?

Brent: I think we started in 1986. We were about 16 years old and started bringing in our classmates or friends. We had a lot of time on our hands and it’s a good way to build friendships by saying, “Hey guys, we’re making this movie. Come down here to the big island and let’s have fun with all these abandoned buildings.”

And when we had the first video done and showed it, that was it. Our friends just couldn’t get enough of it.

B&S: So how did you come up with the effects? Were you reading the Dick Smith and Tom Savini books?

Blake Cousins: We never heard of those books, you know? We just worked with magic when we were kids and performed these magic shows. Parents, friends, whoever would come over for dinner, we’d create these illusions.

We grew up on the beach so we had access to digging holes and figured out how to bury people up to their heads and create this illusion of beheading. We already knew how to do magic tricks, but now we had to figure out how to show the impact, separation and blood splatter all at the same time, and do it all in one camera shot. It was a technical challenge but it just needed a little bit of ingenuity.

We had a lot of gore wrapped around the neck and torso but we’d heard that some movies used real animal guts and we didn’t want to attract flies. It’s going to smell disgusting. So is ketchup. But we had this abandoned house and everything was falling apart and we shredded this couch, shredded the foam and mixed in our concoction of Kool-Aid powder, paint and water. We figured out a non-toxic way of making gory movies.

B&S: That’s way better than how I learned, Karo food syrup, peanut butter and red food coloring.

Brent: When someone gets punched in our movies, we liked to have blood spray out of their mouths. We had enough strawberry Kool-Aid and everyone was looking forward to getting punched in the mouth because it tasted so good.

It was crazy because you look and there’s all this gore but it smells good.

Blake: The gore smells like strawberries.

B&S: You’re ahead of the Texas guys like Tobe Hooper and Bret McCormick who just used guts.

Blake: Strawberry Kool-Aid is the way to go.

B&S: I got the sense watching Slaughter Day that you got different influences culturally on the islands than we got on the mainland.

Brent: We grew up in a sugar plantation in a community that started in the 1870s. A lot of traditions exist here because a lot of immigrants came to the plantations to work. We grew up around a lot of people from the Philippines, Japan, Portugal and the Hawaiian culture.

Every Friday night there will be this thing called Black Belt Theater, so we’d stay up late at night and look forward to it so much. We’d just stay up and watch these Chinese kung fu movies.

Blake: These Chinese directors always had blood coming out of people’s mouths during the action sequences!

Brent: We were definitely influenced by those films, like Master Killer. That was one of the best kung fu movies out there and it was such a big influence because everyone in it had superpowers, they could fly 12 to 15 feet up trees and do these acrobatics. So we tried to throw that in there.

If you see somebody get hit, they’re getting bounced by this huge industrial inner tube. It’s subtle, but it has some extra effort in that it makes things like when John Jones throws people look so much better because it’s all in camera and it’s real. You’re seeing it in real time in front of the camera with no strings attached — someone is getting thrown five feet into the air or slammed against a wall!

A lot of it comes from Black Belt Theater. And in Hawaii, growing up there we were minorities so we had a lot of fights in public school. We brought that to the table.

B&S: It feels like you had everyone putting their life on the line.

Blake: We just watched it for the first time in probably 20 years the other night. And we were looking at how much we abused ourselves! There are so many times where we’re landing on the ground and not cushions. Throwing ourselves up against walls, falling off things, fighting on a moving flatbed truck!

Brent: And I was hanging off the edge of the truck, getting those shots and that was pretty wild.

Blake: We’re lucky no one got hurt.

B&S: Were your parents upset that you used the family camera?

Brent: Not at all! They bought the camera exclusively for us to start to experiment. Actually, we had to go through a couple! We destroyed one during the first couple of days of shooting! We were really happy that we had this super VHS technology. So we’re going with super VHS and we have this fisheye on it because we wanted to kind of emulate Robert Rodriguez, so we’re using that and following John Jones on this tracking shot and boom, the camera gets destroyed in five minutes. And then on another shot, I wasn’t paying attention and almost dropped off the rocks and that would have been two cameras in one day.

B&S:  I was really astounded by the camera placement. It’s well beyond what someone just learning how to make a movie should be able to do. Who were your influences?

Brent: Sam Raimi, Rodriguez, John Carpenter. hat’s what we wanted. We didn’t want to be normal with any of our shots.

Blake:  I grew up reading comic books and I’m an artist myself, so I was for our camera to frame things the same way as comic book panels.

B&S: Like in the truck fighting scene, the camera is all the way to the right and under the truck and it just creates such a dynamic framing.

Brent: I think a thing that is amazing to me today is that we had to make our own camera cranes and Dolly systems because they weren’t really available on the consumer market. The internet didn’t exist. So we had to build a tracking system and dollies, but there was one, in particular, we created for the shot you’re referencing. We had to develop the camera operation where we had Styrofoam sliders on poles and then duct tape the camera to this jury-rigged system.

Blake: We’d each be holding a side of the pole and could move and slide it and get those shots with it.

Brent: We’d talk back and forth as we did it and create this dynamic look, but to get it right it was kind of a little like ballet dancing! Like now, there’s the gimbal stabilizer but everything is preset in cameras. We were doing those things with our own tools and SVHS camera.

B&S: When you watch an older film, you can tell their budget by the aerial shots and today, everyone has one.

Blake: Everyone has a drone shot now so you kind of avoid them!

B&S: What else inspired you?

Brent: Big Trouble In Little China was big.

Blake: We won a John Carpenter award! This magazine called Video Review had a movie contest that we were unaware of and one of teachers sent Slaughter Day. And three months after he sent it, we won this contest. That was also inspiring and gave us more reason to go on, two kids in middle school in Hawaii somehow won a contest in a magazine published in New York.

B&S: You mentioned that this was all pre-internet, too.

Brent: It’s easier to make films today. But with everything being so accessible, people aren’t trying as hard as we did. There might be a missing element of filmmaking today, some lazy filmmaking because we did so much without all this technology thirty years ago. Then again, with the budget, it’s hard to find dedicated actors like we did.

B&S: How did the movie get to Visual Vengeance?

Blake: We considered that it was never going to be seen again. We had it on our master tape and it was collecting mildew for 28 years and then get this call from Rob from Wild Eye. He did his research!

Brent: We had no idea what Visual Vengeance was going to do with the packaging. They said they needed us to maybe do commentary, so we shared some history, but man, they went crazy with the extras. A poster, a sticker, the cover art looks so good…

Blake: It’s even playing at Nitehawk Cinema and we’re going to do a live Zoom to take questions from the audience.

B&S: I love everything Visual Vengeance has released because these movies are like the last of regional cinema. People like you guys, so far away from the mainland and filled with energy and influences unlike anywhere else and you made an artistic vision that is unique.

Brent: Watching it again and yeah, the movie is all action sequences but at the core, I think there’s a story in there. We were impressed looking back and surprised.

Blake: How did 58 minutes of running time somehow add up and we get this whole story? We need to go take notes on the original and have that same energy if we ever do a reboot.

Brent: Let’s not overthink it. Obviously, step it up and even though we’ve come a long way since then, we’ve still never put down the camera and we’re editing over 31 years later. Our techniques now are at another level.

Maybe it’s like how you go from Evil Dead to Evil Dead 2. You repurpose the first act in the first few minutes and then keep it going.

It’s just like man, I felt engaged watching since 20 years ago seen it since the last time I saw it. There is something kind of special to this movie.

Blake: And all the angles and the editing that was involved. And there’s another edit there that was put into this sequence and shoot I don’t even remember!

Also: I’ve already seen some people say that they can hear us talking! (laughs) When we sent the audio, we had a mono track that didn’t have us giving direction, but they went with the mixed one and well, you can hear us! “Go! Go!”

I think it’s kind of interesting because you kind of feel to get into the director’s head and the shot that we’re trying to get.

B&S: That’s what I really liked about it. I thought that it was you know, that’s just part of the charm of it.

You guys have made a name for yourself in documentaries as well.

Brent: Over the past 14 years, our YouTube channel Third Phase of the Moon has gotten around 800,000 subscribers and millions of views. And what we do is we speak to actual UFO witnesses and let them share their videos and their stories.

Blake: So like, you’re in Pittsburgh. You film a UFO and say, “Nobody is watching this on my YouTube channel.” We’ll share it, if it’s good, and give you credit. What we do is we get their permissions and we share, discuss, enhance and analyze their UFO videos. We’re pretty much the number one channel and we’ve also done these documentaries and we have access to top UFOlogists, politicians, experts, astronauts, you name it.

We have one video on Amazon Prime, Countdown to Disclosure: The Secret Technology Behind the Space Force and Above Top Secret and these are the biggest documentaries on there and iTunes. Not just in the genre, but on both services.

Brent: It’s pretty amazing that two guys in Hawaii will go shoot a documentary for seven days, edit it for ten days and we’re beating Academy Award-winning documentaries. Our budget is small but the budget is high! We just wrapped up a new one, UFO Endgame Disclosure in Washington, DC a few weeks ago. It’s been a really good ride.

Blake: YouTube is incredible too and given us such an opportunity. We want to go down in history as being the people behind disclosure, whether that’s finding out that there’s nothing or that there is something extraterrestrial in nature. That’s our mission.

We prove disclosure, we got our feet wet with fake Kool-Aid blood and now maybe it’s the time to reboot Slaughter Day.

VISUAL VENGEANCE/ Wild Eye NOVEMBER 2022 Title Announced – Long Lost Linnea Quigley feature HEARTLAND OF DARKNESS

Visual Vengeance is a label dedicated to vintage “Shot on Video” and microbudget genre independents from the 1980s through 2000. Their next release is 1989 never-before-seen Linnea Quigley Satanic Panic epic Heartland of Darkness AKA Blood Church!

In the small town of Copperton, Ohio, Paul Henson, a former big-city journalist, buys a small local newspaper. He quickly falls into a wide-reaching conspiracy of ritualistic murder and cult mind control when he discovers that the entire town may be under the spell of a Satanic reverend and his flock. As the clues and corpses pile up, Henson and his family are thrust into a life-or-death struggle to expose the truth and stop the demonic cabal’s reign of evil.

Shot in 1989 by director Eric Swelstad on 16mm film and lost in obscurity and distribution false starts for over 30 years, Heartland of Darkness finally arrives on home video for the very first time and is packed with bonus features that spotlight the original creators and document the film’s long history and final completion.

It will have these features:

  • First time available in any format
  • New director-supervised SD master from original tape and film elements
  • Deeper Into the Darkness: New 40-minute behind the scenes documentary
  • Three commentary tracks
  • Linnea Quigley Remembers, a new interview
  • Archival TV interviews, TV spots, behind the scenes footage and trailers
  • Complete original “Fallen Angels” 1990 workprint
  • Blood Church – rare distributor promotional video
  • Six-page liner notes by Tony Strauss of Weng’s Chop Magazine
  •  Limited Edition Heartland of Darkness “Prayer Cloth”
  • Limited Edition slipcase – FIRST PRESSING ONLY
  • Collectible Linnea Quigley folded mini-poster
  • “Stick your own” VHS sticker set
  • And much more!

For more details on the label and updates on new releases – as well as news on upcoming releases – follow Visual Vengeance on social media:

TWITTER @VisualVenVideo

INSTAGRAM: Visualvenvideo

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/visualvenvideo

Feng huang wang zi (1989)

Magic Warriors is the third movie in a trilogy that includes Child of Peach and Magic of Spell. I am happy to inform you that in no way did this series of movies ever get less weird or filled with whimsy.

Well, it’s kind of the third part. It was released as Child of Peach 3 in some places, but it’s a totally different story with the same cast and crew. Lin Hsiao-Lu is now Little Flying Dragon and he/she must protect Golden Boy, the son of a male sword fighting angel and female demon witch. Somehow, he also has a map that can find the only weapon that can kill the Devil King so everyone wants to find him. Also, Devil King has kidnapped Golden Boy’s parents, so they have to figure out how to get that weapon and defeat him.

Golden Boy’s magical powers all revolve around toilet humor. Like when he remembers that his mother told him that when you’re drunk, you can find the truth, so to remember even more of what she told him he gets completely drunk and he’s a kid. A little kid. He then pisses in Little Flying Dragon’s face. He also farts and has poop-based projectile abilities.

There are green skinned monsters to battle, a scene where Little Flying Dragon gets poisoned and turns into a monkey and enemies that look like snails and mushrooms. You should really abandon any hope that this will make sense or be normal. Why would you want that anyway?

I wish there had been thousands of these movies. There are more out there, however, so the hunt is on to find movies that are in the same world as this. Every time I wonder if the well of strange film will dry up, it gives me a new obsession.

You can either watch this on YouTube or download two parts on the Internet Archive: part one and part two.

Tao da liang da xian shen wei (1988)

Magic of Spell is the sequel to Child of Peach and, if anything, it might be even weirder than that movie and that makes me happier than I can even explain to you.

Momotaro the Peach Boy is back and played by a woman named Lam Siu-Lau. Tiny Dog, Tiny Monkey and Tiny Cock are back too and their goal is to rescue the Ginseng King — a living ginseng plant — from a demon wizard who wants to use the plant person to become regain his lost vitality and youth. How would he do that? By bathing in the blood of thousands of dead boys in a hot tub as well as the pulped flesh of the ginseng royalty as well as perhaps Peach Boy’s skin. He also kills Peach Boy’s mother just so this can be even more frightening for kids and yes, this is a children’s movie.

This demon has quite the gang on his side. There’s a transgender ghost with the most perfect hair. Samurai ghosts. Evil puppet skeletons. Buddha statues with laser beams. A strong man who can become a rock lord. And oh yeah, a green fish man who shoots a bazooka.

That said, Tiny Cock can transform her body into a pecking rooster head that can peck out eyeballs.

If you’ve read this far and are wondering, “How can this be?” It can. This movie kept blowing my mind and it made me wish every movie was sped up and had wirework. Your ears will also be delighted, as this movie steals at will from the soundtracks of The Shining and Phantasm.

This movie starts with Peach Boy flying faster than an arrow to rescue a rabbit.

All movies should aspire to be this unconcerned with being strange. Watching movies like Magic of Spell will reaffirm your faith that humans have some business being on this planet.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Shen wei san meng long (1980)

Bruce Lee only made four movies but the number of movies made by his imitators could be incalculable.

The Clones of Bruce Lee may be among the strangest of those movies.

Seconds after the death of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong, Colonel Colin (Andy Hannah) of the Special Branch of Investigations and Professor Lucas (Jon T. Benn, who was the bad guy in Lee’s Way of the Dragon) take the samples of the actor’s DNA needed to create three crimefighting remakes, played by Bruce Lai, Bruce Le and Dragon Lee.

While Dragon Lee becomes an actor battling corruption on the sets of the movies that he makes, Bruce Lai and Bruce Le meet up with Chuck, who is played by Bruce Thai and yes, looks just like Bruce Lee. Their job: defeat Dr. Ngai, who has harnessed the secret of the Shaw Brothers bronzemen through scientific means. This isn’t new for director Joseph Velasco, who as Joseph Kong also made Bruce and the Shaolin Bronzemen and Enter the Game of Shaolin Bronzemen.

This movie is as wild as you hoped it would be, from Bolo Yeung (who was Bruce’s enemy in Enter the Dragon) and Chiang Tao training the clones to Professor Lucas turning heel when no one knows just how hard he worked to make these clones of the actor. He decides to kill them all and he’s 33% effective. He does so by making the clones fight one another kind of like a Capcom palette swap.

How exploitative is this movie? It uses footage from Lee’s funeral. It also has the gall to take the theme from Rocky by Bill Conti which you have to grudgingly respect. I mean, what better montage music is there?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Vampire Raiders Ninja Queen (1988)

This is the actual sales pitch for this movie: “The fate of the entire hotel industry is at stake. A group of evil black ninjas has threatened to insinuate themselves into the industry, take over, and transform the operation into something unspeakable.”

One part of this movie is 1984’s Mixed Up, which was directed by Chow Chun-Gaai, and is about three hotel switchboard operators saving the life of their rich boss. The rest is purple ninjas, hopping vampires and whatever other footage Godfrey had lying around that day.

I would say that watching this movie is like someone switching channels during a commercial and you end up missing a bunch of the movie you really wanted to watch, but that would make you think that this movie has some semblance of coherent storytelling.

This is the kind of movie where a giant pig is launched off the roof of a hotel and lands on an old man and his wife, killing them both. Then a vampire emerges from the dead hog. If you can get with that, you can get with this movie that never even tries to make sense.

Can virgin piss kill a vampire? Why do the zombies have rubbery arms? Are you ready for music cues from Mad MaxThe Road WarriorThe Addams Family and Phantasm? Do you want to watch a vampire get way too fresh with a lady ninja in a bikini?

The answers are maybe, I don’t know, totally and yes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

FANTASTIC FEST 2022: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms (2022)

Roscoe (Phillip Andre Botello) is in a weird place in life. He’s a janitor for a scuzzy love motel ad his girlfriend has brought another man home for strange rituals. But he does have a stash of powerful hallucinogenic worms, visions from a floating worm that is speaking directly to him and perhaps a new friendship with Benny (Trevor Dawkins), a moped enthusiast who is trying to manifest a homunculus baby from a sex doll.

Basically, a Hallmark movie for the kids.

Director and writer Alex Phillips said that this movie is “a meditation on psychosis. The only accurate way to convey insanity is to disregard the literal truth. All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is a dream that is impossible to break from autobiography. It’s about expressionistic maggots born in real wounds – maggots growing into big worms, too fantastical and deranged to be real, despite feeling heavy, wet and alive.”

I found it right up my alley — a gore-filled take on loneliness, connection and love that will make fans of movies like Society stand up and cheer through their tears and normal folk retch in their popcorn. That’s a standing ovation in my world.

“Worms are life, worms are love.” If you’re the kind of person that looks at a worm and wonders not just if you can cut it in half and create two lives but also eat one of them and trip balls, well, this movie was either made for — or by — you.

If you’re attending Fantastic Fest in person, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms will play at the following times:

Tue, Sep 27th, 2:30 PM @ Theater 9

You can also get a virtual badge here.

This film will debut on Screambox on November 8.