Directed by Paolo Strippoli (A Classic Horror Story) and written by Strippoli, Jacopo Del Giudice and Gustavo Hernández, Flowing is about a strange phenomenon in Rome: every time it rains, the manholes unleash a fog of unknown origin and composition. Whoever breathes this gas must deal with their most repressed feelings.
The Morel family are probably the best — or the worst — people to huff in those aromas. Ever since the death of matriarch Cristina in an accident a year ago, Thomas and their son Enrico have stopped speaking, father blaming son and son retreating into violence and an affair with an older woman who reminds him of his lost mother. The youngest, Barbara, is still physically dealing with the ramifications of the accident and reminds Enrico of his failure every time he sees her.
Now, as the fog grows, they must all face whatever is in the past if they hope to make it to tomorrow.
This looked gorgeous and man, it gets dark. Interesting idea and you know, stay out of the sewers.
Tetteh Quarshie was a Ghanaian blacksmith and agriculturalist directly responsible for the introduction of cocoa to Ghana, which today constitute one of the major export crops of the country’s economy. His mother died giving birth to him and he went up against the colonial masters from Spain who had placed a death penalty on anyone who smuggles cocoa seeds off the island of Fernando Po in Guinea. Quarshie did exactly that, bringing the seeds home and going directly against the colonial enslavers.
Director and writer Frank Fiifi Gharbin has transformed the life of this real person into historical fantasy, making a story of the past vibrant and exciting for today’s audiences. The joy of a film festival is the chance to discover new things from countries that I may never learn about. Seek this out and do the same.
Heroes of Africa is playing at Fantastic Fest as part of the Burnt Ends selections.
John Lafia was one of the co-writers of the first film and came back to direct the sequel with creator Don Mancini also coming back. Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is also back, but unlike so many slasher sequel characters, his life has changed so much since encountering the possessed doll with the spirit of Charles Lee Ray. His mother was institutionalized after the end of the last movie and now he’s in foster care being raised by Phil and Joanne Simpson (Gerrit Graham and Jenny Agutter) along with Kyle (Christine Elise), a punk rock mean girl that my wife, when questioned on this film, said, “She had the wardrobe and attitude that I wanted when I was a kid. And she smoked!” Keep in mind Becca was six or seven when she watched this at least a hundred and fifty times.
Meanwhile, the Play Pals Corporation has convinced shareholders that the Chucky incident never really happened. That means that as soon as the line fires up, there’s an incident and Charles Lee Ray finds himself back in the body of a Good Guy doll.
Of course, this ends in the factory where the dolls get made as Chucky starts to become human and needs Andy for a host. Kyle bonds with him and together they blow the doll’s head up real good.
I love how John Lafia made this movie from the point of view of a kid. He used very wide lenses, low angles, bright colors and a deep depth of field to show the world as a place larger for children than grown-ups.
This was a number one box office smash the day it was released. Not everyone loved it. Gene Siskel asked, “Who was this trash made for and would you want to sit next to them in a theater?”
Shudder is in the middle of its 61 Days of Halloween. 11 original and exclusive movies, three new series and a Joe Bob Briggs special in October are coming! Here’s what October has in store for us:
October 1: The return of the Ghoul Log and a secret premiere (shh, it was Dark Glasses), as well as The Descent, The Descent Part 2, The Gate and May
Head over to ARROW to start watching now. Subscriptions are available for $6.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Samsung TVs, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.
DAY 2: A Horror Film Featuring Non-Avian Dinosaurs and Mezozic Reptiles.
Norbert Moutier also made Ogroff, a shot on video slasher. Moutier was an accountant who contributed to the zines Monster Bis and Le Petit bédéraste du 20e siècle before starting to make his own movies in 1982, often serving as the director, screenwriter, producer and sometimes even acting. He quit accounting and started a comic book and movie store, which really feels like a dream life.
Somehow, he got some of the biggest genre personalities in France to be in his movies, like Howard Vernon, Jean-Pierre Putters, Quélou Parente, Christophe Bier, Christophe Lemaire and Christian Letargat. In this movie, he got Jean Rollin to play Professeur Nolan, the leader of this strange experiment in which secret agents work alongside time travel scientists who are in the past to study dinosaurs. Those secret agents bring a war criminal with them to execute because killing is illegal in the future. They’re using a spaceship to get there and also dumping tons of trash, using our past Earth as a trash pit.
Obviously, everything I knew about time travel is wrong.
Moutier also convinced Tina Aumont (Fellini’s Satyricon, Torso, Arcana) to be in this movie. There’s even a striptease scene without nudity, which seems a strange thing to do when dinosaurs are attacking, but when you meet a cave girl, you just watch and be polite.
As for those dinosaurs, they are often rubbery puppets and other times straight up dinosaur toys moved in stop motion. Keep in mind this movie was made the same year as Jurassic Park. If you thought that Carnosaur was the nadir of dinosaur movies, you’ll look at this and say, “Yes, the tar pit does deeper.”
Most of all, this movie is worth watching because Rollin is in the lead. I can only imagine that he kept talking to Moutier, the auteur, and saying, “You sure we can’t just a lot of fog and have a nude vampire woman look depressed and slowly walk through this scene?”
Also: the entire film was shot with the camera audio, so there’s non-stop hiss all over everything.
Motern Media — Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh — make movies that seem to be horror on the outside but are wonderfully strange movies on the inside, explorations of the darkness — and light — within small towns. Like here, in a small New Hampshire town, Farley Wilder (Farley) is the son of talk show host Rick Wilder (Kevin McGee), a near-universally beloved celebrity who spends his days ridiculing his son and forcing him to take constant tests.
Freaky Farley lost his mother at a young age and never found out why; that combined with how his father treats him — this is a comedy, even though everything in this sentence seems horrific — has left him stranded in adolescence, through puberty but still afraid of women, often just peeping around town yet not meaning anything wrong by it. He might have a love interest in Scarlet (Sharon Scalzo), who wants to be a reporter, if his father didn’t hate her. And oh yeah, the town also has a witch (Steff Deschenes), bullies like Air Force Ricky (Kyle Kochan), a ninja (Roxburgh) and woods that are so dangerous that Farley’s dad won’t even talk about them. Surprise — they’re filled with troglodytes.
There’s a dark omega to even town’s light alpha, the kind of clandestine meetings that find a young killer getting conscripted into battling prehistoric cave people. Or maybe there are just bribes in your town, I don’t know.
What I do know is that this movie is just right. It hits all my buttons — low budget horror as the Halloween mask under which a funny yet dramatic movie with heart beats inside — and made me laugh out loud at least twice. That’s more than a win.
Freaky Farley is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest. This is part of Molten Media, which has produced independent feature films since the late 1990s. According to Fantastic Fest, “the idiosyncratic cinema of Charles Roxburgh and Matt Farley pay homage to the regional low budget horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s as they unravel bizarre tales set in and around lightly-fictionalized small New England towns. Akin to the manner in which John Waters and Kevin Smith cultivated their cult universes out of tight-knit communities of vivid personalities, Charlie and Farley’s films imagine a unique portrait of Americana as they recruit an eccentric ensemble of folksy friends and family to endearingly perform the offbeat vernaculars and campy melodrama of their wittily verbose scripts.”
Fantastic Fest Burnt Ends has awarded the filmmakers with the first annual Golden Spatula in recognition of their creative spirit, and a partial retrospective of their inventive catalog which includes Local Legends and Metal Detector Maniac as well as more contemporary works which pursue a distinct, but just as wonderfully eclectic and wry comic sensibility.
DAY 2. TROUBLE IN THE TUB: Bath time ain’t always relaxing.
The Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel Celle qui n’était plus had been already made in 1956 as Les Diaboliques. But was it made in Pittsburgh? And did it star Sharon Stone, who skipped being in The Flintstones to make this?
Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, whose career includes Benny & Joon, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and then this and The Avengers, this has a script by Don Roos, who also wrote Single White Female so you’d think he’d understand that whole concept of American giallo.
This is a movie with the absolute worst threeway relationship ever. Mia Baran (Isabelle Adjani) is a devout Catholic who works at a school with her husband Guy (Chazz Palminteri), a man so abusive that even his mistress Nicole Horner (Stone) feels badly for Mia, who we first meet as she nearly dies in a bathtub.
The two women decide that they’ve finally had it with Guy and lure him to an apartment of one of Nicole’s friends. Mia drugs him, they drown him in a bathtub and then carry his body out in a wicker box that they can barely get into the trunk. They toss his body in the swimming pool and when it disappears and photos of them killing him are mailed to the school, things get tense.
Also: that’s not just Donal Logue filming the school, but also J. J. Abrams. Kathy Bates shows up as an investigator, Spalding Grey — who died by a suicidal drowning — is a teacher and Bingo O’Malley — it’s a bigger deal if you’re from here — is in this too.
There are twists and turns — as you can imagine — as well as Stone hitting Palmieri in the head with a rake. I laughed out loud when that happened. It’s not good, but also it’s good because it’s Sharon Stone in a bad 90s remake of a movie that inspired so many other movies to the point that a remake feels beyond without reason.
Also: if you live in Pittsburgh, you realize that they’re just throwing names of cities out there. Come on, Sharon Stone. You’re from Meadville.
I always discuss that Stone would have totally been in an Umberto Lenzi giallo if she were around in the 70s. Her career path proves this. But as I keep track of what movies are Yinzer giallo — psychosexual murder movies made in the Steel City — this does not qualify. Sure, it has sex and murder, but it doesn’t get the geography right, theree are no accents and no one goes to a bar and has an IC Light. Nor do they visit a single landmark. You mean to tell me that Sharon Stone couldn’t walk past the Oyster Bar?
Body Organ Replacement Network starts with three of the adopted daughters of Buck and Della Cassidy (Russ and Claire Hagen) being abducted by an evil ambulance that delivers its captives to Hugh (Russ Tamblyn) and his crew of surgeon Dr. Farley (William Smith), nurse Jerry (Clint Howard) and secretary Liz (P.J. Soles) where their organs wil be harvested and sold to rich people.
Sounds good, but then let me tell you: this movie’s second unit director John Stewart and most of the cast also show up in Action U.S.A. so you know that this movie is not going be normal. I mean, there’s a part of the movie that takes place at a charity adopt a grandparent day.
Of course Ross Hagen directed this, so that made me think, did Gary Graver act as his cinematographer? I mean, do I even need IMDB for this movie?
Oh yeah, Rance Howard as a corrupt cop and the alt title of Merchants of Death? Was this made for me? William Smith gravel voiced complaining about livers being bad and saying medical terms is pretty much all I want in this movie watching life.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on December 22, 2018 but since it played Fantastic Fest live, I can’t miss the opportunity to talk about this movie that is more about male love than sharks.
When I was a kid in the 1970’s, I was sitting in a B. Dalton’s reading — parents routinely dropped kids off places to read without any fear of kidnapping back then — and discovered a copy of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex on a shelf. I had no idea what it was at the time, but the drawings (by Chris Foss, who would go on to work on Alien, Flash Gordon and Jodorowsky’s Dune) were upsetting to me. Hairy soft focused seventies post-hippies getting it on didn’t jibe well with my single digit mind.
I forgot what that feeling was like. And then I watched Tintorera…Tiger Shark.
This movie is based on the novel of the same name by oceanographer Ramón Bravo, an undersea explorer who studied the 19-foot-long species of shark known as “tintorera” and also discovered the sleeping sharks of Isla Mujeres. You may know him better for his role as the underwater zombie in Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2.
Here’s the thing — this is a shark movie, but it’s also pretty much a softcore adult movie about the three-way relationship between the heroes. As such, this is the only shark movie I’ve watched all week with full frontal male nudity, which is something of an accomplishment.
Hugo Stiglitz from Nightmare City plays Steven, born in the US but a Mexican businessman here in Cancun for vacation. He falls for Patricia (Fiona Lewis, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) but breaks up with her when he can’t decide whether or not he’s in love with her. Ah, the 1970’s.
Jealousy ensues when she starts hooking up with Miguel (Andrés García, a real-life former diving instructor who is also in Bermuda: Cave of the Sharks), the swimming instructor at the resort. After those two dance the devil’s dance and Steven gets all misty-eyed, she goes skinny dipping and ends up being eaten by a tiger shark that seems to have breathing problems, judging by the soundtrack.
The two fight over what happened to Patricia, but neither ever learn that she was devoured by a shark. That night, the two hook up with Kelly and Cynthia Madison, two American college students looking for fun, and swim to Steven’s yacht as the heavy breathing shark follows them. They swap beds all night long before heading back to the resort and the shark decides to leave them alone. Kelly is played by Jennifer Ashley, who was also in Phantom of the Paradise, Chained Heatand Guyana: Cult of the Damned, while Cynthia is Laura Lyons, which is her real name and not a stage name inspired by the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles. She was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for February 1976 and actually led a strike amongst the club bunnies that led to better wages and rights for them. Other than an appearance on TV’s Love, American Style, this is the only other acting role in her career.
Steven and Miguel decide to partner up both in a shark hunting business and in being womanizers. They start shooting all manner of sharks, but Miguel warns Steven that if they ever meet a tiger shark that they must immediately get out of the water.
The guys meet Gabriella (Susan George, Die Screaming, Marianne) and take her shark hunting. She hates it, but falls for both men. They decide to form a triad relationship where they can’t be with any other woman or fall in love with her. Remember those The Joy of Sex drawings I mentioned earlier? Get ready to watch the play out as the three make love, make omelets and sightsee the Mayan ruins.
Sadly, the next time they go shark hunting, the tiger shark reappears — surprise! — and bites Miguel in half. Gabriella is so upset that she leaves, never to return. Steven vows revenge on the shark and beats up every shark he can find, upsetting even the most hardened fishermen. Surely, they tell him, he has killed the tiger shark by now.
Nope. It’s still out there, killing fishermen and lying in wait for Steven. At a beach party with Kelly, Cynthia and two new American girls (one of them is Priscilla Barnes from TV’s Three’s Company and The Devil’s Rejects), everyone skinny dips. As Steven and Cynthia make out nude in the water, the tiger shark comes back and tears the woman literally out of his embrace. Everyone is injured by the shark’s attack and Steven makes a promise to kill the shark himself.
You may be wondering: how will Steven go about killing this shark? If you guessed “he’s going to blow it up” then congratulations. You’ve been watching just as many shark movies as I have. Are explosives the shark’s natural predator?
Anyhow — Steven uses a devilfish to lure the shark close and then he hears its breathing, because that’s how sharks work. He succeeds in turning that shark into a million pieces, but loses his arm in the process. He wakes up in a hospital bed, minus an arm but filled with happy memories of the sexy times he shared with Miguel and Gabriella.
Keep in mind when you seek out this film that there are two versions. One is 85 minutes long and is more of a shark film. Then there’s the 126 minutes long cut that’s chock full of swinging Mexican resort sex. Also, a warning for those of you sensitive to these matters: many of the scenes of fish being caught and killed underwater are unsimulated. That should be no surprise to anyone who has seen a René Cardona Jr. directed film, as he threw live birds through windows in Beaks: The Movie and a cat over a wall in Night of a Thousand Cats. He’s also responsible for the borderline insane film Bermuda Triangle, as well as the scum-ridden cash-in Guyana: Crime of the Century.
Tintorera…Tiger Shark is one of the stranger films I’ve watched, not only in my shark obsessed week of trying to watch every single pre-Sharknado film of this genre, but really in all the films I’ve watched. I have no idea who it is truly for, yet appreciate its willingness to indulge in spectacle and scum, whether that be people hooking up or being eaten in front of your very eyes.
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