Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul spent a lot of time together in 1978 and 1979. That said, maybe they did all of this in four hours, making several movies and doing no small amount of drugs. 

What are we into this time? Well, flying saucers, cryptozoology, ghosts, alien life on their home planet, psychic phenomena, Kirlian photography, Uri Geller, earthquakes, the home movies of Hitler, aliens eating us, fairies, the Loch Ness monster… nothing is off the table. I mean it. Have you ever talked to me and wondered how I can change subjects so quickly that you wondered if I was high? I am high. But I can’t jump around as much as this.

I decided to transcribe some of this so that I can share with you the words that fly by so quickly.

Welcome to the World of Mystery, a world of strange sights and sounds, a world of unexplained mysteries and visitation from other planets. It is a world of ghosts, of monsters from outer space, of demons and sorcery, of monsters from the depths of the seas, of werewolves and Satanic ceremonies, of despotic rulers and wars. In short, a world of contradictions, continual conflicts and unexplained phenomena which scientists are only now beginning to unravel.

Throughout this movie, I yell at the screen during the narration, things like, “No, they aren’t!” and “That’s not true!”

This is how fast this movie changes things on you: Seen in this photograph is the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, supposedly surrounded by tiny fairies. Actually, this photo is a fake, constructed to show that fakery was possible. This photo of a medieval tapestry depicts a seven-headed dragon, known in the Book of Revelation as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

Wait, were we talking about faeries? Have you ever had an old person keep showing you photos on their phone, and every image is blurry, you have no idea what it is, and you don’t even know who they are? Just me?

This is a breakneck, psychedelic journey through the paranormal that feels less like a film and more like a fever dream. If it feels like the creators were operating on an entirely different plane of reality, it’s because the movie refuses to stay on one subject for more than a few seconds, hurtling from the occult to deep-space nihilism without catching its breath.

This isn’t even the end of the movie, as somehow, this continues after this:

Yet out in the vast reaches of space, how little this all matters. Man is just a small and not very important part of the vastness of the universe, less than a millionth of its contents. Man thinks he is immortal. But what is age to the denizens of the stars? From a small portion of space, we can grasp the relative insignificance of our own existence. Whether we look at a small portion of the universe or a larger area, we can easily see that mankind could cease to exist without the universe even noticing it.

Now we’re just destroyed. Thanks, World of Mystery.

You can watch this on YouTube.

There are three things you need to know: A coven of witches is aiding and abetting wives as they murder their husbands. A slacker has transformed a pizzeria into a video rental shop, years after it would have been a good business decision. A lonely soul ends up in a doomed romance with a serial killer. You have 97 minutes to figure all that out, but along the way, there will be metal shows, tons of dudes rocking Samhain shirts, Iron City beer, women who will kill you in your sleep and no shortage of noise, both musically and all over the picture.

Sure, this looks like 90s SOV, but unlike so many people who steal that style, this feels earned and lived in. 

In this blackened world, we meet Vi (Morrigan Milam), who is in a doomed relationship but has also fallen hard for Clover (Zoe Angeli), who works in an occult store and may be part of the coven. Vi is desperate to save her connection to her lover, but Clover gives her a potion that addresses that problem in a grimy, vomit-inducing way. Soon, she’s swept in, taken Vi off her feet and brought her into her world. Vi and Clover feel like people you’d actually see at a mid-week metal show, not caricatures.

I really think that this was made for me. Did I get so high one night that those rituals I do in my basement really worked out and I got a film with an Acid Witch cameo and Tina Krause walking into the frame? Why is her hair so perfect forever? How can a movie straddle being exploitation yet have lesbians in it that feel like anything but a fake exploitation male gaze BS disaster? Throw in some dick mutilation, gloomy girls in Misfits leather jackets haunting cemeteries, and people who don’t just know what W.A.V.E. Productions is but bought the t-shirt, and you have something beyond.

I would 200% make mixtapes for everyone in the cast and crew, but I think we have all the same albums.

Movies like this give me hope. This wasn’t made. It was summoned.

The Blu-ray release of Coven of the Black Cube includes behind-the-scenes clips, outtakes, and a commentary track with writers Brewce Longo, Zoe Angeli, Josh Schafer, and DP Michael DiFrancesc. You can get it from MVD.

This historical sit-down, originally titled The First Family of Satanism, serves as a fascinating time capsule of the Satanic Panic era, capturing the sharp ideological divide between Bob Larson’s evangelical world and the Schrecks’ elitist Social Darwinist philosophy.

Recorded in 1990 and later released in 2002, the program features Bob Larson, a well-known Christian evangelist, engaging in a direct conversation with two prominent figures in the Satanic and occult communities: Zeena Schreck, the daughter of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and Nikolas Schreck, leader of the Werewolf Coven, a modern pagan and occult group with ties to the Church of Satan. 

The conversation begins with Larson questioning the Church of Satan’s sincerity in its founding in 1966. Zeena defends her father, Anton LaVey, stating that the showmanship and gimmicks (like using nude women as altars) were necessary to pave the way for Satanism to be a recognized religion. She also confirms several Satanic legends, including her father’s alleged affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, as well as Mansfield’s devout membership in the Church.

Nikolas Schreck presents a bold, apocalyptic view of the 1990s, predicting it would be the Satanic Century and describing Christianity as being in its last extravagant death throes. He argues that religious media’s growth is actually a sign of its end, as it has turned to entertainment, something he claims Jesus would never have condoned.

Zeena was raised within the Church of Satan and during the 80s was the organization’s first spokesperson, as her father was in exile. How did she end up speaking for the Church? She told Obsküre Magazine, “In 1985, a U.S. news show called 20/20 accused The Satanic Bible of being responsible for child daycare Satanic ritual abuse, new allegations then. … I called my father and asked him what his media strategy would be to deal with this catastrophe. Nothing. He didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t concern him. It wasn’t anything he needed to worry about. He certainly wasn’t going to do anything about it in public. He admitted that many media outlets had already contacted him and that he was just going to ignore it until it went away. I tried to convince him that this would only get worse if he didn’t respond and that he really needed to get someone to answer calls quickly, or it would be taken as an admission of guilt or suspicion. Finally, he admitted he had no one to deal with interviews or media. I offered to help temporarily until he found someone. This was not what I’d intended to do with my life; I had other plans.”

She was also a major part of working with police departments to defuse the Satanic Panic. In 1990, she resigned her position, severed ties with her father and renounced LaVeyan-based Satanism before embracing Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and forming the Sethian Liberation Movement in 2002. She said, “In the process of defending the Church of Satan from these unfounded claims in the U.S. mass media, Zeena’s media appearances attracted a new upsurge of membership to the formerly moribund organization even as she began to question and ultimately reject the self-centered philosophy she promoted. As she toured the United States on behalf of the Church of Satan, Zeena’s crisis of faith reached its highpoint when she learned that most of her father’s self-created legend was based on lies and that many of his works were plagiarized. When jealousy and spite motivated Anton LaVey and his administrator, Densley-Barton, to endanger Zeena’s life, she could no longer continue to cover up her progenitor’s true character in good conscience. This behind-the-scenes tension should be kept in mind when viewing or hearing Zeena’s interviews from that time.”

As for Schreck, he founded the music and performance collective Radio Werewolf and was affiliated with the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, but later disavowed both and became a Buddhist. Schreck was part of the Abraxas Foundation, an occult-fascist think tank that included Boyd Rice, Adam Parfrey and Michael J. Moynihan. At one point, as he padded out pro-AIDS brochures, his ear was cut off. 

Bob Larson? I listened to him every day as a child. The pastor of Spiritual Freedom Church in Phoenix, Arizona, hosted Talk Back and went after, well, everything I loved from heavy metal to role-playing games. He went from doing exorcisms on the radio to charging people nearly $300 to do them over Skype.

This is a sit-down among all three, and it’s no different from a bunch of people high at a party talking psychology. Yet it’s a wonderful relic of a time I lived through, one that never went away.

You can watch this on YouTube.

My parents were saints. 

Instead of getting a child who loved playing football or one who was devoted to scholarship, they got a chubby kid who wanted to be a stuntman and who was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster. 

I wish my dad were around so I could apologize every day.

Director Richard Martin also directed King Monster, Jaws of Death, UFO Journals, UFO Syndrome and The Lost City of Atlantis. His IMDb bio states that “Richard Martin has been an active member of the entertainment industry for over thirty-five years as a motion picture and television executive. Serving as Chief Executive Officer for Transworld Films and Cinema Arts, he was responsible for the development and production of over a dozen major theatrical releases. Richard helped pioneer the revolutionary movement of “Four Walling,” a system of combining film production, marketing, distribution and theater leasing.

Someone alert Sunn Classics. Kroger Babb, too.

Like most of his paranormal films, this is narrated by Arthur Franz, who appeared in Invaders from Mars, Monster on the Campus, The Atomic Submarine and more. This goes from the stuff you expected, like you know, the Loch Ness Monster, before the focus goes all over the place, and we learn about fish fossils and lizards. We also see a jet boat crash and see Boleskine, the home of Crowley, which was once owned by Jimmy Page.

Will we also watch a priest try to exorcise Loch Ness? Yes, we will. There’s also a shark, so every exploitation topic in 1976 is covered. I’m surprised this doesn’t have inserts.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

Just before I hopped on the plane to Austin and SXSW, I was thinking that the current state of movie comedy is pathetic. In the 70s and 80s, we had films from Monty Python, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, John Belushi, John Hughes, the ZAZ guys, hell, Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite was hilarious. Today, it’s dire. Comedies are money losers in theaters, and the stuff made for streaming services is either a sad-ass romcom or a belated sequel that no one asked for to something like Beverly Hills Cop. A couple of months ago, I watched Frackham Hall, a parody of Downton Abbey, which was moderately amusing. But before that, I can’t remember a decent comedy, which is why I walked into Pizza Movie at SXSW with the lowest of expectations. But my head was about to explode—like the 50 or so in the film.

At the outset, the generic title Pizza Movie recalls 80s teen comedies like Hot Dog … The Movie and Hamburger: The Motion Picture. And if you figured that there will be a meta-reference why the film has that generic title, well done. This might be the review for you. Anyway, I knew next to nothing about the film other than it was the first film from Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, two former SNL and Funny or Die writers and starred Gatan Matarazzo. An SNL-adjacent movie with a kid from Stranger Things? That hardly sounded promising.

But hang on tight, the first five minutes have more laughs than probably the last 10 comedies I’ve seen (if only I could remember what they were apart from Frackham Hall). In a brilliant montage, winningly set to David Naughton’s disco hit “Makin’ It,” we see that the misguidedly overconfident Matarazzo as Jack and his college roommate, Sean Giambrone (the TV show The Goldbergs) as Montgomery, who’s so wussy he has a pet butterfly, are the geekiest kids on campus and hated by everyone for a mysterious thing that happened with the football team. We follow them as they get beaten up, abused, shaken down, farted on, and covered in urine. If the movie had no laughs past that opening, it would still be better than all the recent comedies combined.

Soon, it’s apparent that this movie’s universe is an extreme version of a Savage Steve Holland film, like his classic Better Off Dead: surreal, weird, and batshit crazy. One day, the cool kids in school have the hapless duo on their dorm room floor and are farting in their faces–and potentially giving them pink eye. (The clique leader, a smarmy kid in a sweater, never seems to have any conversation outside of “we farted in their faces.”) These hijinks dislodge a secreted and long-forgotten tin that contains what appear to be drugs. What are these smart lads to do but use Google and check out “drugs exploding head mints.” And lo and behold, up pops a 10-year-old YouTube video of Sarah Sherman (this movie gets more amazing by the minute), a chemistry major who created this mind-blowing psychedelic. Taking one mint will give you seven levels of tripping. (Now we’re into Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World territory.) I’ll let you fully discover the trip levels yourself, but I will preview that one deals with exploding heads, and the last one has your worst nightmare f***ing you in the ass with a chainsaw. (One character will discover how terrible that is simply because he was frightened by the Rat King in a Baltimore community theater production of the Nutcracker as a child.) 

Now, if the film were only about the misfits making it through the seven levels—all filled with ridiculous, surreal, violent, gory, disgusting, absolutely stupid and psychotic imagery, including heads on hands and a nightmarish area where a Hispanic man holds a baby in a sailor suit, and you have to “impress the baby,” it would be great. But oh no, it’s more, much more. If the trips get out of control, Sherman tells them the only way to come down is to eat pizza. So the guys, high AF, order pizza, which is delivered by a psychotic drone delivery cart voiced by Bobby Moynihan. All they need to do is compose themselves long enough to go down two floors to the dorm lobby to pick up the pizza.

But that, my friends, is an epic journey like the Odyssey fraught with incredible danger, such as a stormtrooper brigade of resident assistants whose leader is psychotically committed to punishing rulebreakers by taking their cellphones and using them to register their owners to living at Gralk Hall, a dorm on a branch campus four hours away, which appears to be part hell, part tuberculosis sanitarium, and part insane asylum from which no one ever returns. But assisting Jack and Montgomery on this journey is former platonic friend Lizzy, played by Lulu Wilson (Becky and The Wrath of Becky), who’s now part of the cool kids because she has a credit card, and who also has ingested a mint and is tripping balls.

I’ll stop right there because I’m laughing too hard, there’s so much more to tell that I’d be here for hours typing, and you need to discover for yourself the twisted, sick, juvenile, puerile, revolting, ludicrous, politically incorrect hilarity in this effed up film. Like Airplane, it’s packed with so many jokes that if one misses, no worries. Just three seconds later, you’ll be doubled over in hysterics. Indeed, someone should count the number of jokes in just over 90 minutes. I’ll bet it’s a record.

That said, like all comedies, Pizza Movie will be divisive. Many will not find it funny and complain that it’s terrible. If that’s you, I don’t want to know you. If the humor hits with you, you’re in for a rollicking time, just like back in the halcyon days of movie comedies. Loaded with great video effects, characters, and humor, it’s a big winner. And it was filmed in Buffalo. Amazing!

Pizza Movie premieres on Hulu on April 3.

I assume that Delineator Films is really just director and writer , the same man who brought us UFO Top Secret and its spiritual siblings UFO Exclusive and Amazing World of Ghosts. When you watch enough of Dixon’s movies, you start to realize that his filmmaking method is less about directing and more about curating whatever film cans happen to be lying around the room. If there’s a reel of stock footage, a religious educational short or a black-and-white dramatization from the Eisenhower administration, chances are it’s going to show up in one of his movies eventually.

Dixon didn’t shoot any of this, of course. Like most of his work, it’s a cinematic patchwork quilt. The footage comes from productions made by Family Films, pulled from several episodic religious series that were already decades old by the time Dixon got his hands on them. If you want to get technical, and you know I do, the footage seems like it was taken from several episodic series, including The Living Bible, a 26-part series released from 1952-55, and The Old Testament Scriptures, a 14-part mini-series released in 1958 and 1959.

This feels ancient now and probably felt as moldy in 1979.

Narrated by the ever-serious Sidney Paul, this film consists mostly of pantomime reenactments that tell the stories of Moses from the Old Testament and Jesus Christ from the New. If you’ve ever seen those old church-produced Bible films where everyone moves slowly, stares toward heaven and gestures dramatically like they’re trapped in a silent movie, that’s basically the vibe.

The production values scream mid-century religious educational film. The costumes look like something from a church basement pageant. The lighting is flat. The acting is…well, “acting” might be generous. Most of the performers appear to have been instructed to slowly raise their arms, gaze upward, and move around like they’re in a reverent game of charades. The whole thing plays less like a movie and more like a filmed version of a Living Nativity scene your local church would put on in December.

You know the kind. Wooden manger. Plastic sheep. One kid who refuses to stay in character. Someone’s uncle is playing Joseph while trying not to drop his fake beard. Maybe I’m the only one who went to those growing up, but that’s exactly the energy here. Who am I kidding? I was in one of those for almost a decade.

What makes the film fascinating isn’t the storytelling, which is about as straightforward as it gets, but the texture of the footage. The film stock looks faded, as if someone left it sitting in a sunny storefront window for 30 years. Colors bleed, the contrast fluctuates, and every now and then the image looks like it might dissolve into dust right there on the screen.

And somehow that actually adds to the charm.

This whole thing feels like a relic. Not just a movie about biblical history, but a movie that itself feels like a historical artifact. You’re not just watching the story of Moses or Jesus. You’re watching how people in the 1950s imagined those stories should look on film, filtered through the low-budget repackaging instincts of a 1970s exploitation documentarian.

That combination is what makes a Wheeler Dixon production so strangely compelling. He’s the king of the cinematic collage, the patron saint of recycled footage. If he made a movie about aliens, ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle or the Book of Exodus, you can bet that half of it would come from some other movie he found in a bargain bin.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

FINAL EXAMINATION—Horror Filmmaking 101

Create a horror feature film using as many types of jump scares as possible. Additional points given for homages to classic horror films with jump scares. Use your imagination and be creative. (Counts for 100% of your grade for the semester)

March 16, 2026

Professor,

As my submission for the final exam, attached is a digital file of my film Hokum, with Adam Scott trapped in an Irish haunted hotel. I hope you like it.

Respectfully submitted,

Damian McCarthy

A mysterious teaser trailer was attached to Oz Perkins’s horror film Keeper last fall. While Keeper was another misfire for the prolific Perkins, the coming attraction was for one of the most anticipated horror films at SXSW 2026, Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to his hit Oddity (2024). While quite a few folks loved Hokum at the SXSW screenings (the young woman sitting next to me watched most of the movie through her hands), it was one of the most infuriating horror movies I’ve seen in years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hokum begins with a perplexing scene of a man in armor and a young boy in a desert. They have a treasure map that they can’t get out of a bottle. The scene ends with a cliffhanger, and we soon learn that it’s the beginning of the epilogue of what will be the last book in author Ohm Bauman’s best-selling conquistador trilogy. Yours truly, ever the avid credits reader, sighed and noted that in the opening credits, an Abu Dhabi production company was credited, so this is McCarthy’s sucking up to his foreign investors. We’re not off to a good start.

Adam Scott as Bauman sits in the dark in his sterile, concrete residence with his laptop, drinking whiskey and laboring over how to end his book. He has writer’s block. He also has a small box that contains a revolver and some faded old photographs. Hold the phone. There was a sudden movement of something in the dark, our first jump scare. 

The next thing we know, Scott’s in Ireland to write that damn epilogue and put the ashes of his parents under a big tree where they got engaged. In rather rapid succession, he sees a local with a dead goat in the parking lot of the quaint old hotel. He insults the local. He checks into the hotel. He insults the desk clerk. He insults an old guy in a wheelchair, who is telling a folk story about a witch to some children. The old guy owns the hotel, but Scott doesn’t care. He insults the bellhop who’s a wannabe writer. He then pounds down whiskey, finds out about the honeymoon suite that’s haunted by a witch, so it must remain locked, and only mildly insults the cute young Irish woman tending bar.

This sets up two huge problems with the film: First, Scott’s an insufferable douchebag. He’s so awful that he can’t really be a surrogate or a hero for the viewer, You can’t picture yourself in his shoes, and you don’t really care what happens to him. Then there’s an unexpected shock behind his hotel room door, and McCarthy begins the mystery part of the narrative to set up the supernatural part, the movie’s second big problem. The young woman mysteriously disappears, Scott feels compelled to help find her, and the supernatural stuff sets in, which means the film will soon become a jump-scare-o-matic. Oh, I forgot to mention that when he buried those ashes, he met an old coot living out of his van in the woods who drinks milk laced with the local magic mushrooms that the goats have been eating. If you’re getting the idea that this film is overstuffed with random tropes and things that will probably end up going nowhere, ding, ding, ding, you are correct.

This mystery of the missing barmaid really cripples the film because McCarthy must interrupt the supernatural stuff to get back to Scott’s playing detective with the old coot from the woods. At this point, I thought to myself, why in the hell did we need all that set up? Just get Scott locked in the haunted honeymoon suite already. 

In the supernatural part of the movie, Scott eventually does get locked in that suite, and we have jump scares galore. I didn’t count them, but, like clockwork, there’s at least one about every 10 minutes. And McCarthy, like he’s fulfilling the requirements of the imaginary film school final exam that began this review, does almost every possible permutation of a jump scare. He gives you the motionless apparition at the end of the hallway, the out-of-focus image suddenly coming into focus outside a window, a spirit suddenly moving across the screen in the background, and a character shifting position to reveal a ghost. That fulfills the homage part of the exam by cribbing from The Shining, Suspiria, The Exorcist III, and Insidious.

But wait, there’s more! A scary thing comes out of the TV as in Poltergeist and The Ring. And The Ring was so cool, hey, let’s pay more homage to it by turning its well into the hotel’s dumbwaiter shaft. I think McCarthy plays all variations on his theme except the cat jump scare and the old chestnut with closing the medicine-cabinet mirror.

At about midpoint, I started to grade the film like an academic exercise because that’s how it felt to me: a semester-long project to see how many times you   can go “Boo!” To its credit, the production is beautiful looking, the visual effects are good, Scott gives it everything he has, and it’s never boring. About half of the attempted jump scares work well, and a couple are almost in the pantheon of the ne plus ultra, the jump scare at the end of Brian DePalma’s Carrie. But the other half don’t work due to poor timing or misdirection or a musical stinger that comes a fraction of a second too soon. 

Even as time is running out in the last act, McCarthy’s not quite finished. Look at this! It’s Inferno! Now I’m going to crib from Fulci without the gore! It’s The Fog! If you’ve been following me, it should be obvious now why the film infuriated me so much. McCarthy’s a talented horror director, for sure, but he’s just punching in all these mechanical shocks, tropes, and references that mostly go nowhere. And speaking of nowhere, we’re going back to that imaginary desert in Adam Scott’s mind for a bookend scene with the conquistador and the boy. But not before McCarthy has a last line of dialogue that pulls the rug out from under the viewer. No, it’s not “it was all a dream,” but it’s pretty damn close. 

When Hokum comes out in wide release from Neon on May 1, a lot of folks are going to rave and say that it’s effing great and scary AF. But the SXSW crowd at my screening didn’t applaud when it was over. It was the only time that happened at a screening while I was in Austin. That’s dire. Maybe other audience members felt, as I did, that McCarthy had just repeatedly punched them in the face and laughed for over an hour and a half, and that didn’t deserve applause. To paraphrase Monty Python, “I came for a horror film, not abuse.” 

Mr. McCarthy, you passed the final, but just barely. You are a smart and talented guy. Next semester, you’d better show improvement, or you’ll have to do remedial work by directing episodes of Goosebumps.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

Family Movie, a meta-horror film starring the beloved Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13th, Tremors, Hollow Man, Stir of Echoes, MaXXXine, and many more), wife Kyra Sedgwick (the long-running TV show The Closer), musician son Travis, and daughter Sosie (the TV show Scream and the film Smile) is a strange creation that resides in a murky nether world somewhere between vanity project and high-concept gimmick. In it, the Bacon family members play exaggerated versions of themselves as a family that makes micro-budget horror films.

Kevin plays Jack Smith, a farmer and struggling filmmaker, whose greatest triumph was when one of his Palonia Brothers-like films opened a crappy regional film festival two decades earlier. He’s trying to finish Blood Moon, the last horror film he’s going to make with his family. (You gotta love the inside references to the horror masterpiece Messiah of Evil in Dan Beers’s screenplay, including the climax of Jack’s film, which is something akin to the never-filmed sacrifice scene from Messiah.) Kyra plays his wife, a failed New York stage actress, who stars in the family’s films and does craft services–humus and stuff that will “bloat” a bit player. Travis is their boom-operator son, a heavy-metal head into martial arts who longs for something more in life. And Sosie is their daughter, of course, a budding actress who has just landed a starring role in a TV series filming in Vancouver, but who is afraid to tell her mom that mom’s former agent, now an enemy, got her the job. It’s just your average family with average problems.

But, as you can guess, things do not go smoothly on Blood Moon. A documentary filmmaker hired by Jack to do a “making of” film keeps catching the family at its worst, a surly neighbor, played by a very funny John Carroll Lynch (Face/Off, Gothika, and Zodiac), has a dog that keeps barking and ruining takes, and wonderful character actor Jackie Earle Haley (Dollman, Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, and the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street), playing a Smith-film regular, gets conked on the head with a spotlight. And as his SAG insurance has just expired, he hands Jack the hospital bill, which is huge because the wound reopened and oozed and all that. Then there’s a real murder and we’re off to even broader humor, more murders, lots of gore, family meetings where secrets are revealed, and proof that the family that slays together stays together. 

Sounds like fun, right? Well, for a time it is kind of  fun. The Bacons seem like nice people whom you’d want to hang out with, and they’re clearly having a ball, especially Kyra. But I think my plot synopsis makes Family Movie sound much better than it really is. It’s co-directed by Kevin and Kyra in a slick, fussy way (too many unnecessary tracking shots) that the fictional Bacon clan could have only dreamed of achieving. I hate to use the cliché, but it’s never truer than here: They’re all having more fun than the viewer with this burlesque horror-comedy, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. I’d describe it as kind of the American horror version of an Ealing Studios black comedy like Kind Hearts and Cornets as done by Benny Hill with assistance from the Cohen Brothers, while drunk on Malort. (But if that were true, it would be a much better movie.) It’s cute and pleasant enough, but obvious and predictable, and I’m sure I won’t think about it again after finishing this review. 

Fun fact: A producer friend of mine was invited to the pre-screening party for Family Movie. He told me Kevin Bacon didn’t attend his own party but was seen later looking surly, accompanied by his gigantic bodyguard. Somebody must’ve mentioned Footloose to Bacon, and the bodyguard had to throw the miscreant through a wall. Now that image is better and funnier than anything in Family Movie.

Family Movie has apparently been picked up by Neon but does not have a release date.