William Fruet made his directorial debut with Wedding in White, based on a play he had written. The film won Best Picture at the Canadian Film Awards in 1973 and starred Carol Kane and Donald Pleasence. He followed that up with an intriguing string of Canuxploitation films, obviously taking full advantage of those wonderful tax shelter laws that produced so many statistic favorites.

There’s proto-slasher Death Weekend (released in the U.S. as The House By the Lake), Cries In the Night (known better here as Funeral Home), redneck rampage film Trapped (AKA Baker County U.S.A.), Spasms, Bedroom Eyes and the kinda-sorta Alien by way of animal experimentation oddity Blue Monkey, as well as episodes of Goosebumps, Friday’s Curse (perhaps better known as Friday the 13th: The Series) and Poltergeist: The Legacy.

That brings us to Killer Party, a movie once named April Fool before the similarly named April Fool’s Day went into production.

College students Vivia (Sherry Willis-Burch, who is also in Final Exam), Jennifer (Joanna Johnson, who was on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful off and on from 1987 to 2014) and Phoebe (Elaine Wilkes, Sixteen Candles, My Chauffeur) are sorority pledges at Briggs College who are in the middle of Hell Week.

They’re warned by their housemother, Mrs. Henshaw, to avoid the Pratt House, then travels there herself to the grave of a man named Allan, who she asks to leave the kids alone before she’s murdered.

On the day of the initiation—this is a similar slasher trope; just witness Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, One Dark Night and The Initiation, just to name a few—the girls prepare to break in and steal some clothes. We also meet Blake (Martin Hewitt, the doomed obsessive lover of Brooke Shields in Endless Love) and Martin (Ralph Seymour, Surf II, Just Before Dawn), who are interested in Jennifer.

During the hazing, the girls are forced to hold raw eggs in their mouths. Soon, all hell breaks loose, and the lights begin to flicker, and glasses rise off the table. Vivia goes to see where the noises are coming from, which leads to the group finding her getting beheaded by a guillotine. Somehow, this was all a ruse and part of a prank that she decided to play. This part kind of confuses me, as I have no idea how a pledge — or why, to be honest — could set up such an elaborate trick.

That said, that prank becomes the reason why Vivia makes it into the sorority. She’s asked to recreate it at the April Fool’s Day masquerade that they’re throwing at — DUH DUH DUH — the Pratt House. That’s when we learn — via Professor Zito’s (Paul Bartel!) exposition — that Allan died in such a hazing ritual involving a guillotine 22 years ago. That said, Allan may have been way into the occult and conjured an evil force that was behind his death.

Bartel is the best part of this movie. I’ve said that sentence so many times, but it’s incredibly accurate here. Sadly, he doesn’t last much longer, as when he decides to inspect the house, someone in the basement electrifies him. Also, his Zito character is named after Joseph Zito, who directed Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and The Prowler. That’s because the former of those films was written by this film’s writer, Barney Cohen.

During the prank at the part, Jennifer is possessed by a spirit and stops the trick. As the party falls apart, the killing picks up, with Veronica being killed with a hammer, Pam stabbed with a trident, Martin’s head ends up in the fridge while Albert also loses his noggin and then Blake is drowned in a bathtub. Vivia and Phoebe run from all this carnage right into Jennifer, who discloses that she’s possessed by the ghost of Allan.

They try and escape through a window, but Vivia is thrown to the unforgiving earth, breaking both her legs. Phoebe ends up killing her possessed friend by impaling her with a board, but she’s overtaken by Allan just as the police put both women into an ambulance. The movie closes with Vivia screaming that she can’t be left alone with Phoebe.

The quick burst of murder in this film is because it had to be re-edited following numerous MPAA cuts. That’s why the film seems to have no gore and is edited so that the murders have little room in between. In the original cut, there was more time between each kill, as well as plenty more gore, like Pam getting completely impaled by the trident.

If you’re watching this and wondering, “Have I seen Briggs College before?” you have. It’s the same school as 1998’s Urban Legend.

Killer Party was a latecomer to the slasher era, but it’s a quick-moving burst of fun. It’s not perfect, but how many of these movies are?

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

I am obsessed with the films of Johannes Grenzfurthner (Razzennest, Masking Threshold), and I was somewhat concerned, as you know how when your favorite band has a new album, you worry if this is the one where they lose it or worse, sell out? That’s how I felt about this. Luckily, my concerns could be laid to rest. This has all the wildness that I expect from his films and then some. While I’d love to see him selected to direct a remake of RoboCop, I don’t think Hollywood is calling anytime soon after this.

That’s a good thing.

Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries!) is an American researcher who is going through a farmhouse in search of Nazi documents. But that’s the least of the strangeness that he uncovers, as Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), the man who owns the property, takes him through the moldering home of his grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (archival footage by Otto Zucker, Grenzfurthner’s real grandfather), a man who disappeared and left no trace.

The team finds a metal pipe and decides to explore it until leader and Polish academic historian Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen) has a mental breakdown from being near whatever is inside it, accidentally killing another member, Cornelia Dunzinger (Jasmin Hagendorfer). Everything is shut down, but Holbrook is now beyond intrigued; what he finds won’t just drive him insane; it will transform his body into some kind of rot. We learn that he and Krystyna were lovers, that he went AWOL when he got PTSD from serving in Kuwait and that he’s been a mercenary in Bosnia. Now, he will experience something perhaps no other human has or should.

I had the sheer joy of a long series of conversations with the creator of this art (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are posted here), during which he discussed the origins of this film in depth.

“The idea for Solvent came from this moment when I stepped into my grandfather’s old farmhouse after not having been there for ten years. There had been a rift in our family—my mother and her sister didn’t speak for a decade, partly due to inheritance disputes and family drama. When my aunt passed away, her daughter came back to Austria for the first time in twenty years, and we went to see what she inherited. It felt a lot like the story of Solvent.

When I stepped into that house, I could feel the mold attacking my lungs—it was horrendous. The smell was unbearable, and everything was decaying. But I spent some of my best childhood days there, so walking into that house again and seeing what my aunt had or hadn’t done with it hit me hard. I saw it through this nostalgic lens—how it used to look in my childhood, compared to how it was now, in ruins. Something in my brain shifted, and I thought, I need to do something with this. It felt like the perfect setting for a horror story.

I’ve always been fascinated by Austrian history, and the movie was born out of a need to confront Austria’s historical baggage—not in a traditional or sanitized way. The farmhouse, tied to my family’s history, became a metaphor for exploring guilt, complicity, and how the past still seeps into the present. Austria has this unique way of dealing with its Nazi past. When I was in school in the 1980s, we didn’t learn a lot about the Nazi era. The German school curriculum, by contrast, was much more proactive about it. But in Austria, it was as if the country didn’t exist between 1938 and 1945. Austrians were very eager to forget, despite the fact that most of the concentration camps were run by Austrians.

Austria was never good at confronting the past, and I saw this gap in my conversations with friends, their parents, and grandparents. It was as if Austria had this hole in its soul, this thing that no one wanted to talk about. The more time passes, the more people forget. And that’s the core of the film—there’s something in the ground in Austria that never goes away, something that still affects us. It doesn’t matter if you talk about it or not—it will catch up with you. It’s very Freudian, embedded into everything, this festering wound that never heals.”

I usually do my best to avoid found-footage films, as the shaky camera and rules of the form feel nauseating and constrictive. That said, Grenzfurthner’s films are so technically proficient and just plain unsettling, moving and wonderous that I get over myself very quickly. This is yet another triumph for him, a film that begs to be experienced.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

This movie is so perfect for me. Just imagine, a more well-thought-out Midsommar that has actually seen The Wicker Man — and on drugs, mind you — but also knows about collecting records, the joy of finding lost media and understands the allure of strangeness like the Arica, Source Family/Father Yod/Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Process Church and how today’s youth only gets the cool veneer of these lost groups — well, The Process is now kinda sorta Best Friends Animal Shelter — and not the at-times harsh reality. It’s easy to love black metal for its aura of kvlt, yet I doubt you’d participate in the burning of a stave church.

Made for the price of a used car, this movie finds Pater Noster and his band/church lying low after recording several albums in the distant past, one found by Max (Adara Starr), a record store employee that probably only is there to get the discount and build up her own collection of albums. Store owner Sam (Shaley Renew), co-worker Abby (Sanethia Dresch), Gretchen (Shelby Lois Guinn), and Jay Sin (Josh Outzen) get obsessed with the songs. When an invitation to visit the actual Pater Noster compound comes to Max, they all decide to go. Armed with info from cult podcaster Dennis Waverly (Tim Cappello, not playing a sax), they think this is going to be a laugh.

Maybe they haven’t watched the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis or I Drink Your Blood.

Meeting Pater Noster (Mike Amason) may be the last thing they do.

Even crazier is how perfect the music is for this film, featuring The Restoration, Brandy & the Butcher, Turbo Gatto, EZ Shakes, Stagbriar, Ass/Bastard, In/Humanity, Transonics, Hot Lava Monster, Marshall Brown and Larb as well as Tim Cappello playing that sax.

Here’s how the movie was sold on Indiegogo: “The movies we make are punk rock demo tapes. We operate outside of Hollywood and traditional distribution routes. We make movies for people looking for something different, not defined by focus groups and corporate interests. You won’t find this movie in a Walmart because it doesn’t belong in a Walmart.”

That couldn’t be more true. This feels truer to the insane spirit of drive-in movies that you wonder, “Who is this for, other than me?” than any movie I’ve seen in years. Yet it feels real, lived in, authentic. This is, quite literally, the actual shit. A movie where you feel for the victims just as much as for the victimizers, a place where you think that you too could be trapped, because as much as I love the cults of the 70s, I know I would never survive.

A near-perfect film. Find it and live in it now.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.