Marissa (Bridget Regan) and Eve (Joanne Kelly) have seemingly been pitted against one another since they were born. Their father, Raymond Hale (Samuel Roukin), was an oppressive collector of art who felt that his life of privilege kept him from his true calling of being an artist. He sword that his daughters would be guided to becoming the best artists who ever lived. To do that, Hale taught them that their pain would guide them to become better at their craft, despite the damage that it would do to their psyches. Marissa became a cold, unfeeling art scenester, using her sister’s art to gain entry into a world that she doesn’t have the talent to survive in. Eve has regressed inward, spending as much of her time as possible inside the family’s crumbling home, the same place where she found her father dead from suicide.

Their relationship is best summed up by a flashback where both paint in front of a waterfall. Their father yells at Marissa, complaining about how she doesn’t seem to care. He then forces Eve to burn her sister’s canvas, intonning, “The seed of creativity is adversity.”

Eve became a prodigy and was known in the art world before puberty.

Marissa was always jealous of her.

And if this seems like an art world version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the filmmakers should take it as a supreme compliment.

Years later, the sisters come back together as Marissa learns that Eve plans to donate the priceless art that her father owned to a local gallery. It just so happens to belong to the fiancee of the girl’s childhood friend Cormack (Alain Uy), who has also remained in their hometown. Instead of becoming a great painter, he’s content to take care of Eve from afar and have a tattoo shop.

Appearances are reality for many in this film. Marissa is as much a mess as Eve, but she never admits it. Eve may appear like she’s hanging on to life by her fingernails, yet she can feel joy at the opportunity to reconnect with her sister.

Director and writer team Melora Donoghue and Kimberly Stuckwisch have created an entire world populated by characters who live and breathe. Marissa blows into town, seemingly always one step ahead of her sister. Yet Eve, while innocent, is not without guile. I rooted for her in this.

This is quite a movie. I hope it gets the kind of distribution where so many people can watch it.

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

Mr. McDaniel (Paul Lazar, Silence of the Lambs) is a retired teacher obsessed with a game all the social media kids are playing called Sweet Relief. They all name someone who they dislike and people vote on whether or not a murder would be justified. If it is, they must complete the murder. If they back out, they’re killed.

The game starts to infect a small town. Nathan (Adam Michael Kozak) moves away from home and cohabitates with Jess (Alisa Leigh). This causes his young sister Hannah (Lucie Rosenfeld) to be trapped with their strange mother who constantly watches McDaniel online. Hannah and her mother think that Nathan has betrayed their family and if they have to play the game to get him back, they’re in.

There’s also a child killer turned drug deal and now police informant reformed Gerald (B.R. Yeager) who is obsessed with the fact that he’s kind of a cop. He’s also still a murderer and when Jess catches him, all of these stories meet in a bloody and nihilistic finale.

Directed and written by Nick Verdi, this has a pace outside of what you see out of Hollywood. There are moments that just wait and wait for you. The characters all feel authentic and even when they’re locked into their own odd thought patterns, you never lose sight of the fact that they could be real.

It’s not perfect yet it’s rough edges are what make it interesting. The kids — and the adults and the senior citizens and everyone in town — are not alright. You can’t stop watching.

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

Directed and written by Ludvig Gür, Gudstjänst — which is being released in the U.S. as In the Name of God — is about Theodor (Linus Walhgren), a priest who is often the only person at his masses. The worshippers are dying off and his wife Felicia (Lisa Henni) wonders if they should move on. He’s happy that his mentor Jonas (Thomas Hanzon) has come to town. The problem is that it seems like he may be deranged. After all, he just killed a dove right in front of him and sprayed him with hot blood.

Yet when Felicia collapses and is soon hospitalized, dying from a mysterious ailment, Jonas offers to save her if Theodor follows him just as he did by going into the priesthood. Now, he must accept the true priesthood of God and kill sinners to save his wife’s life.

Jonas has already captured a rapist and all the younger man has to do is snuff out his sinful life. He does. His wife is healed. He becomes known as a faith healer and people come back to the church. His wife is with child. God has a plan.

Yet to make the prayers of his new followers come true, he must keep killing. Because the God who has listened to Theodor is the Old Testament one, the vengeful demander of sacrifice, the God that asked Abraham to murder his own son just to see how far he would go.

This is the very definition of a moral quandary. Isn’t murder a sin? Yet aren’t the people who Theodor is hunting and destroying evil incarnate? Isn’t all this murder making the world a better place? And if he can make miracles happen at the same time, isn’t that God’s will? Can you become addicted to creating magic happen in the lives of those who follow your teachings?

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

In this movie directed and written by its stars, Gavin Charles and Alex Conn, two filmmakers explore a dead mall yet find themselves trapped within its environment, as the hallways, stairwells and abandoned stores start to trap them.

Made in Kansas City on nearly no budget — $37 or so IMDB would like you to believe — this is a liminal horror movie. That means that it takes place “in a space between two states of being.” This is a big YouTube horror trend and before every Hollywood movie starts to run it into the ground, Charles and Conn are here first.

Hollywood pitch meeting shorthand: Think Skinamarink.

The duo keep yelling, “This is another liminal space!” as they find all these backrooms and the Lunch Zone inside what was once a place of capitalism. Now, it’s a husk. This feels like the next level of found footage and taking streaming video into the horror film.

So wait — for the old people like me — what are The Backrooms?

According to Wikipedia, they “are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting (“no-clipping out of”) reality.” They’re also quite often filled with sinister beings.

In 2019, a 4chan thread posted a “photograph of a large, carpeted room with fluorescent lights and dividing walls.” It upset people and no one could quite figure out why. One anonymous poster was able to sum it up and some of their words came to be the title of this movie: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

A24 announced that they are working on a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Kane Parsons’ videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino is set to write the screenplay, while James Wan, Michael Clear from Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps are set to produce.

So again, it’s nice that these guys got there first.

Much like the aforementioned Skinamarink, nothing much happens. But that’s sort of the aesthetic, I guess. Again, I’m ancient and I remember when found footage was Cannibal Holocaust and not The Blair Witch. I feel about this the way I do about pop music: I am almost forty years past when that music should be relevant for me. For those who it is for, I hope they love it.

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

If you think there’s censorship in America today, well, let me tell you…after the comic book trials of the 1950s, in which Dr. Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent led to Congress having trials amidst the belief that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, the Comics Code Authority was born. Every comic needed the code and in order to keep offending comics like E.C. Comics’ Tales from the Crypt from ever rearing their ugly head again, vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies were banned. Comics couldn’t even use the words horror or terror in their titles. Even comic book writer Marv Wolfman’s last name was challenged!

It got so ridiculous that when Marvel used zombies in The Avengers, they had to call them zuvembies. They were still undead, they still acted like zombies, yet that spelled got them past the outdated Comics Code.

However, a 1971 provision to the Code stated the following: “Vampires, ghouls and werewolves are allowed when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world.”

After the last appearances of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and a werewolf as superheroes in a short-lived line of Dell Comics, comic publishers realized that they could make monster books and as the characters were in the public domain, they could create their own versions of some already beloved characters.

Marvel already had a “living vampire” in Morbius — yes, the same character who is getting his own movie — but the Dracula comic floundered at first with several different writers (Gerry Conway, who went from a Universal-inspired take with major input from editors Roy Thomas and Stan Lee to a Hammer take on the character in the two issues he wrote, followed by two issues by Archie Goodwin and two by Gardener Fox before the aforementioned Marv Wolfman came on board) before gaining traction. Gene Colan was the artist along with Tom Palmer on inks for most of the run, basing his Dracula on Jack Palance, who would end up getting the role in the Dan Curtis TV movie Dracula a year after Colan prophetically started drawing him as the King of the Vampires.

At its height, Tomb of Dracula also had two black and white titles, Dracula Lives! and Tomb of Dracula. Yet even after the series ended in August of 1979, the character would return to battle the X-Men.

Strangely enough, Marvel’s Dracula comic book has more of an honor than just being one of the first Marvel movies. It also introduced the character of Blade, who would be one of the first Marvel film successes in 1998.

In 1980, soon after the end of the series, Marvel’s deal with Toei led to this movie.

The Toei deal began when the CBS Spider-Man series — which only had 13 episodes in America and a few TV movies — became a big success in Japan. Toei, the makers of Kamen Rider, would be the partner to create Marvel-inspired series such as their own Japanese Spider-Man show that gave Japan their own webslinger in Takuya Yamashiro and his giant robot Leopardon.

Marvel also produced the Sentai — think Power Rangers shows Battle Fever J (with characters from multiple countries much like Captain America; Miss America on the show inspired American Chavez — according to this article on Inverse — and the crew even battled a Dracula robot), Denshi Sentai Denziman and Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan, which Stan Lee tried and failed to bring to America. Ironically, former Marvel producer Margaret Loesch ran Fox Kids in the 90s, which led to Marvel shows appearing on Fox, as well as a much later Super Sentai series, which was rebranded exactly as Lee had suggested by Saban Entertainment and called Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

In 1983, Harmony Gold released this to American cable as Dracula Sovereign of the Damned. And wow, it’s something else.

The movie starts with no less gravitas than to show us how the universe was formed and the nature of juxtaposition — life and death, heat and cold, light and dark — began. Nowhere is that juxtaposition more felt than in the form of Dracula, who is both alive and dead.

Now making his home in Boston, after being hounded by multiple vampire hunters, Dracula soon interrupts a wedding between a virginal bride and Lucifer, stealing Dolores for his own, yet conflicted as to whether or not he should drink her blood. They end up having a son, Janus, who is killed by the cultists and Satan, but comes back as a being of pure light that also wants to kill his father. Meanwhile, Frank Drake, Hans Harker and Rachel Van Helsing are hunting down the vampire, wanting to end his life for good.

Can you fit more than 40 issues of a comic book into 90 minutes? Well, the makers of this movie sure gave it a try. At one point, Dracula even becomes human and walks the streets of Boston still wearing his cloak, but goes to get a hamburger. It’s also amazing just how much violence, Satanic moments and even nudity that this movie has. It’s also hilariously dubbed and the source material isn’t understood by the people making it, so it’s exactly everything that I want and need it to be.

As part of the deal with Toei, one more movie got made: Kyoufu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein.

You can watch this on YouTube.