The Bigfoot trap is located in the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest in the southern part of Jackson County, Oregon. It was built by the North American Wildlife Research Team (NAWRT) and in six years, all it caught was bears. Today, the trap has been fixed and is maintained by the United States Forest Service as a tourist attraction. It’s a wooden box — ten feet by ten feet — made of planks that are bound together with metal and secured by telephone poles.

Josh MacMahon (Tyler Weisenauer) makes a video for the new site he’s working on where he makes light of flat earth conspiracy theorists. He goes viral and now he has to go after every other weird theory. His next target is Red Wilson (Zach Lazar Hoffman) and the Southern Sasquatch Research Foundation. It has one other member, Kyle (Andy Kanies).

Things don’t go as well.

Red knows Josh’s plan of making him look like a moron all while the would-be serious journalist is morally conflicted about doing exactly that. And then Josh accidentally shoots Kyle and ends up in, well, the Bigfoot trap.

Director and writer Aaron Mirtes (American Hunt, The Alpha Test) plays with your feelings — if you have negative Squatcher feelings, but not me, I’m a believer, I saw that one in a cooler outside a K-Mart when I was little — and makes you consider whose side you’re on before all that drama turns into the actual scares. It’s not perfect, but there are some great moments of character in this.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Silas Brewster (Jacob Ryan Snovel) and his wife Priscilla (Leah N.H. Philpott) have gone beyond wanting to kill one another and saying they want to murder each other to actually doing something about it on the very same night.

This dark comedy feels more like a broad farce you’d see on stage than a movie, but I think some may enjoy how over the top that it is. Director Zachary Burns and writer Jacob Leighton Burns have put together a movie filled with the kind of coincidences and cliches that go hand in hand with a slapstick story like this, including the fact that Silas is having an affair with Lily (Michaelene Stephenson) and Priscilla is sleeping with Thomas (Clinton Kubat) and both of their new partners have teamed up to help kill their respective despised partners. Plus, the next door couple, Andy (Yousef Kazemi) and Theo (Laron M. Chapman), keep coming to visit at the worst and most dangerous moments.

If you’re looking for a fun and somewhat frothy piece of murderous marital madcappery, well, this will do quite well.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Known in its native Lithuania as Rūpintojėlis (Caregiver), this is at once a teen drama, a folk horror and a slasher and when it leans into the latter, it goes all the way. Once known as Pensive, the new title is a much better explanation of what happens in this shocker.

After their graduation party location gets canceled, a group of teens are saved by Marius (Šarūnas Rapolas Meliešius), who has been one of the more misunderstood and unpopular students. His mother has an empty property that she’s been trying to sell forever and he knows where she keeps the keys. It seems like the perfect strategy to get his crush, Brigita (Gabija Bargailaitė), all alone.

Sounds like a teen sex comedy, maybe? Well, when the students arrive, there are statues all over the property, wooden figures that one of them claims are representations of grief and loss, as the last person to live here lost his family in a fire, which led to his suicide. When they go inside, the walls are covered with black soot. Yes, people died here.

Let’s party?

Once the drink starts to flow, someone gets the idea to destroy the statues. But those pieces of wooden remembrance have a caretaker willing to give out the same treatment to flesh that has been visited upon wood.

The difference with nearly every other slasher that you’ve ever seen is that these aren’t disposable teens. Some of them are quite nice. But just because they’re at the house and were around when the statues were defaced, they must all pay.

If this were the 80s, Hollywood would hire director Jonas Trukanas (who co-wrote the script with Titas Laucius) and have him direct the next sequel in a horror franchise. As it is, the wood-masked charred caretaker named Algis (Marius Repsys) just might be a better Cropsy than the one that shows up in The Burning. It also takes most of the things that you expect from a traditional slasher, references them and then throws them into a blender where they come up bloody and unrecognizable yet perfect in their new execution.

This is a movie to get excited about.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Lilly (Alison Walter) has finally escaped a horrible relationship and has found the courage to tell the world on social media. That’s something that Tom (Sam Brittan) is just licking up. I mean, he literally is, because he’s the Tearsucker of the title, a maniac who lives for the taste of women’s tears.

Tom is the kind of guy that goes to support groups to do homework to better figure out how to break women down. So when Lilly falls for him, you want to warn her. And when she quickly decides to go away for the weekend with him, you want to scream at her.

Director Stephen Vanderpool fixates on tight shots of faces often in this and it works. He’s working from a script by  Brittan that gives more to its antagonist than its protagonist, although her one speech online is heart rendering. The romance moves a bit fast from Lilly being shattered to her falling for a stranger, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Even if it’s to lick the salty tears off someone’s face.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Director and writer Zach Passero spent eight years bringing this movie to life. It’s the story of Dug, Mel and Fatt, who all go on a camping trip to Jerusalem National Park with Dug’s brother Wyatt and his girlfriend Mary. Then they meet the Night Child, a bug creature that they’d already been warned about. But no, of course they didn’t listen. Now, they’re set to either be devoured by the Night Child or murdered by the townsfolk who seem straight out of The Devil’s Rain!

Between this and Attack of the Demons, I’ve been surprised twice now by animated horror films that end up outdoing their live action counterparts. This feels like the kind of movie that you’d rent along with The Gate, House II, TerrorVision and Critters.

Passero edited Old Man, one of my favorite movies of the last few years, as well as Jug Face and All Cheerleaders Die. Somehow he did all that and also raised two kids with his wife and creative partner, Hannah Passero. There are some recognizable voices, too. The convenience store girl is Angela Bettis, who played May, the sheriff is Sean Bridgers, who was in The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot and Walter is Ellar Coltrane, who was Mason in Richard Linkater’s Boyhood.

If you love 80s VHS-era horror or the kind of animation that Liquid Television had before computer animation, this is for you.

You can learn more at the official website and Facebook page for the movie.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

South of Chile, if not heaven, a trio of twenty-something women have formed a black metal band, Invoking Yell, and taken to the woods to record their first album. They decide that to capture their sound, they need to find psicofonias, quite literally the voices of dead children killed in a schoolbus accident, inside the forest. While they film their recording, things go wrong. Or right.

Directed by Patricio Valladares, who co-wrote this with Barry Keating, this brings back one of the ideas in their movie Embryo and has a music video in the woods that slowly unravels. It starts with a quote from Maximiliano Sánchez Mondaca, which claims that while the rise of black metal around the world led to more bands trying to record their own music, it also brought about more Satanic rites, vandalism and murder.

Andrea (María Jesús Marcone), Tania (Macarena Carrere) and Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich) are now in the same conundrum that artists like Snorre Westvold Ruch, Varg Vikernes, Euronymous, Samoth, Jorn Inge Tunsberg, Faust, Dead and Andreas “C. H. Surt” Kirchner, Sebastian “Dark Mark Doom” Schauseil and Ronald “Wolf” Möbus of Absurd — named for, yes, the George Eastman movie  — found themselves in. How long can you pretend to be amoral and evil before you have to prove it for real?

A movie that claims to be found footage from Ruth’s video camera as the women recorded in 1997, this finds Tania and Ruth enjoying their time in the woods — drugs and drinks are had by all — while Angela seems devoted to reaching true kvlt status and following up on her goal of having music bringing suffering.

There’s plenty of enjoy here, as you learn how the women want to break out of just being used for their bodies and need to establish their own music. To stand out in a scene where church burning, suicide and seld-mutilation is the norm, however, they’re going to have to go too far to make that happen.

Chile is also known for its extreme music with nearly three thousand bands listed on Encyclopaedia Metallum as proof. There’s Skullshredder, Desecrator and Negro from Slaughtbbath, as well as Ecologist, Invocation Spells, Sol Sistere, Death Yell and many more. Just check out this Spotify list.

The moments of the girls talking about who is true and who isn’t may seem silly, but Euronymous used to be quoted saying stuff like, “I would rather sit at home and cut myself than go to parties.” and that he would only sign evil bands to his label, Deathlike Silence.

Beyond the music, I think that any fan of found footage will enjoy this, even if you don’t have an opinion on Immortal being better with or without Abbath.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.