“Ah, two peas in a pod and not a pot to piss in.”
— Yuri the Knifethrower breaks it down to truth

This tale of two down-and-out, twenty-something losers reminds of Step Brothers (2008) — and a whole bunch of earlier ’80s comedies. Was it screenwriter Cameron Van Hoy’s intention to create a retro-’80s comedy? One thing is for sure: Cameron Van Hoy — who’s the screenwriter — and his fellow up-and-coming co-star Michael Drayer, are certainly as chemistry-talented as Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

They star as the broke and busted best buddies Vince Valley (Van Hoy) and Freddy Krebs (Drayer, who’s guest starred on the Law & Order franchise, The Sopranos, and most recently on NCIS: Los Angeles) reduced to living in a tent in the backyard of Freddy’s parents. Vince and Freddy are perpetual dreamers who, instead of getting jobs (Freddy refuses to work for the family’s Bible-publishing business), they’re always looking for the “idea of a lifetime” to strike it rich — without the hard work that goes into becoming wealthy. Their latest, can’t-miss idea: shark-proof wet suits. Of course, no one, including their put-upon parents (Dennis Haskins; Principal Belding from Saved by the Bell, Abstruse, A Bennett Song Holiday, and the we-don’t-see-her-enough Joan Severance of TV’s Wiseguy, and coolest female “Batman” ever in Black Scorpion), will back the idea.

Cue Jon Lovitz.

He’s his usual, droll pisser-self as Max (we first met him as he rants about vaginas), a local L.A. loan shark-cum-nightclub owner who, instead of fronting them the money, becomes infuriated when his crush, Isabella (the new-to-the-scene and very good Kinga Kierzek), the receiving half of a knife-throwing duo performing at the club, takes a liking to the likeable ne’er-do-wells. (You’ll recognize her act-partner, Yuri, as Ken Davitian from his most recent work in the series-streaming Corba Kai and the film Borat. Stick around for his rant about chickens and ducks.) Now Max has sent his goons to get Isabella back and take care of Vince and Freddy. Of course, it doesn’t help that she robbed Max. Will these cool-nerds get their act together to save the girl? (Stick around for the comedic-bent, Reservoir Dogs-warehouse confrontation. Funny stuff.)

While his name leads on the theatrical one-sheet — this is a Cameron Van Hoy and Michael Drayer showcase, after all (deserving so; they’re both very good, here) — Lovitz isn’t here as much as we’d like, but when he shows up, he nails his small-time gangster role, and Joan Severance reminds us why we miss seeing her on camera, as she oozes the cougar heat for her son’s best friend. (Lovitz was also equally great in his sidekick role to British rockers Status Quo, in our “Rock Week” review 2013’s Bula Quo!.)

Unlike a Judd Apatow flick written by Seth Rogan and starring Ben Stiller with James Franco, Almost Sharkproof is delightfully innocuous, which throws it all back to the comedies of the ’80s — instead of carbon-copying today’s brand of 21st Century raunch. Are the proceedings sometime clichéd? Maybe, but you never once groan, because once you get on the comedic chase through the underbelly of Los Angeles, you enjoy the retro-comedy ride that’s rife with genuine, laugh-out loud moments — all courtesy a great script by Cameron Van Hoy. If the acting thing doesn’t work out (it will; again, he’s very good) for Van Hoy, he will surely make his mark as a screenwriter to complete for the screens with Rogan.

It’s been a long-hard road to distribution for Cameron Van Hoy and his co-directors Simon Chan (his second, next feature film is the horror-western Satan’s Children) and Joe Rubalcaba (who got his start with the iCarly tween-franchise), who completed the film in 2014. And their hard work has paid off as TriCoast Worldwide, in conjunction with Rock Salt Releasing, bring Almost Sharkproof to the worldwide streaming audience on March 5, 2021.

Disclaimer: We received a screener from the distributor. That has no bearing on our review.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.

Editor’s Note: So, you say you’re a fan of Amando de Ossorio’s blind Templar Knights? Then you’ve found your one-stop shop for not only his films — but to the homage films and books based on the Blind Dead series.

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B&S About Movies’ buddy Bill Van Ryn gave it a hard pass. Sam Panico is groaning in anti-anticipation of watching it. And contributing B&S writer Jennifer Upton? She’s still trying to recuperate from the news that her beloved Blood Freak from 1972 got the 2021 remake treatment. The news of this film may push her double helices over the edge and transform her into the crazed turkey-woman of Polish Hill — if not a Xanax-addict — terrorizing the streets of Lawrenceville.

Tinker, Tailor, Drive-In, UHF, VHS, and celluloid thief. Oh, this friggin’ movie.

The potholes facing film reviewers is that you can not measure movies in the low-budget and indie streaming verses against the major studio films. In most cases, the low-budget and indie productions will pale in comparison. A critic of streaming films from low-budget shingles and indie studios can not view those films with a mainstream filter. In the case of remakes, the critic has to separate themselves from their affections to the source material — no matter how inept or expertly-crafted it may be.

And the source material in this case is the great Spanish horror director Amando de Ossorio* and his “Blind Dead” tetralogy. No lover of horror film is not a true lover of horror film without copies of, not only de Ossorio’s “Blind Dead” films, but his first horror film, Malenka, The Vampire’s Niece (1969) and his utterly bonkers Exorcist clone, Demon Witch Child (1975) (pencil that one into the schedule, Sam).

Of course, between Malenka and Demon Witch Child, de Ossorio wanted a piece of the George Romero zombie action — of course, from 1968’s The Night of the Living Dead. (The second wave of Italian and Spanish zoms would come courtesy of Romero’s 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.) So, with a few drops of the Romero plasma and a couple corpuscles of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Gothic-horror short story “El monte de las animas” (“The Mount of the Souls”; part of his 1862 short-story collection, Soria), de Ossorio concocted a tale of about a legion of 13th Century knights, known as the Templars, who, in their quest of eternal life, began committing human sacrifices and drinking human blood. And the town’s peasants around the monastery rose up and blinded the knights (who weren’t so much zombies, but mummies-cum-vampires), cursing them to ride skeletal horses . . . and woah the Spanish and Italian designer-clothed models who awoken the knights from their crypts: they were hunted down by the sound of their (out-of-sync) voices and heartbeats.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) was an international success that transformed de Ossorio into a full-time horror director — no more political intrigue (1956’s The Black Flag*), and comedies (1967’s A Girl in the Yard*), or dramas (1968’s Escuela de enfermeras, aka School of Nurses) for ol’ Armie. So he churned out three more sequels on the continuing exploits of the Templar Knights: Return of the Blind Dead (1973), The Ghost Galleon (1974), and the fourth and final, Night of the Seagulls (1975). While most of us were not blessed to see them in the Drive-Ins during their initial release, we did get to see the criminally butchered versions during their replays on Friday and Saturday overnight horror blocks on UHF-TV in the ’70s and aka’d-to-death home video VHSs in the ’80s.

Now the legend goes that de Ossorio, who was making films to lesser and lesser effect — even moving into erotica with Las Alimañas (1976) and Pasión Prohibida (1980; you’ll never want to shoot a game of pool ever again), and ending his career with an abyssal Jaws knockoff, The Sea Serpent (1984) — that he completed a script in 1993 for a fifth and final “Blind Dead” film, The Necronomicon of the Templars. However, after falling off the horse (sorry), with porn and an inept Jaws rip, no producer — regardless of the classic status of the “Blind Dead” series — was interested in backing the production.

Instead, for the fifth “Blind Dead” film we got a sixth, ersatz Planet of the Apes film with Revenge from Planet Ape (1978). The short of the story: The blinded, burnt-cloaked Templars weren’t Templars: they were 3,000-year-old apes from Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) who, it turns out, eventually lost the 20th Century Fox battle. (Now, if you never heard of this Templar-cum-Ape post-apoc flick, hold onto this trivia, because it’s coming back at you, later in the review.)

In between Night of the Seagulls and Revenge from Planet Ape, director John Gilling (The Challenge, 1960) — with a screenplay assist from Paul Naschy (more Naschy references to come), as well as borrowing from, again, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s gothic short tales — gave us a loose, unofficial sequel of the blind Templars with La cruz del diablo (1975; aka Cross of the Devil). Then Jess Franco had to ruin the de Ossorio memories (as his usual) with his uber-cheap fest, Mansion of the Living Dead (1982). Then, German director Andreas Schnass brought back the blind knights with his shot-on-video homage-sequel Don’t Wake the Dead (2008), and there’s Vic Campbell’s Graveyard of the Dead (2009; aka Knights of the Blind Dead). In 2015, an unofficial short film version rose up, Island of the Blind Dead that, in a Tarantino-twist, was actually an ersatz trailer for a non-existent, lost, “Blind Dead” movie (You Tube). Then, musician, writer and director Chris Alexander gave us his low-budget-short homage with Scream of the Blind Dead (2021). How much do we love thee Templar Knights; let us count the pages: St. Rooster Books published a 2020 anthology of stories by Tim Murr and William Tea based on the Blind Dead series entitled The Blind Dead Ride Out of Hell (Goodreads).

And now . . . here we are in 2021 with the latest, feature length “Blind Dead” romp: one that acts as a sequel-cum-homage-cum-reboot to the de Ossorio canons courtesy of Italian horror director Raffaele Picchio, in his fourth directing and sixth writing credit. (His Morituris, The Blind King, and House of Evil have their fans and detractors in equal measure; I’ve seen the first and never sought out the other two; now that I am reminded, I need to.)

Okay, now if you’ve spend any amount of time reading my reviews, you know my jam with Italian and Spanish horror — Paul Naschy in particular. And those films have a very specific, de rigueur checklist for those films to be an Italian and Spanish horror movie:

1. Twenty-something, curvaceously-nude Italian and Spanish models with perfectly made-up faces that never run, drip, or smudge, hair that never loses its Aqua-Net coif, and French-manicured hands that defy rotted monasteries, the dingiest of cellars, the dankest of crypts, and the darkest of twisted winter woods.
2. The aforementioned beauties always wear graveyard-appropriate mini dresses and hot pants and they must run on chunky, Nine West loafers.
3. The arousing, unsynchronized gasps and screams of those crypt-kickin’ hotties rival the worst dubs of Asian cinema.
4. Fictional, creepy European historical characters and events based on real-life, creepy European historical characters and events.
5. A horror aficionado’s grab-bag of MGM noir and Universal horror film homages.
6. Nods to Alfred Hitchcock, William Castle, Dario Argento, and Mario Bava.
7. Deus ex machinas, red herrings, MacGuffins, and POV shots abound.

The caveat emptor with Curse of the Blind Dead is that this sequel-cum-homage-cum-reboot to the de Ossorio canons fulfills none of these requirements. Where’s the ne’er do well gaslighting? Where’s the affairs? The ailing wife? Where’s the escaped prisoner-cum-roadside bandits? Where’s the crazy-ass kitchen sink mayhem? Where’s the women who sashay through the chilly halls and woods of the estate in the sheerest of negligees? Where’s the fortune tellers and séances? And, most importantly: Where’s the lesbianism with a dash o’ necrophilia?

Ah, because this film isn’t made for the analog-loving Methuselahs, such Billy Van Ryn, Sam Panico, Jennifer Upton, and yours truly: this is made for the Brad Pitt World War Z and Zack Synder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) crowd enamored with the sexy-cool of Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Norman Reedus in the grunge-trendy U.S. TV series The Walking Dead.

So, as the obligatory, budget-conscious voice over-photo montage opening credits roll with static-ridden radio broadcasts and grainy, red-tinted war footage, we learn that Armageddon arrived and turned Earth into a post-apoc wasteland. And we learn of the tales — in an almost shot-for-shot retelling of Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) — of the Templars. And the next caveat: these are bigger-budgeted, new and improved Tempies of the rotten-zom variety. Gone are the burnt skull n’ skeletal knights of yore. And while we have a chick ridin’ the ol’ cross of St. Andrews, she’s also doin’ the white-eye possession thang and, graphically, birthing what we think is the anti-christ, but really a sacrificial baby.

Of course, the peasants breakdown the doors, capture the knights, and burn out their eyes. Now, it’s important to point out: the opening credits and the 13th Century-period setting looks really good. The costumes, the sets, the (graphic) effects (I don’t do babies in horror none-to-well), and actors are top-notch. It’s a great preamble. . . .

Then, there’s the rest of the movie that, without the rotten knights . . . and an ergotic plague wiping out the grass-grains family added . . . we’re watching Cornell Wilde’s post-apoc take on the biblical tale of Exodus with No Blade of Grass. But that has has no zombies, just biker gangs. So, since we have zombie-things terrorizing the folks — and remembering that Paul Naschy is in the mix of this review — we have a gooey smidgen from Paul Naschy’s The People Who Own the Dark (1975), his (low-budgeted) updated take on de Ossorio’s “Blind Dead” series — sans the knights, natch — with his post-apoc rework of The Night of the Living Dead (1968) of eye-bandaged townsfolk hunting down post-Armageddon survivors by sound. Oh, and since we’re frolicking through the bowels of an old, burnt out factory, we got a soupçon Richard Harris and his forgotten apoc-romp, Ravagers.

And remember when I said, “Don’t forget about Revenge from Planet Ape?” Well, in that “Blind Dead” retooling, we had a group of ne’er do wells surviving in a post-apoc world with resurrected zombie apes. . . .

A year later . . .

Micheal (Aaron Stielstra of Landing Lake; ironically reminding me of Jeffrey DeMunn, crossed with Christopher Meloni; if this were a major studio or mini-major U.S.-made film, they probably being starring), encouraged by a radio broadcast urging survivors to “Paradise,” a utopian encampment, treks through the deep woods. Of course, as is the case with any post-apoc film: even in the throes of the end of the world, men be needin’ the nookie because the key to survival is rape. And Lily, (Alice Zanini; in her first international film), his pregnant daughter (incest is insinuated), is purty. So, when they’re ambushed by bandits (bandits? Check!), the members of a religious sect rescue them — via crossbows and shotguns, praise, Jesus!

Templars: Turning man into meat puppets one human at a time.

Then, there’s 30-minutes of religious weirdness and betrayal inside a bombed out factory-sanctuary (that’s not “Paradise”) and some eye-patched Ron L. Hubbard-type who sees Lily’s baby as a prophesied savior. Uh, oh. This is a sect that worships the Templars and needs the baby as a gift to them, for zombie knights, for reasons unknown, can stop the apocalypse. Or something.

Finally, time for Tempies . . . and they, uh . . . just walk out of the darkness of an archway? Where’s the graveyard? Where the slowly, creepy, concrete scraping of sarcophagus lids releasing a fog and the boney arms n’ hands rising up? (Dude, the toy-boat ineptness of The Ghost Galleon is looking better already.)

Then . . . it’s just a bunch of “What are we gonna do now” running around an old factory. And camouflaged pant and combat-booted Lily’s constant wailing is annoying as frack. (Maybe if it was out-of-sync?) Where’s the hot, mini-skirted Spanish model tripping on her heels when we need her?

Finally! The skeletal ghost horses show up, and, uh . . . that’s it? I hope you didn’t go take a piss or get fed up and fast forward through it.

On the gore scale: We get (two) Scleral-contacted possessions of the Linda Blair variety (Why, I don’t know), a black orb next to the sun (I don’t know why; I think it’s a planet that came into Earth’s orbit and fucked up the world-by-eclipse), a freshly-born devil baby ripped in half (again, puking; if a dog showed up, I’d have stopped watching), a self-thumb removal, slithering-to-the-floor innards, a few throat slits, a pretty decent spine removal-by-Templar (Why, I don’t know, the old Tempies could barely break through nailed-to-the-window wood scraps), a disemboweled gut munching (de Ossorio’s never did that), and a backwards head pulled-apart-by-the mouth (again, the boney arms of de Ossorio’s could barley break wood). And I am not down with Lily’s birth-by-a-pipe-blow-to-the-stomach (if not at almost the end of the movie, the stop button would engage right then and there). And again, while the Tempies ain’t the Tempies of old and disappoint because they ain’t de Ossorio Tempies, the effects make-ups are, none-the-less, very well done.

And then the black hole sun does “something,” as it moves over the sun and the Tempies fry and everyone looks up and “something” is happening here, and it ain’t exactly Buffalo Springfield clear.

Da fuck? Why are the credits rolling? Calling Neil deGrasse Tyson: we need an astrophysicist explanation for it all.

So . . . is this a severed thumbs up or down?

Well, I’ve watched the “Blind Dead” tetralogy via my four well-worn VHS tapes many, many times over the years. For they’re are my Phantasm or Rocktober Blood. They are my The People Who Own the Dark, my Panic Beats, and my Horror Rises from the Tomb (the last two themselves with “Blind Dead” vibes) celluloid altars perpetually VCR-programmed every Halloween.

However, Curse of the Blind Dead, for me, is a-watched-and-done film, as it has none of the de Ossorio-sphere that makes his four cheapies so special to me. I always err to the filmmaker who makes do with what they’ve got (which is why it’s always Phantasm I over II, Escape from New York over L.A. and the ’77 to ’83, non-CGI Star Wars cuts), so while they’re not exactly the films de Ossorio wanted, he still made an engrossing film. I will not, however, dismiss Raffaele Picchio’s extremely competent effort with the adjective of “sucks.” I believe that the new, young bucks of the streaming verse who are not Ossorio-versed, will watch this film today — and twenty years from now — will watch Picchio with the same wide-eyed nostalgia I watch the de Ossorio originals. What’s the worst case scenario, here? That Picchio inspired streamers to seek out de Ossorio’s “Blind Dead” romps? The more de Ossorio fans, the better, I say.

If you were fortunate (you old bastard) to see the de Ossorio originals during their initial Drive-In runs or could afford the later DVD and Blu-ray restorations (you disposable income rich bastard), you know that while de Ossorio didn’t have the budgetary resources of Picchio, de Ossorio’s films are still — despite those films not achieving “the vision in his head” as result of their budgetary constraints — are an exquisite watch. The grainy, 16mm documentary vibe of the films that most of us experienced during the their UHF-TV and VHS replays were result of those TV prints coming from less-than-stellar, “road showed” Drive-In reels emulsion-scratched to hell and back again. Then, their incessant rental-replays on the ‘80s home video market beat them to hell and back again, and again. The irony, however, is that “to hell and back again” consumer processing — as it did with Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead — only lent, more so, to the film’s documentary-grainy, dream-like qualities (of course, de Ossorio shot through filters and stop-speeds to add to the ghostly qualities as the Templar’s rode their skeletal steeds).

I wonder if Tarantino had made Curse of the Blind Dead, would he — as he did with his Planet Terror/Death Proof project (2007) — have purposely shot the film slightly out of focus and “damaged” the film stock to achieve what he first saw — what we all saw — on VHS?

As I watched Curse of the Blind Dead, I reflected back on the work of Peter Hyams with his efforts to sequel-remake-homage Kubrick’s landmark moment with 2010: The Year We Made Contact. After the completion of the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick had all of the sets — as well as its production ephemera — destroyed. As result, Hyams, with photographs created from the initial film, re-created all of the Discovery’s models, costumes, and interiors. And if Hyams never disclosed that fact, you’d never know it (sometimes, filmmakers should just keep their mouths shut; they keep ruining the wonders of going to the movies). If Hyams or a Hollywood A-Lister remade de Ossorio, I think we would have gotten a Tarantino-cum-Rob Zombie approach. There’s no way, with their meticulous-to-a-fault fanboyitis (they are one of us, after all), the “Q” or the “Z” would fuck with our mutually-beloved Tempies; it would be as if they found the mothballed original knights — with their bony hands that reach through the tiniest cracks of walls and doors — and stallion shrouds buried in a corner of an Italian prop house. . . .

But this all just a bunch of “Who Shot John?” at this point . . . and you just want to get to the trailers, already.

Regardless of the critical left hooks Picchio’s taking to the chin (the comments on the streaming trailers are cruel, but funny), he made a good film that’s on an analogous quality level of everyone’s most recent exposure to the world of zombies and ghouls: The Walking Dead. And we all know — regardless of that series’ detractors — that AMC U.S. TV series is a high-quality product. And if you enjoy the exploits of Jeffrey Dean Morgan swingin’ “Lucille,” then you’ll enjoy Curse of the Blind Dead. And we — yes, including moi — the de Ossorio purists, are a bunch of stubborn, judgmental old bastards who need to live in the now, give up our inner de Ossorio, and give Pocchio a break. (Duck, Pocchio! Another critic is coming in for another “Lucille.”)

The official, overseas theatrical and U.S. streaming trailers. Which is the better cut?

Curse of the Blind Dead will be released March 2, 2021, by Uncork’d Entertaiment and High Octane Pictures. You can enjoy behind-the-scenes and film stills at the film’s official Facebook page. We’ve also recently review another Uncork’d Entertainment Italian-import, the stellar The Funeral Home. We also reviewed High Octane’s Italian-import, Landing Lake.

* Be sure to join us for our December 2022 “Amando de Ossorio Week” of film reviews. If it’s not hyperlinked, cut and paste the title into our search box and see if we watched it. And scroll through the week to find other films we’ve reviewed.

Disclaimer: We were sent a screener by the film’s P.R. firm. That has no bearing on our review.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.

If you’ve spent any time surfing around the streaming-verse pages of Amazon Prime and other services, then you’re familiar with the resume of Ithaca, New York-based filmmaker Kevin Hicks, who made his feature film writing and directing debut with the mobster comedy Waiting on Alphie (2005), the horror-thriller Paranormal Proof (2010), the horror-mystery Behind the Door (2014), and his most recent effort, the paranormal horror Doppel (2020).

Now Kevin has teamed with his wife Vickie (his writer and co-star; she also wrote Doppel and the currently in-production The Forever Room) for his fifth feature film: one that deals with a haunted, antique ham radio set.

Upon cleaning out the home of his recently deceased mother, William (Kevin Hicks) discovers his late father’s old ham radio set. As he fires up the radio, he begins an over-the-air friendship with Eva (Vicki Hicks). As does William, Eva also deals with dark secrets seeded in a past family trauma. And William comes to discover his connection to Eva goes beyond just an innocent ham radio transmission. And there’s “something” that wants out of that radio set.

As we’ve said many times in our reviews of these up-against-the-budget vanity projects of the streaming-verse that delve into the horror genre: don’t come a knockin’ for an A-24 or Blumhouse horror flick because the shock-scares ain’t a-knockin’. But if you’re into a character-driven supernatural drama that, because of budgetary constraints, goes the dialog route to tell its story, then there’s something here for you to curl up with on Friday evening under your digital device’s glow. So, instead of a mystery novel, why not a mystery movie, for a change?

Kevin and Vickie Hicks are low-budget filmmakers shooting with thin budgets on iPhones and other digital devices; filmmakers that need to be given a wider berth than tmajor and mini-major studio filmmakers — such as TV scribe Gregory Hoblit, with his Dennis Quaid-starring Frequency (2000), to which Dead Air has been compared by streaming-verse commenters. (If you’re not familiar with the Hoblit name: he also gave us the Denzel Washington-starring Fallen (1998) and the 2002 Bruce Willis vehicle, Hart’s War. I’ve seen former in passing on cable; I’ve never seen the latter.)

I’ve watched Frequency in passing on cable several years ago — and a few years after its initial release. So while others opine Dead Air is a “rip off” of that other ham-radio-from-beyond flick, I can’t attest to that fact, as I really don’t recall much of the Dennis Quaid film, other than it also starred Mel Gibson’s “Jesus,” Jim Caviezel, in the controversial Passion of the Christ. Others have cross-referenced the never-heard-of-and-never-seen (at least moi; it was released before B&S About Movies came into being) Canadian thriller The Caller (2011), concerned with an apartment’s “haunted” telephone line. I guess you’d have to be one of that film’s 86 IMDb users to make that critique-connection of The Caller to Dead Air.

Since this is my first Kevin and Vickie Hicks flick, I also can’t attest if Dead Air is an improvement over his earlier works. But as I researched Kevin’s career, I’ve come to learn he’s had a long, successful career in music video and commercial production. And he’s brought those skills to the table, as Dead Air, while not a visually stunning film, is certainly a well-shot film and Kevin and Vicki each bring competent thespian skills to set. The rest of their cast is pretty fine, too, and are certainly above the thespin’ frays of most indie streamers.

Dead Air, a supernatural family-oriented drama, is now available on a number of digital and cable platforms, including Amazon Video and Vudu from Freestyle Digital Media. The studio, run Bryon Allen, who recently launched the black-centric cable network The Grio (it’s airing all of the old ’70s blaxploitation classics), recently picked up an indie-film we really enjoyed, the cat-turns-into-a-human dramedy, Shedding. Another indie we reviewed that was recently picked up for wider distribution by Freestyle is the horror-comedy Hawk & Rev: Vampire Slayers. You can also learn more about the commercial production-to-feature film career of Kevin Hicks at his official website.

Disclaimer: We received a screener from the distributor’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.

The ecosystems of islands, by nature, are self-sufficient biological communities that, sans the intrusion of man’s foolish nature, can survive and thrive for an eternity. Man, on the other hand, is not an island; man is a social animal that withers and dies in their Don Quixote quest for independence. Autonomy doesn’t grant self-worth, but self-loathing.

And the Brothers McAuley of Prince Edward Island — the eldest Nicky, the troubled middle child Jordie, and the cooler-passionate youngest Noah — are about to learn a geographical lesson in futility.

The not-so-Musketeers are led by the bullish Nicky, a man-child who hasn’t learned the craft of thinking before he lets his tempers flare. Jordie is a semi-pro hockey star who runs from life’s responsibilities for the ice and comes to discover the “lone wolf” approach to life simply doesn’t work. Noah, for the most part, escaped his father Doug’s alcoholism to mature into a somewhat well-adjusted, approachable free spirit. When Jordie’s propensity in taking out his frustrations on the ice result in his being kicked off his team for fighting, he has no place to go other than home. And while forgiveness lingers in the mists, family resentments towards the hell the now-recovered father Doug’s drinking brewed, lies within the fogs of the past.

This powerful, dramatic feature-film debut regarding the trials and tribulations of family from from writer-director Susan Rogers encapsulates her passions for her Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island home; an adoration encapsulated by Cinematographer Christopher Ball (Black Swan; second unit on Aquaman, multiple episodes of SyFy’s Haven). Courtesy of Ball’s experienced eye for crafting shots for his first-time director, Roger’s debut film accomplishes what most movies do not: create a character out of a location.

There’s an err in screenwriting where neophyte writers are of the opinion that characters (if properly written, aren’t “characters” with “motivation”; they’re people with emotions) must speak by words; forgetting that we, as people, communicate silently 70 to 93 percent of the time via facial expressions and body language. A character in a screenplay is a person who drives a plot and inspires other characters, in the effort to create drama. Locations — even objects with a close connection to a person — that inspire and influence characters and drive the plot, also work as “characters” (that’s my opinion and I am sticking to it). Susan Rogers, through her usage of the history and beauty of Prince Edward Island, understands this little-used fact of screenwriting to make the island sing its siren song to the McAuley brothers.

A lesser writer would have had the patriarch-father die and, through a will or some type of legal or heirloom McGuffin, put the three brothers into a cross-country road movie-to-catharsis. We’ve been there on that expanse of asphalt and done that white line fever, ad nauseam. Roger’s debut is a road movie without the road trope; a film where man learns to function as part of an island’s ecosystem and learns how self-sufficiency comes from the reliance of the other and each other.

After completing a successful theatrical and streaming-run in its native Canada, Still the Water is fresh off an equally successful series of U.S. festival showings. It is now available as a free-with-ads stream in North American courtesy of Indie Rights Movies on Tubi TV.

Other recent releases from the Indie Rights Films catalog we’ve reviewed include A Band of Rogues, Banging Lanie, Blood from Stone, The Brink (Edge of Extinction), Chasing the Rain, Double Riddle, The Girls of Summer, Gozo, Loqueesha, and Making Time.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.

Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request for this film from its director, distributor, or P.R firm. We discovered the trailer on social media, were intrigued by the film, and we truly enjoyed the film.

“Like many immigrant children, I was raised to believe that the prestigiousness of a person’s career directly correlated with how good of a person they were, morally speaking. I was also raised to believe that no such prestigious career would be attainable without first paying for the privilege of a university education. Finally, I was told that my own race and appearance would have no effect on my future prospects in life, or on how people treated me here in Canada. At some point during my life, I realized these were all lies. This film is about my revelation at the bold hypocrisy that pervades throughout the esteemed institution of higher education, and indeed perhaps all western institutions held in high regard.”
— Director Li Dong, from the film’s press kit

Any aspiring writer and director who receives an anointing from acclaimed German director Werner Herzog goes to the top of the streaming list of the B&S About Movies’ review stacks. If you read our “Klaus Kinski vs. Werner Herzog Night” Drive-In Friday featurette, you know how we feel about Herzog in these wilds of Allegheny Country.

The creative tales of lawyer-cum-filmmaker Li Dong, who made his feature film debut as a screenwriter with the Canadian feature drama Samanthology (2019), began on the campus of Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University, where he graduated in 2006 with honours in English and history, and then went on to graduate from Dalhousie Law School. After law school, Li satiated his love of poker as a professional player prior to being selected by Oscar-nominated Werner Herzog for his “Rogue Film School” project. After directing episodes of the Canadian TV drama Model Minority, Li Dong’s now made his feature film debut, as both the writer and director, with this timely exploration of systematic racism — which he experienced growing up in Toronto.

However, despite the suggested heaviness of the material, Stealing School is, instead of a serious drama, an absurdist social satire. It’s a dark comedy that, instead of pointing fingers, offer solutions regarding sociopolitical issues, racial and gender inequalities, and the unilateral powers giving to school administrators of prestigious universities (and the nepotism of our employers in the real world).

Li Dong’s work also questions the value of liberal arts degrees in the real world (April thinks the class, which she’s accused of cheating, is beneath her) — a world now overwhelmed (and ever changing) by globalization and technology — and the resulting anxieties and fears inflicted on the futures of an institution’s students by the world’s archaic social views. As did Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s early ’60s explorations of regarding the alienation of the self in the modern world, Li Dong offers solutions to the development of our neuroses that result from our failure to adapt to our changing environs. While lacking the ubiquitous dead body (but filled with its share of Gogolian dead souls), Stealing School unfolds as a pseudo-film noir rife with analogously James M. Cain-twisted characters driven by ulterior motives and changing allegiances — whose own corruption and egotism becomes their moral and professional undoing.

We come to meet April (Celine Tsai; the Canadian TV series Rising Suns and the Hallmark Channel entry Christmas by Chance), an Asian-Canadian tech prodigy (sent to Toronto from China by her parents) accused of plagiarism by Keith, her humanities teaching assistant (Jonathan Keltz; got his start on Degrassi: The Next Generation and starred as Jake Steinberg on HBO’s Entourage), which jeopardizes her graduation from a prestigious Toronto university. Once friends, their relationship is, at best, acrimonious.

Meanwhile, a newly appointed faculty administrator wants to sweep it under the rug, lest the bad publicity derails her career. Another professor deciding April’s fate deals with clouded judgement as result of a personal grudge against April’s professor. And that professor, in turn, fears April’s fate will expose his infidelities with a student. And the student newspaper-journalism student? He’s looking for a resume-building “scoop” to start his career, so he works the racism angle to his advantage, even going as far as leaking information to off-campus publications.

Is April innocent . . . or did she actually cheat and frame others for her cheating scam. Or is she being railroaded — or not — for others’ personal gains. And what secrets about the racial and professional biases of her professors will come to light. What is the true meaning of accusing another of “guilt” and leaving them fighting for their “innocence” when it can expose an accuser’s own skeletons? For on this university campus, the halls of right and wrong are a murky maze of double-standard corridors . . . with the accuser and the accused ending their journey at a bus stop sharing a cigarette. Which is the martyr and which is the saint. Who is the sociopath let loose on the world to destroy more lives in their quest for professional admiration?

While Li Dong is obviously a writer and director of extinction, he’s still an indie director scratching and surviving in a streaming verse overflowing with other indie filmmakers in need of funding. And when you’re up against the budget: you write what you know around sets you know can secure. As result of his academic endeavors, Li Dong intelligently handles the poignant material in a budget efficient, subtle manner. In more a established director’s hands backed by a major studio, Stealing School, which also works as a courtroom drama (a university tribunal seated by three professors, with a teaching assistant as the prosecutor and student advisor (a law major) as the defense attorney), could have easily turned into a bloated production filled with matured Disney actors — when it doesn’t have to be bloated. Sometimes, simpler is beter, as “simple” can still convey complex subject matter (and it runs a tight 74-minutes).

In the film’s press materials, Li Dong stated that, despite the film’s potentially weighty subject matter, his first and foremost aim was to create a fun and entertaining film.

He did.

Stealing School rises proudly over the usual indie-streaming norms we experience at B&S About Movies. In fact, when considering the film is lead by a strong, female protagonist-cum-her own antagonist, the film would fit nicely into the female-driven programming blocks of the U.S.-based Lifetime Channel — but Stealing School also rises proudly over the quality of that channel’s “damsel-in-distress” telefilms. The cast of unknown actors are skilled in their roles, Li Dong’s non-linear (which turns off the many; but not me) script is followed with ease, and his camera work is engagingly well-shot.

I look forward to what the Werner Herzog-inspired Li Dong can accomplish with a larger budget on his future feature-film projects.

After its successful premiere at the Napa Valley Film Festival in 2019, Stealing School was released by Game Theory in June of 2020 on the iTunes platform in its native Canada. It becomes available across multiple streaming platforms in the U.S. courtesy Vertical Entertainment on February 26, 2021. You can follow the film on Instagram.

We previously reviewed the 2019 Vertical release, Portal.

Disclaimer: We received a screener for this film. That has no bearing on our review. Film still, theatrical one-sheet, and trailer courtesy of Vertical Entertainment.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.