Una Pelicula de Zombies (A Zombie Movie) is NANO’s first film, a production created entirely with deepfake technology, which allows faces to be exchanged for others in a hyper-realistic way. For this movie, they’ve added Chilean comedians, actors and faces speaking and acting into a modern adaptation of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

With a cast including Botota Fox, Pedro Ruminot, Sergio Freire, Javiera Contador, Javiera Acevedo, Ricardo Meruane, Pancho Saavedra, Juan Andrés Salfate, Chelipe Cárdenas, Rodrigo Villegas, Miguelito, this was directed by Cristobal Ross who co-wrote it with Harry Films.

Remember when they colorized Night of the Living Dead? Remember the added scenes that took away from the original in the Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition that everyone but George Romero got in there? That’s what this movie feels like, complete with riffing over a movie that is legitimately a classic. I can appreciate the technology, but I’m not using deepfakery to put dick and fart jokes into La Gravedad del Púgil or Sangre Eterna.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

Holy shit, this fucking movie blew my mind.

A hapless high school guidance counselor (Santiago Vasquez) is just trying to save everyone, most importantly a student who could care less named Luther (Ramon Armstrong). He’s made promises to everyone — his wife that he’ll attend their daughter’s recital and bring her a rabbit, other teachers that he’ll deal with Luther and to Luther, he claims that he will finally attend a martial arts class after bragging that he has thirty years of fighting experience — only to ruin everything. A gang wants the money that Luther has stolen from their leader’s mother, a gun battle breaks out in the dojo and soon Santiago has gone from Kansas City, Missouri to the dark side of Kansas City, Kansas where he will be stripped of his clothes, nearly his manhood and most certainly his sanity as he faces off with man-eating dogs, RV-driving senior citizen swingers, having to wear piss-covered women’s slippers, being dosed with several drugs, encountering occult rituals and a church balcony candle swordfight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F5e7Rc4ViE&feature=emb_title

Director Gary Huggins co-wrote this movie with Betsy Gran (who plays Betsy in the movie) and it’s the kind of journey into the heart of all night darkness we haven’t seen in movies in some time. There’s some incredible camera work by Michael Wilson and Todd Norris that makes this film feel absolutely frantic. You may also feel some anxiety because so many animals are placed in harm’s way — the credits state no animals were harmed and all were loved — particularly Tripp, a three-legged chihuahua who stumbles his way through every moment of the movie and right into your heart.

When this is out of festivals and available on a wider basis, you need to seek it out. This is one of the best films I’ve seen in 2022.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

Director and writer A.T. Sharma has created a film in which a young therapist (Tim Torre) tries everything he can to save his patient (Adam Johnson, who is really great in this) including hypnotism. The problem is that that backfires and soon the issues that his patient is undergoing begins to slowly go even more unhinged than a man who is struggling to keep his business solvent and his family together.

Starting with “The following is based on actual case studies” and ending with a long quote about the Catholic Church trying to keep exorcism relevant — “There continue to be cases of demonic possession that goes mis-diagnosed as mental illness today. The Catholic Diocese states that there has been a recent increase in exorcisms in the United States and around the world. As faith is in decline, more people are opening themselves up to the reality of evil. Father Vincent Lampert (Diocese appointed exorcist)” — this film has some disquieting moments, including a grisly suicide scene that shocked me.

By the way, Lampert is the designated exorcist of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and part of the Pope Leo XIII Institute in Milwaukee, a training school for American clergy to learn how to perform an exorcism.

This is a little all over the place, but it’s got an interesting take on possession and how modern medicine attempts to stop it. I sometimes ponder how much of possession is just mental illness and how much of mental illness is possession.

Directed, produced and written by Adam Lenhart, Eric Griffin and Jake McClellan, the star of HeBGB TV is HeBGB TV itself, “a multidimensional cable box installs itself into a neighborhood and slowly, the world.” A brother and sister are soon taken captive by their host The Purple Guy who shows them everything from a talking pumpkin named Squash on a home shopping channel to a skeletal standup comedian named Dick Tickler (the web site calls him Rib Tickla) and Monster Girl, a former horror host turned live on TV phone sex operator having a “breakthrough during a breakdown.”

Imagine if there was another Nickelodeon in the 90s that didn’t care about theme parks and mass merchandising its cartoons and instead stuck with weirdness like Turkey TV, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and You Can’t Do That on Television but with monsters, anthropomorphic candy corn getting mutilated and no small amount of wonderfully queer content.

This is it. And it’s exactly as awesome as you dreamed.

HeBGB TV rewards all the short attention span I’ve built over the and feeds it lots of sweet, sweet candy. Commercials parodies, cartoons, weird bursts of half-watched TV, all through a pulsating cable box — eXistenZ for kids! — that should not be and yet is.

Ten thousand stars out of five.

You can learn more about HeBGB TV at its awesome official site.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

The first film by director and writer Travis Burgess, Hayseed is intriguing: an ex-cop turned insurance investigator comes to a small town to look into the death of a priest and determine how the insurance should pay it.

Probably its best-known actors are Caitlin Carver, who plays Cassandra and was Nancy Kerrigan in I, Tonya; Amy Hargreaves, who is Jane and was Maggie Matheson on Homeland; Bill Sage who is Leo Hobbins and starred in We Are What We Are and Jack Falahee, who is Duck McIlrath and was on How To Get Away With Murder as Connor. This movie doesn’t have big name actors but it definitely has big roles for people who get to give their all in each role.

There’s an equal combination of humor and mystery in this with neither at the expense of the other. I had a lot of fun with this film and was surprised with just how complex and well-made it is for a first-time filmmaker on a budget.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on January 5, 2020 and the article first appeared in Drive-In Asylum Special Issue #4, which you can buy here. It’s running again because the Another Hole In the Head Film Festival will be playing it during the Warped Dimension VHS Show! at the Roxie Theater on December 3rd at 9 pm.

This performance art hybrid of Live interactive theater and movie screening experience will be hosted by MC Benji, AHITH programmer and host of the underground virtual show Warped Dimension TV. Special guests include award-winning actor Michael Kane and his personal VHS copy of Jaws: The Revenge, which will be screened after a brief Q&A session.

So many people use Jaws: The Revenge as an instantly recognizable reference point for bad movies. If you watch any of those top ten worst film lists on YouTube, inevitably it’s right there on the top of every one of them. But can it really be that bad of a movie?

It’s certainly made by people with talent. Producer/director Joseph Sargent won four Emmys throughout his storied career, as well as helming such well-thought-of movies like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Night That Panicked America, Nightmares, MacArthur and Colossus: The Forbin Project. He even won the Directors Guild of America Award for The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the TV movie pilot for Kojak. In fact, he still leads all DGA members for most nominations for the TV movie category.

Sir Michael Caine is certainly a talented actor. He’s been nominated for an Academy Award in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s, winning two for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules, with his performance in Educating Rita earning him the BAFTA and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor.

So what happened? How can a movie — that one assumes was made with good intentions — turn out to be the touchstone for what constitutes a bomb?

In interviews before the film was even released, Sargent referred to it as “a ticking bomb waiting to go off” and noting that MCA Inc. president — and husband of star Lorraine Gary — Sid Sheinberg “expects a miracle.” There was no script when Sargent was asked to direct. Years later, he’d say that the movie was made out of desperation and that he tried a mystical take in an attempt to give audiences “something interesting enough to sit through.”

Even though this film was to center on Gray’s Ellen Brody character, Roy Scheider was offered a cameo where his Martin Brody character, rather than Sean Brody, would have been killed by the shark in the beginning. This was a wise choice to avoid this opening — murdering the center of the first two films would have put such a bad taste in audiences’ mouths that they may have hated this movie even more than they already did. To his credit, Scheider said, “Satan himself could not get me to do Jaws Part 4.”

Lee Fierro also returned as Mrs. Kintner, the mother of Alex in Jaws, along with Amity Town Council member Mrs. Taft, who is again played by Fritzi Jane Courtney. Amity Selectman Mr. Posner (Cyprian R. Dube) is now the mayor, probably because the actor who played Larry Vaughan (Murray Hamilton) is dead.

Otherwise, forget all you knew about Jaws and the previous sequels. Mike no longer works for SeaWorld and he’s no longer played by Dennis Quaid. Instead, Halloween 2 hunk Lance Guest fills in. Following the heart attack death of her husband and great white murder of her son Sean — to the strains of holiday carols no less — Ellen Brody forgets all that she knew as well and leaves for the Bahamas.

There, she falls for Hoagie (Caine), who is a degenerate gambler by night and a pilot by day, but we all know that he runs cocaine. It’s just never said, but we can read between the lines that he’s done some shady things. In fact, scenes involving him being a smuggler were shot, then deleted during post-production, because it took away from the shark scenes.

Right now, Hoagie is having a September September romance with Ellen, trying to get her to forget the past — keep in my her husband died a few months ago and her son a few days hence — with some airplane riding, slow dancing and carnival attending.

Some moments of the film definitely make me understand why people dislike it so — the sepia toned callbacks to the first film, Mario Van Peebles’ forced accent, a shark that is somehow able to swim from an island in New York to the Bahamas in three days, which means he’d had to swim at nearly its full speed of 25 mph non-stop to make it. I mean, sharks never sleep, but that’s ridiculous.

Also, when you watch the ending, you may notice that the shark roars. Underwater, no less. The sound effects guy thought that this was so stupid that he used a sound effect from a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Speaking of the ending, the one that gets aired on TV and home video isn’t the original. When the film was first released, it ended with JJakebeing devoured, Ellen ramming the shark with Mike’s boat and the shark’s death throes nearly killing everyone. Audiences hated that, so the ending with her stabbing the shark with the bow of the ship was added. Because they didn’t have much budget left, the film ends with the footage of the dying shark from the original.

These reshoots kept Caine from accepting his Oscar. Imagine that.

It could have been much worse. Or better, if you’re someone like me that loves movies packed with inanity and insanity in equal measure.

That’s because in the novelization of the film by Hank Searls, Hoagie is a government agent transporting laundered money. Jake is killed by the shark. And the reason for all this mayhem is because a voodoo witch doctor has a score to settle with the Brody family — which also explains, I guess, why Ellen and the shark have a psychic connection.

While the movie ignores the third film, the book combines all the movies with the Peter Benchley novel, making a reference to Ellen’s affair with Matt Hooper that is eliminated from the Spielberg-directed original film.

In truth, I like this movie. It’s an interesting take on how years of dealing with shark-related mayhem takes its toll on the various characters’ lives. And I really enjoyed how Michael and Carla’s marriage is depicted; she initiates lovemaking as much as him and it just seems honest and real.

Let’s face it. I’ve seen plenty of worse movies than this one. If there’s any tragedy to this movie, it’s that the actress who played Thea — Judith Barsi — died not long after it was released, as she and her mother were the victims of a murder/suicide at the hands of her father. Lance Guest served as a pallbearer at her funeral.

Perhaps the best review of the film comes from Sir Michael Caine himself, who said, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific. Won an Oscar, built a house and had a great holiday. Not bad for a flop movie.”

Mannequins, Ouija boards, evil clowns, film crews descending into haunted houses to film them…The Haunting of the Murder House is packed with things that yes, we’ve all seen before, but have we seen them like this? Even the synopsis for this movie — “In October, four filmmakers disappeared in a haunted house while live streaming on social media. A year later, their footage was found.” — gave me no hope.

Directed by Brendan Rudnicki, who co-wrote it with Kellan Rudnicki, this film avoids being totally found footage, which is a plus. The Otherside crew — Harper (Sarah Tyson), Kai (Tyler Miller), Dylan (Dylan DeVane) and Kellan (Kellan Rudnicki) — has entered the home of Lester Morgan, a serial killer who kidnapped and murdered half a dozen young women before being shot by the cops, chaining themselves and ready to face whatever happens.

Sure, they discuss faking the evidence — reality television — but soon enough, the terror is real. It’s not wholly the most original terror but if you like haunted house films, this will definitely do the job.

If you don’t watch this at the Another Hole In the Head film festival, you can watch it on Tubi.

You may have grown up afraid of Chucky but you didn’t live the life of Kyra Elise Gardner, the director and writer (with Jason Strickland) of this documentary, as she’s the daughter of special effects master Tony Gardner, and in her house were the half-built parts of Chucky and Tiffany from the movie Seed of Chucky onward.

She told Entertainment Weekly: “My mom said when I was leaving preschool (one) day, I told my teacher that I couldn’t go home because the bad people were there. My teacher almost called CPS on my parents because she thought that they were hitting me. I didn’t understand that it was dolls. It was scared of Chucky, so it was absolutely frightening.”

Building on the short Dollhouse that she made in college, Gardner has filmed moments with her father, as well as interviews with creator Don Mancini; producer David Kirschner; actors Alex Vincent, Lin Shaye, Marlon Wayans, Abigail Breslin and Jennifer Tilly; Chucky’s voice Brad Dourif and his actress daughter Fiona Dourif (who has been in two Child’s Play movies and the new TV show); and even John Waters, who gleefully recalls having his face burned off by acid in Seed of Chucky.

Beyond serving as a much-needed documentary about this horror series, it’s interesting to get into the shared experiences and family feeling — Fiona Dourif and Gardner bonded over childhoods with often work-absent fathers — that have grown along the way. I’d also love a doc that tries to get to the bottom of how Jennifer Tilly stays so perfect all these years, if anyone would like to make that.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on March 15, 2021.

It’s back because the Another Hole In the Head film festival will be playing it on Friday Dec 2nd, at 7:30 pm at the Roxie Cinema (3117 16th Street, San Francisco).

That said, it’s not just a regulae screening. It’s the world premiere performance of Sleepbomb’s new score for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead! Experience the terror and tension of the original zombie film that started it all with Sleepbomb’s unique blend of doomy drones and electronics filling the air. You’ll never see the film the same way again! Tickets are $25 and available here.

For almost two decades, Sleepbomb has been bringing innovative and exciting new scores for a wide variety of genre films. Atmospheric and heavy, ranging from doom and drone to electronic textures, Sleepbomb’s scores have re-contextualized films like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Conan the Barbarian and Metropolis for mesmerized audiences in the Bay Area and beyond. Sleepbomb returns to Another Hole in the Head for the second time after their sold out Conan performance in 2019. 

I’ve debated writing about this film for the site for a long time. It’s beyond a seminal movie and it’s also from right where we call home. There’s probably no modern horror movie as important as this one for so many reasons and so many films have their inspiration right here.

I’ve spent a lifetime in advertising, so I can see how making television commercials and industrial films as part of The Latent Image pushed George Romero, John Russo and Russell Streiner to make their own movie.

And horror movies? Horror movies sell.

Shot between June and December 1967 in Evans City with friends, relatives, local actors and interested locals, this movie was made for around $114,000 but looks like so much more. The crew had been through the ringer — they did the original Calgon “Ancient Chinese Secret” commercial — and they knew how to get the most out of every shot.

You have no idea what it was like as a kid to drive past Evans City nearly every day, knowing that the dead lived there.

The movie was a huge success, obviously. That’s why we’re talking about it here. And yet, there’s so much that makes it a regional film, as it has local people like horror host Bill Cardille in it. And it feels, well, exactly like living in Western Pennsylvania. We’ve been preparing for the zombie uprising since before people knew there was such a thing.

The movie starts with Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Streiner) in a cemetery, arguing over visiting their parents. Their sibling games soon give way to terror when what looks like a homeless man murders Johnny and sends Barbara racing away, finally discovering what seems to be an abandoned farmhouse. There, she meets Ben* (Duane Jones), a black hero saving a white woman in a time that these things just weren’t done. But the true joy of Night of the Living Dead is that unlike modern elevated horror, this is no message movie. These are just the right people to tell the story.

It’s funny because Romero has often cited Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend as his inspiration, but that author has said that this movie was “kind of cornball.” What does he know?

The movie ups the tension when we discover that a married couple, Harry and Helen Cooper, and their daughter Karen have been hiding in the basement, The young girl has been bitten by a ghoul and Harry is obsessed with barricading himself and his family in the house while Ben wants to escape. In truth, no one is right and everyone pays the price. There is no happy ending in Evans City.

Perhaps the most astounding thing to me about Night of the Living Dead is its public domain status. Its original distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, never put a copyright on the prints. There was one under its original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, but when the name change occurred, Walter Reade also removed that copyright notice.

That’s why when the VHS era started, you could actually buy this movie, as well as why it shows up in so many other movies and in DVD multipacks. There’s also the unfairly maligned Savini remake that this site needs to get to someday, which I love because Barbara is a more capable heroine and also because I saw it in a theater near Zelienople and when they said the name of the town, people lost their minds.

Roger Ebert’s review of this film has always stuck with me: “The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying … It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.”

That’s probably why I like it so much.

*According to an interview on Homepage of the Dead, Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman said, “Duane Jones was a very well educated man [and he] simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself.”

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.