Edward Shimborske IV—making his feature debut at the ripe age of 24—definitely brings the ambition with On Gallows Hill.

Matthew (Rohan Maletira) was a regular college kid until a rough night in New York City and a fight with a bouncer ends with him being dumped in an alley in the worst neighborhood in the Big Apple. He ends being attacked and turned into a vampire.

Here’s where Shimborske gives us a clever twist: our new bloodsucker can’t just feed on anyone. He’s limited to the blood type he had while human. Poor Matthew is O-, turning his new eternal life into a comedic hunt for the right donor.

He falls in with a crew of underground vampires, including mentor figure Joseph Singer (Sam Smiley) and the dandyish leader of The Inner Circle, Ben (Noah Jacobs). They take pity on him and get him a source for blood while he works for them. 

Toss in a ticking-clock mechanic where vamps turn into desiccated husks if they don’t feed every ten days and a doomed romance with a nursing assistant named Annie Apples (Jill Pierangeli — who has the blood type Matthew needs — and you have a movie that is clearly bursting with ideas. 

Maybe too many ideas, as by the end we also have Mr. James Skinner (Billy Whitehorse), a vampire hunter who pursues him.

The biggest takeaway here is that On Gallows Hill feels like an overextended feature. The high-concept hook of the blood type diet is fantastic and I loved the scene where our protagonist keeps asking women their blood type at a bar. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t quite know how to stretch that premise across two hours without losing steam.

However, the craft on display is worth the price of admission. 

For example, the black, white, and red opening title sequence (crafted by Jasper Morris, Anna Anderson, Jake Johr and Shimborske) really sets the mood. It’s gritty, nightmarish, and exactly the kind of stylistic punch we look for.

Shimborske is clearly a filmmaker who has watched many movies and wants to try everything at once. But there is more than a vibrant pulse beating here. I can’t wait to see what he makes next.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Directed by Madeleine Hicks, this is the story of Elaine (Clara Vance). She’s teetering on the edge of thirty, living in a world that’s suffocating under the weight of total environmental collapse. More than right now, that is.

Oxygen is a luxury, and humanity is dying. The government solution is a medical procedure that repurposes a woman’s reproductive system to perform photosynthesis. Instead of having a baby, you become a human air purifier.

Elaine joins the Sunshine Girls, a group of these converted women who act as living, breathing lung replacements for society. It’s supposed to be an empowering, life-affirming transformation, but is it? As Elaine begins to thrive, the film peels back the layers to show that when you’re turned into a human plant, you’re also prone to being harvested.

In her director’s statement, Hicks said, “Sunshine Girls is both a love letter and a rallying cry. ​ Women are the sunlight illuminating everything around them. They are nurturing. They are strong. They are giving. They are the seeds from which we grow and the roots that ground us. ​ We want to explore the beauty and tenderness of life-giving, while also acknowledging the potential for violence and suffering alongside it.“

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Giuseppe is a man defined by the intensity of his fleeting obsessions. One week, he is completely consumed by embroidery; the next, he is tracking bugs for a private investigation. He lives a life of manic, rapid-fire shifts in identity and interest. He is a man who cannot stay still, a human whirlwind of hobbies and fixations.

Everything changes when he encounters a quiet, ethereal balloon seller in the park. For the first time in his life, his frantic internal motor hits a wall. He doesn’t just become interested in her. He becomes fixated on the silence and the stillness she represents. The film tracks his attempts to win her over, not by changing his stripes, but by molding his chaotic energy into something that fits her quiet world.

The film is based on the novel Toritsukare Otoko (The Obsessed Man) by Tomihiko Morimi. Morimi is well-known for his eccentric, whimsical characters, and the film captures this playful spirit through its animated, almost magical realism style. Director Wataru Takahashi’s stylized, fable-like visuals invite viewers into a world of imagination and charm, making the story more captivating.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

In Jacob Perrett’s Photo Negative, we dive headfirst into the grind of Jen (Karlee Mayfield), a struggling forensic photographer desperate for a lifeline. That lifeline appears in the form of a wealthy, enigmatic couple, Arthur (Taylor Rhoades) and Madison (Casey Notarianni).

The premise is a classic cautionary tale: when a job offer seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is. What begins as a straightforward, high-paying gig—photographing every inch of a luxury home—quickly curdles into a nightmare. As Arthur and Madison’s demands shift from professional to deeply intrusive and sinister, the boundaries of Jen’s reality begin to fracture. Back at home, her friends Lucy (Maddie Morgan) and Melissa (Maribeth McCarthy) sense that something is rotting beneath the surface, but the tension inevitably builds toward a dark, unavoidable climax.

Photo Negative is a stark reminder that if someone offers to fix your life, they usually intend to dismantle it first. While the pacing is deliberate and, at times, pushes the limits of its runtime, it offers a grimy, unsettling experience for those who like their psychological thrillers with a side of voyeuristic unease.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

If you grew up watching MTV when they actually played music videos, you might remember a strange, hyper-kinetic show called Buzz that aired 13 episodes in 1990. It was called Buzz, and chances are, you didn’t see it. But you may have seen what came out of it.

Mark Pellington’s new documentary, This Is Buzz, isn’t just a look back at that experimental news program; it’s an autopsy of an analog relic that accidentally predicted the total information overload of the TikTok era.

Pellington, the man behind the camera, reunites with his original co-creator, ABC News producer Jon Klein, to deconstruct how they convinced MTV to fund a news show that rejected the traditional anchor-desk format in favor of a frantic, avant-garde collage aesthetic. The documentary chronicles the 13-episode run of the original series, where the narrative was built through rapid-fire cuts and raw footage. It dives into how they wrangled icons like William S. Burroughs, futurist Syd Mead and William Gibson to opine on a changing world while featuring artists and musicians that wouldn’t necessarily make it on MTV.

The real meat of the film lies in how it frames Buzz not as an artifact but as a prophecy. Pellington interviews those who were there, alongside fans like Chris Gore of Film Threat, to illustrate how the show’s global news compression style became the default grammar of the internet. 

If you recognize Mark Pellington’s name, it’s likely from his transition into feature films like Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies, as well as his work with U2.

While Buzz may have influenced the media of today, seeing as it was forgotten, I’m not so sure. Maybe I just chafed at all these tastemakers telling us why they were so important instead of showing us why the show was meaningful. There’s no establishing the thesis; there’s just the fact. This feels like a good extra feature for a box set of the episodes, but for those who have never seen it, it just seems rather hollow. 

MTV was made — at first — on the videos that it was given for free, and even then, it kept black artists off the air and regulated non-mainstream acts to the middle of the night. Hearing NYC intelligentsia art people reminds me of creative directors who opine in their offices instead of actually doing or showing something, in love with being cool and the elements of coolness, and dissecting that undefinable narrative rather than getting over the past and making something new. 

Regardless, this is an interesting examination of a time and place where you could get something like this on the air. But as for all that “MTV is different” today, yes. They no longer play anything but endless reruns of the same old, same old. You can make your own taste; you can be your own Buzz; you can share with the world as easily as clicking to upload a video today. 

Anyway, just watch these episodes of Buzz on the Internet Archive.

Then go make your own shit.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

When a movie starts with a line like “Family is forever,” you know you’re about to watch a family get absolutely decimated. Directed by James Kondelik, Pitfall is a gritty, backwoods survival-horror mixed with dysfunctional-family drama. 

The Williams family—patriarch Drew (Grant Vlahovic), mother Loraine (Teresa Laverty) and their adult kids, Scott (Marshall Williams) and Ashley (Alex Essoe)—start things off on a camping trip that goes south. A horrific road accident leaves the family shattered, with the survivors carrying scars that run deeper than their physical ones.

Five years later, the guilt-ridden siblings return to the same woods with a group of friends — Lars (Richard Harmon), Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins) and Charlie (Matt Hamilton) — to go head-to-head with all that trauma. Bad move. They aren’t just battling their own fractured psyches. They’ve wandered into the private hunting grounds of a primal, nameless serial killer played by the legendary MMA fighter Randy Couture. This guy doesn’t do firearms. He prefers axes, arrows, and, as the title spoils for you — elaborate, body-piercing pit traps.

Scott takes a fall into a concealed pit and finds himself impaled through the leg. He starts to hallucinate — straight out of Evil Dead II, lifting a line and even seeing an evil double — and is near death the entire movie. 

This seems a bit slow and not in a good way, as characters appear that have nothing to do with the main list of potential victims. Keeping things a bit tighter would have benefitted this film, but you know, I judge all slashers made after 1981 pretty harshly. Your mileage through these woods may vary.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.