This film follows the journey of Dylan Brady, who is played for most of the film by director and writer Shane Brady (Ballers, Dr. Sleep) and Owen Atlas when he is young, a man who is struggling to achieve his first year of sobriety.

It goes deep, not just showing his journey, but how his extended family deals with him, which is all caused by the death of his father (John D’Aquino) when he was young. As Christmas approaches and he’s cut off from his family — they had to finally give him the tough love that it took to make him reach out for help — and must go through this next stage of his recovery alone.

June Carryl, who plays Dylan’s mother, is incredible in this, a woman striving to keep her adopted family together despite years of hardship. The love that she has for her son shines through even when it’s impossible to feel anything for him. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, who made The Endless and Spring, also do great voice work as some of the characters that live inside Dylan’s head.

The rest of the strong cast includes Katelyn Nacon (The Walking Dead), Augie Duke (Spring), Brittney Escalante, Jim O’Heir (Parks and Recreation) and even NHL Hall of Famer Phil Esposito, who plays the future that Dylan could become. Hockey — and magic — have a major role in this movie, so seeing Esposito be the perfect older Dylan is a great idea.

Breathing Happy takes you on a journey that’s not always comfortable, but the filmmakers were committed to telling what this story is truly like, for good and bad.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Mirna Loy once wrote:

“We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings.”

She also once wrote that the inward dimension or the fifth dimension was the source of great art and literature, as well as where genius resides.

So between a poem that lamented the loss of her relationship with Futurist Giovanni Papini and her worry that she’d forever lost any ability to feel sexual yearning again, as well as her thoughts on how the superconscious — “We are but a ramshackle edifice around an external exaltation, a building in which the moralities are a flight of stairs whose bases dissolve in the wake of our ascension” — really have a lot to do with this film, even more than giving it a title.

The Dents, Diane and Daryl, (real life couple Annie Parisse and Paul Sparks) are a married couple who we get the feeling have forgotten why they ever came together but cannot forget that they could honestly leave each other or leave each other dead at any moment. There’s constant tension brimming, all while Diane has her identity stolen, Daryl has dreams that the family is forced to follow, their daughter Danielle (Rachel Resheff) becomes part of a school play, their son Andrew has a pregnant girlfriend named Marlene (Gus Birney) who tries to become part of the family as her mother Monica (Constance Shulman) loudly exclaims that she’s a famous actress who has become forgotten.

When Diane decides to figure out who took her identity and why they’ve taken all of the family’s money, she enlists Marlene’s aid and sets off on a road trip. When they knock on the door of the people behind the crime, they meet two white-haired twins — both named Nina, both played by Judith Roberts — who are not living on the same wavelength as the rest of the world.

Diane has spent years — decades? — making everyone else happy and always finding herself in the role of the bad guy. And yet she keeps working extra hours and selling her clothes and just giving in to every infraction but certainly, it all has to be too much at some time, right?

Director Theodore Schaefer, who co-wrote the story with Patrick Lawler, gives in to surrealism at the end, as the world of the real becomes unreal and may give the two women at the center of the story the opening they need to change the direction of their lives.

The superconscious has the ability to acquire knowledge through psychic methods, then pass that knowledge on to our conscious mind, transcending the ways that we normally perceive the world, allowing us the ability to process more information and more importantly, make more changes to ourselves. It’s where true creativity is found.

This is about 77 minutes of said superconscious.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Are the movies trying to tell me something?

I’ve watched multiple films in the last few weeks where people try to go back home again and set things right. This never works out.

What am I to learn?

Directed and written by Paul Owens, LandLocked brings his family into the film, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as well as appearing in their old home movies which have become part of the narrative.

When Mason (Mason Owens) takes on the task of clearing out his father’s home, he discovers those films on an old video camera and begins to grow obsessed with the footage that he starts to watch and learn and document the past.

So yeah, you may be watching a family’s old films and the film feels long even though it has a short running time. But the idea of a camera that can show you any moment in time you ask for is solid, the footage works within the film and you can see what the director was going for. Nostalgia is dangerous (or a profitable place to make a movie) is the message and yes, while you can go home again, you probably shouldn’t.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

I’ve said it before, I’ll certainly say it again, but if your parent — who you have been estranged from — calls you repeatedly with strange messages and then they die and you need to set their affairs in order, just stay away. You don’t need the money, the aggravation or the supernatural onslaught.

Nathan (Nathan Wallace) and Mirra (Jenna Sander) are in no way close. The only thing that connects them would be the same parents and now that their father is dead, that connection is in the past. In town to handle the old farm — where everyone in town worked, so there’s already some resentment — they soon both live out the Thoreau quote that begins this movie: “I believe men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.”

Nathan starts having vivid nightmares of a woman rising from the sea and soon starts feeling the same dread that his father felt; the family had long ago stolen the land and then used the people around it for decades to help them make their livelihood. This causes him to spiral back into addiction with the help of old enabling friend Greg (Samuel Dunning) — nice Bolt Thrower shirt by the way — while his sister grows close with the very people who once toiled in her father’s fields, Alice (director Eliese Finnerty) and her sister Scarlett (Estelle Girard Parks).

This is Finnerty’s first full-length film and it moves quickly — it has a 70-plus minute running time, which I love — and the closing visuals are gorgeous. It made me think that while we truly own nothing, everything that we try to put on a mark on was owned by someone before us and worse, probably taken by force from them. Everything is cursed, when you think about it, but some worse than others.

Many years ago, an ancestor made it to the final degree of brotherhood and was taken to an island for his last rite and initiation. When he came home, he didn’t look the same, his eyes didn’t have any life and he just sat in a chair facing the window, miserable and depressed in a chair, telling everyone he was waiting to die. I thought about that story as I watched this and if I had any opportunity to claim his heritage, trust me, movies have taught me to run long, hard and fast. And never, ever steal anything from a woman.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Director and writer Cate Jones — she also made She’s the Eldest — comes from Lawton, Oklahoma, known — as her IMDB bio helpfully reminds us — for high crime, meth and an Army base. She left town as soon as she graduated and now makes movies. She’s also Cat, the new roommate in a house of actresses who turns everything way upside down, inside out and shakes it all about.

Shot in nine days on a $17,000 budget — a fact that is not apparent — this film has three actress roommates — if not friends — at its core: Charlie (Ashley Mandanas) is struggling with her sexual identity, Beth (Jessi Kyle) is obsessed with religion and April (Kassie Gann) is non-stop recording auditions for ads about vaginal wellness. They’re all conflicted in how they feel about themselves, never mind one another, so even Cat arrives and refuses to even discuss the limits on how hard of drugs can come into the house — and then reveals that a poltergeist is also living there — things start getting wonderfully messy.

There are also Mormon missionaries, questions of existence and, yes, the reveal of the ghost within the room who ends up — spoiler warning — perhaps being the best roommate of them all. Big points for casting Mickey Reese, the director of Agnes (and at least a movie a year, every year and sometimes two, like in 2019 when he made Climate of the Hunter and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune).

The film plays out like an interrogation of what happened in the home — in color — mixed with remembrances and scenes — in black and white — and the narrative works so well. Yes, we all have issues, actors and filmmakers more than most, but sometimes the strangest — and most supernatural — events unite us. Even if it’s an ill-advised exorcism. I mean, what’s some holy water between friends?

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Director Kevin Kopacka and co-writer Lili Villányi worked on an episode of the TV show DYLAN a few years ago, which is based on the same character from Cemetery Man. That makes perfect sense, as this film has style to spare.

Dieter (Frederik von Lüttichau) and Margot (Luisa Taraz) have moved to a Gothic castle that would be at home in the films of Corman or Bava*. He has anger issues, she’s in the throes of depression and the estate? Well, it’s slowly making them prisoners. And then they find the whip in the basement, which unlocks old souls and a house that was definitely the site of some whispered illicit behavior.

A story that goes from Eurohorror to a study of relationships to even the nature of male and female inter dynamics within an occult movie that looks like it came from Italy in the 70s, this one has so much going for it. Just look at the font in the poster and at the end of the film. This is a movie that has been polished and honed and worked into the art that it is now. Don’t miss it.

*The director has directly called out Bava’s The Whip and the Body and Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose as influences. The poster is literally taken from the latter film. It also takes a line from Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Father David (Graham Skipper, the director of Sequence Break) is a devout priest who has never missed a Mass, never eaten meat on a Good Friday and never misses the opportunity to speak on God’s love, including when he invites Terry (Jeremy Gardner, the director of After Midnight and the man who told his mother not to watch this movie) and Lexi (Taylor Zaudtke, Gardner’s real-life wife) to stay during the holidays.

It starts as a simple act of kindness and nothing can go wrong, right? But throw in a game of never have I ever, then have a good man — in his head if perhaps not as much in his heart — get tempted and things are ready to go off the rails.

Director and writer Eric Pennycoff also made Sadistic Intentions, which starred Gardner and Zaudtke, and he puts together a movie with a small cast, a smart script and a mix of madness and black humor as the priest finds himself in a place — and perhaps a position — that he had never prepared for.

I also loved Rigo Garay, who plays RIgo the organ player, perhaps the only character brave enough to tell Father David that he hasn’t had a parishioner attend Mass in weeks and that he’s just been giving sermons to an empty church. But if that’s true, who are the prophetic — and perhaps Satanic — voices who come to confession? And what’s with the young padre’s frequent confessions of his own to that horrifying painting?

There’s an incredible moment near the end where an off-the-deep-end Father David throws on his vestment and rants on the altar while arguing with a red-lit Terry — or a vision of him — before learning that — and this is the biggest spoiler warning I can give — that the real Terry has beaten his wife and snorted David’s mother’s ashes.

I mean, this is a movie that has a priest with his head wrapped up straight out of Threads losing his mind and a last shot that will make you think long after the Christmas carol scored credits run out.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

When a movie starts with Tony Todd asking if you know your hood horror, then name drops Blacula, Bones, Tales from the Hood, The People Under the Stairs and Candyman, it has a lot to live up to.

Luckily, Bitch Ass more than succeeds.

Director Bill Posely, who started his career as an actor before writing episodes of Cobra Kai and directing several shorts and the TV movie Culty, has co-written (with Jonathan Colomb) a pretty intriguing idea for a movie: four young wannabe gang members must rob a house to get their colors. That house, however, is no normal house. It belongs to the hood legend Bitch Ass (Tunde Laleye) and they must all play games for their lives.

One of the gangsters, Q (Teon Kelly), truly wants to be a doctor but his grades aren’t enough for a scholarship, so he hopes that he can make enough money from the gang life to escape the hood and take his hard-working mother Marisa (Me’Lisa Sellers) with him.

However, his mother has a secret. She once ran with the gang, specifically its leader Spade (Sheaun McKinney), and she knows exactly how Bitch Ass become a scarred and angry killer of urban youth. He was once the bullied Cecil (Jarvis Denman Jr.), burned by his grandmother for the slightest bad behavior at home and routinely abused at school and on the streets before being shredded with a razor blade.

Now, on 666 Night, Q and his fellow initiates — Cricket (Belle Guillory), Tuck (Kelsey Caesar) and Moo (A-F-R-O) — enter the home, they soon must match wits with the first black masked slasher, playing him in games similar to Connect Four, Operation and Battleship. It’s a ridiculous idea done beyond well, which makes this movie work. In fact, I’d go so far to say that this movie wouldn’t just fit on to the shelves of your dearly departed mom and pop video store. I dare say that it’d be checked out every time you looked for it.

Even the title cards in between each sequence look like they come from a board game and the editing of the film slices and cuts the screen like a comic book and at times a quickly spinning Rubik’s Cube. It’s kinetic and makes the movie fly while allowing it to rise above its low budget.

It’s not perfect, but it has a ramshackle direct to video charm that makes it a worthy successor to the urban horror that has come before. I just can’t wait until the sequel, because this movie needs to be expanded and its unique slasher methods further explored.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Irina (Greta Bohacek) and her brother Paul (Claude Heinrich) are Firstlings, the young members of a cult based around an upper caste that strives to remain pure and clean, while its opposite lower members are devoted to making soap, herding pigs and living in darkness and filth. All decisions are made by Fust (Sam Louwyck), who has set himself up as a god-like figure and built his own island world based around Greek and Teutonic mythology. In fact, the goddess Hygieia, who embodies health and cleanliness while being the source of the word hygiene, is worshipped by the cultists.

The promise of Fust is that those who labor in the mud will one day rise to the world above and Irina gets that chance, as a scan shows that her organs are completely milky white, which means something to the strange German man whose family built an empire upon soap which has allowed him to be a deity on Earth. She leaves Paul behind, but their individual stories show that they both remain individuals within this groupthink: she is hand-picked to embody the goddess yet still sees the dirt that exists even on the highest of levels while he starts to ferment a revolution.

“The stage is the intermediate realm upon which we may encounter the gods,” is a statement that Fust makes, but perhaps movies are also that place. This film — directed and co-written* by Nikias Chryssos (Der Bunker) — looks rich and gorgeous, deftly setting apart the united yet divided worlds that make up this film’s world. Cinematographer Yoshi Heimrath makes it look even better, as the close of the movie allows multiple colors to intrude into the pure light and sheer dark that we have emerged from.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

*With Lars Henning Jung.

There’s a quote at the start of this movie that was so great that I wrote it down: “True love is wild and sad. This is the thrill of two beings in the darkness.”

Director Marat Sarulu, who co-wrote this movie with Emil Jumabaev, also made Move, Songs from the Southern Seas and The Rough River, the Placid Sea. In this film, he explores the relationship between fiction and reality as Nazar discovers the digital artwork of his partner Rumia’s ex-husband Arsen and finds his life changed as he learns that dream and fantasy, as well as reality and imagination, can intermingle and at times seem as one.

Of the film, Sarulu said, “At first, the film unfolds as a theme that can be described as “love amid change.” Here, the social background is removed and transformed into an expressive psychedelic, turning the plot into a complex relationship between reality and fiction. The true author of the story creates within the real flow of life his own secret myth in which he disappears. Dreams, memories and fantasies are intertwined with reality, creating a complex metaphysical pattern.”

Director Boris Troshev has created a world that takes black and white with muted moments of color to take us into worlds that are beyond our own. It’s gorgeous and nearly numbing in the best of ways, a balm for the chaotic world that we exist in. This film is nearly a meditation just as much as it is a movie.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/