A young Brazilian girl, Laura (Rebecca Rosato), has come to Argentina to visit her aunt but once there, schedules don’t work out – her aunt has forgotten that she’s coming to town – and all her luggage is lost in her taxi and what follows is an all-night adventure through a crazy night, ala After Hours. Usually, it’s men that have these late night adventures, but this movie puts its female traveler into some strange places with even odder folks.

Directed by Matías Szulanski, who wrote it with Victoria Freidzon, this was quite the journey. Buenos Aires offers a strange birthday party, a broken nose and so much pizza. It feels dirty, haphazard and at the end, authentic, even if these are the kind of nights that can only happen in a movie. I really liked the look of this film. It feels like being out all night with nowhere else to go, nowhere better to be and we all know nothing good for you happens at 11 PM.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Directed and written by Casey T. Malone, this is about Stephen Doore (Aiden White), a dock worker who refuses to be vaccinated against a strange harbor pathogen in a black and white world of conspiracies. The acting is strong and I understand the understand how we’re still trying to make sense of the pandemic that we all lived through, as well as the waking nightmare that we find ourselves in today. But a hero who refuses to be part of the program feels strange in today’s climate and I don’t know what that says about us, me or this movie. There are a lot of soliloquies that discuss the secrets that are behind the world, but so many of them seem to go nowhere, as does a lot of this film. Yes, there’s a briefcase that has spirals of something inside it. But like this film, it all feels like wisps of what could have been something more. The bones are there, the muscle and flesh covering it let me down.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Less a movie and more a true confession – director and writer Shane Brady and his wife Emily Zercher really did lose money in the same way as a hacker stole $20,000 of their money as they bought their first house  – Hacked is them living out what they wish really did happen. Or as the filmmakers say, ““The first ten minutes of this film are based on true events. The rest is what we wish we could have done to that bastard.”

Mark Rumble (Brady) and his wife Amy (Augie Duke) are getting through the pandemic, even if it means selling vacuums to people they are terrified of. Their kids Freddy (Collin Thompson) and Ralph (Owen Atlas) are unfazed – this is a time to play. They’ve seen through the lies of the world and just want to make their videos. And play a video game that causes them to abuse The Chameleon (Walking Dead’s Chandler Riggs), the most wanted hacker in Florida. In response to the ways that they troll him, he steals the family’s downpayment on a new house. The bank doesn’t care. The police can’t do much. And now they’re living in a motel and Mark is forced to donate bone marrow to make ends meet.

Working with CIA agents Nova (Mia Castillo) and Kate (Katelyn Nacon), they plan on taking down the hacker, who has done so many horrible things, including stealing a giant axe like the one in the game the brothers are obsessed by.

I also enjoyed Brady’s Breathing Happy and this is even better. Richard Riehle as Santa? Two brothers whose videos abuse almost everyone they meet? Revenge on banks and those who take advantage of people? I mean, maybe $20,000 isn’t a lot of money to you, but to the average person, it’s life-changing.

This is the kind of film that I love. It’s what I call a hijinks ensue movie. The idea is basic: a hacker goes after a family and erases their lives and steals their cash. But the rest is in those hijinks: moments of sheer lunacy, goofball over the top humor that you can come into and watch at any time. Hacked is a movie made for lazy Sundays, lying on the couch and coming into it wherever you end up, knowing the great parts about to happen. That’s about as high a compliment as I can give.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Directed and written by Richard Peter Hunter, this is , quite simply, a movie about people being bad. Six people give in to their impulses; this can happen no matter your station in life, whether you’re an ex-con trying to get back to a normal life outside of jail or a rich lawyer in a dead marriage.

Shot on digital video, this feels like life being captured, even if the way the screen fades to black instead of a resolution may frustrate some. My issue with it was that the BDSM was used as an indicator of weirdness or sin; yes, it’s someone cheating on their life and at odds with what they preach, but the desires of this lifestyle aren’t inherently wrong. This came off as a vanilla judgement.

It’s exclusively men behaving badly here, from a dry cleaner who misreads signals and touches a co-worker to a minister obsessed with dead mice, a stray cat and pornography. Some of these evil deeds may just be mistakes. Others are sins. I wonder if we’re complicit for judging between them.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

William Fruet made his directorial debut with Wedding in White, based on a play he had written. The film won Best Picture at the Canadian Film Awards in 1973 and starred Carol Kane and Donald Pleasence. He followed that up with an intriguing string of Canuxploitation films, obviously taking full advantage of those wonderful tax shelter laws that produced so many statistic favorites.

There’s proto-slasher Death Weekend (released in the U.S. as The House By the Lake), Cries In the Night (known better here as Funeral Home), redneck rampage film Trapped (AKA Baker County U.S.A.), Spasms, Bedroom Eyes and the kinda-sorta Alien by way of animal experimentation oddity Blue Monkey, as well as episodes of Goosebumps, Friday’s Curse (perhaps better known as Friday the 13th: The Series) and Poltergeist: The Legacy.

That brings us to Killer Party, a movie once named April Fool before the similarly named April Fool’s Day went into production.

College students Vivia (Sherry Willis-Burch, who is also in Final Exam), Jennifer (Joanna Johnson, who was on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful off and on from 1987 to 2014) and Phoebe (Elaine Wilkes, Sixteen Candles, My Chauffeur) are sorority pledges at Briggs College who are in the middle of Hell Week.

They’re warned by their housemother, Mrs. Henshaw, to avoid the Pratt House, then travels there herself to the grave of a man named Allan, who she asks to leave the kids alone before she’s murdered.

On the day of the initiation—this is a similar slasher trope; just witness Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, One Dark Night and The Initiation, just to name a few—the girls prepare to break in and steal some clothes. We also meet Blake (Martin Hewitt, the doomed obsessive lover of Brooke Shields in Endless Love) and Martin (Ralph Seymour, Surf II, Just Before Dawn), who are interested in Jennifer.

During the hazing, the girls are forced to hold raw eggs in their mouths. Soon, all hell breaks loose, and the lights begin to flicker, and glasses rise off the table. Vivia goes to see where the noises are coming from, which leads to the group finding her getting beheaded by a guillotine. Somehow, this was all a ruse and part of a prank that she decided to play. This part kind of confuses me, as I have no idea how a pledge — or why, to be honest — could set up such an elaborate trick.

That said, that prank becomes the reason why Vivia makes it into the sorority. She’s asked to recreate it at the April Fool’s Day masquerade that they’re throwing at — DUH DUH DUH — the Pratt House. That’s when we learn — via Professor Zito’s (Paul Bartel!) exposition — that Allan died in such a hazing ritual involving a guillotine 22 years ago. That said, Allan may have been way into the occult and conjured an evil force that was behind his death.

Bartel is the best part of this movie. I’ve said that sentence so many times, but it’s incredibly accurate here. Sadly, he doesn’t last much longer, as when he decides to inspect the house, someone in the basement electrifies him. Also, his Zito character is named after Joseph Zito, who directed Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and The Prowler. That’s because the former of those films was written by this film’s writer, Barney Cohen.

During the prank at the part, Jennifer is possessed by a spirit and stops the trick. As the party falls apart, the killing picks up, with Veronica being killed with a hammer, Pam stabbed with a trident, Martin’s head ends up in the fridge while Albert also loses his noggin and then Blake is drowned in a bathtub. Vivia and Phoebe run from all this carnage right into Jennifer, who discloses that she’s possessed by the ghost of Allan.

They try and escape through a window, but Vivia is thrown to the unforgiving earth, breaking both her legs. Phoebe ends up killing her possessed friend by impaling her with a board, but she’s overtaken by Allan just as the police put both women into an ambulance. The movie closes with Vivia screaming that she can’t be left alone with Phoebe.

The quick burst of murder in this film is because it had to be re-edited following numerous MPAA cuts. That’s why the film seems to have no gore and is edited so that the murders have little room in between. In the original cut, there was more time between each kill, as well as plenty more gore, like Pam getting completely impaled by the trident.

If you’re watching this and wondering, “Have I seen Briggs College before?” you have. It’s the same school as 1998’s Urban Legend.

Killer Party was a latecomer to the slasher era, but it’s a quick-moving burst of fun. It’s not perfect, but how many of these movies are?

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

I am obsessed with the films of Johannes Grenzfurthner (Razzennest, Masking Threshold), and I was somewhat concerned, as you know how when your favorite band has a new album, you worry if this is the one where they lose it or worse, sell out? That’s how I felt about this. Luckily, my concerns could be laid to rest. This has all the wildness that I expect from his films and then some. While I’d love to see him selected to direct a remake of RoboCop, I don’t think Hollywood is calling anytime soon after this.

That’s a good thing.

Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries!) is an American researcher who is going through a farmhouse in search of Nazi documents. But that’s the least of the strangeness that he uncovers, as Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), the man who owns the property, takes him through the moldering home of his grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (archival footage by Otto Zucker, Grenzfurthner’s real grandfather), a man who disappeared and left no trace.

The team finds a metal pipe and decides to explore it until leader and Polish academic historian Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen) has a mental breakdown from being near whatever is inside it, accidentally killing another member, Cornelia Dunzinger (Jasmin Hagendorfer). Everything is shut down, but Holbrook is now beyond intrigued; what he finds won’t just drive him insane; it will transform his body into some kind of rot. We learn that he and Krystyna were lovers, that he went AWOL when he got PTSD from serving in Kuwait and that he’s been a mercenary in Bosnia. Now, he will experience something perhaps no other human has or should.

I had the sheer joy of a long series of conversations with the creator of this art (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are posted here), during which he discussed the origins of this film in depth.

“The idea for Solvent came from this moment when I stepped into my grandfather’s old farmhouse after not having been there for ten years. There had been a rift in our family—my mother and her sister didn’t speak for a decade, partly due to inheritance disputes and family drama. When my aunt passed away, her daughter came back to Austria for the first time in twenty years, and we went to see what she inherited. It felt a lot like the story of Solvent.

When I stepped into that house, I could feel the mold attacking my lungs—it was horrendous. The smell was unbearable, and everything was decaying. But I spent some of my best childhood days there, so walking into that house again and seeing what my aunt had or hadn’t done with it hit me hard. I saw it through this nostalgic lens—how it used to look in my childhood, compared to how it was now, in ruins. Something in my brain shifted, and I thought, I need to do something with this. It felt like the perfect setting for a horror story.

I’ve always been fascinated by Austrian history, and the movie was born out of a need to confront Austria’s historical baggage—not in a traditional or sanitized way. The farmhouse, tied to my family’s history, became a metaphor for exploring guilt, complicity, and how the past still seeps into the present. Austria has this unique way of dealing with its Nazi past. When I was in school in the 1980s, we didn’t learn a lot about the Nazi era. The German school curriculum, by contrast, was much more proactive about it. But in Austria, it was as if the country didn’t exist between 1938 and 1945. Austrians were very eager to forget, despite the fact that most of the concentration camps were run by Austrians.

Austria was never good at confronting the past, and I saw this gap in my conversations with friends, their parents, and grandparents. It was as if Austria had this hole in its soul, this thing that no one wanted to talk about. The more time passes, the more people forget. And that’s the core of the film—there’s something in the ground in Austria that never goes away, something that still affects us. It doesn’t matter if you talk about it or not—it will catch up with you. It’s very Freudian, embedded into everything, this festering wound that never heals.”

I usually do my best to avoid found-footage films, as the shaky camera and rules of the form feel nauseating and constrictive. That said, Grenzfurthner’s films are so technically proficient and just plain unsettling, moving and wonderous that I get over myself very quickly. This is yet another triumph for him, a film that begs to be experienced.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

This movie is so perfect for me. Just imagine, a more well-thought-out Midsommar that has actually seen The Wicker Man — and on drugs, mind you — but also knows about collecting records, the joy of finding lost media and understands the allure of strangeness like the Arica, Source Family/Father Yod/Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Process Church and how today’s youth only gets the cool veneer of these lost groups — well, The Process is now kinda sorta Best Friends Animal Shelter — and not the at-times harsh reality. It’s easy to love black metal for its aura of kvlt, yet I doubt you’d participate in the burning of a stave church.

Made for the price of a used car, this movie finds Pater Noster and his band/church lying low after recording several albums in the distant past, one found by Max (Adara Starr), a record store employee that probably only is there to get the discount and build up her own collection of albums. Store owner Sam (Shaley Renew), co-worker Abby (Sanethia Dresch), Gretchen (Shelby Lois Guinn), and Jay Sin (Josh Outzen) get obsessed with the songs. When an invitation to visit the actual Pater Noster compound comes to Max, they all decide to go. Armed with info from cult podcaster Dennis Waverly (Tim Cappello, not playing a sax), they think this is going to be a laugh.

Maybe they haven’t watched the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis or I Drink Your Blood.

Meeting Pater Noster (Mike Amason) may be the last thing they do.

Even crazier is how perfect the music is for this film, featuring The Restoration, Brandy & the Butcher, Turbo Gatto, EZ Shakes, Stagbriar, Ass/Bastard, In/Humanity, Transonics, Hot Lava Monster, Marshall Brown and Larb as well as Tim Cappello playing that sax.

Here’s how the movie was sold on Indiegogo: “The movies we make are punk rock demo tapes. We operate outside of Hollywood and traditional distribution routes. We make movies for people looking for something different, not defined by focus groups and corporate interests. You won’t find this movie in a Walmart because it doesn’t belong in a Walmart.”

That couldn’t be more true. This feels truer to the insane spirit of drive-in movies that you wonder, “Who is this for, other than me?” than any movie I’ve seen in years. Yet it feels real, lived in, authentic. This is, quite literally, the actual shit. A movie where you feel for the victims just as much as for the victimizers, a place where you think that you too could be trapped, because as much as I love the cults of the 70s, I know I would never survive.

A near-perfect film. Find it and live in it now.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Directed and written by Alberto Sedano — who produced Jess Franco’s 2010 Paula-Paula — Severin goes deep into Spanish cinema — well, at least the kind we all want to watch — with this doc. Here’s what they have to say for themselves: “Under the Franco dictatorship, Spain’s rigid censorship laws had repressed any form of sexuality outside of Catholic marriage. But following Franco’s death and the consolidation of democracy, Clasificada “S” films–restricted to those over 18 years old, with the warning that their content may offend the sensibilities of the viewer–embodied a period in Spanish history when sex went from being a sin to becoming a cinematic expression of political freedom.”

This film “…explores the history behind the rating, the battles it fought, and the distinctive dramas, thrillers and horror shockers that subverted the values of the former dictatorship. Narrated by Iggy Pop, featuring revealing interviews with actors, directors and historians, and showcasing clips from films by Jess Franco, José Ramón Larraz, Ignacio Iquino, Eloy de la Iglesia and many more, Exorcismo tells the incredible true story of a film movement that rocked Spanish culture, changed the face of genre films, and left its transgressive mark on global cinema forever.”

If the names of any of those directors got you all hot and bothered — look, I’m cuckoo for Franco and lunatic for Larraz — this is for you. And even if you have no idea who they are, there’s a lot to learn here about how sometimes extreme cinema can have a lot to say about the world that it escapes from.

From euro horror like The Awful Dr. Orloff and Horror Express, which played American screens, to the films of Naschy, the Blind Dead and Eugenio Martín and Eloy de la Iglesia, this hits the expected notes before surprising you with stuff like The Killer of Dolls, Bloodbath and Human Animals.

As much as I love Italy, and it will always have my perverted movie heart, Spain has been neglected too long. Italy’s violent films of the 1970s often were reactions to Anni di Piombo. Spain was finally emerging from a time when everything was forbidden, when two versions of nearly every movie had to be filmed—one for Spain, where women were nearly fully clothed, and where violence was held back, and another for the rest of the world.

Where this film really sings is when it allows the talking heads to expand on movies that they love from Spain—Bloody Sex, Beyond Terror, Satan’s Blood, Morbus, Mad Foxes—and three of the country’s most unique directors, José Ramón Larraz, Ignacio F. Iquino and Jess Franco.

Maybe you won’t feel like you’re seeing uncles you haven’t heard from in too long when Jack Taylor and Antonio Mayans show up to speak, but if you do, again — this was made for you. You will also come back with a list of movies you need to check out. Mine are Poppers, Morbus and Dimorphic.

Also: Holding back from showing Jess Franco until an hour and forty-four minutes in is the very definition of edging.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Detective Mitchell Morse (Albert Jones) seems to have been on this case forever, but it doesn’t seem like that. He may really have been.

Directed and written by Neal Dhand, this begins with a body and a foot washing up on a beach in Jacksonville. The foot doesn’t belong to that body. And there just might be a serial killer on the loose. Morse has an unraveling relationship with his wife Emily (Keesha Sharp) and doesn’t really trust his younger partner, Dreyfus (Tom Lipinski). These are all the things that you expect from a neo-noir detective story, but this is setting up for a rug pull near the end.

With incredible photography by Charles Ackley Anderson, I wanted to love this more than I did. Dhand is making his first film and went all out, which you have to commend. I’m not sure how well it all came together, however, as it wasn’t until the last few moments reveal that what I saw as the flaws in the film were explained. The acting is good, the idea is right, but something just didn’t add up for me. That said, your mileage will always vary, and I could see others loving this.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

A triple feature of anime in the middle of the night. What better way to spend the evening?

Baoh the Visitor (1989): This movie takes over a year of manga and makes it fit into a 45-minute  original video animation (OVA). Created by Studio Pierrot and distributed by Toho, this is an early release by Hirohiko Araki, who would go on to make JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.

17-year-old Ikuro Hashizawa has been taken by Doress and given a parasitic worm which transforms him into BAOH (Biological Armament On Help), giving him incredible superpowers which will also kill him in 111 days when the worm eats his brain. RFK, eat your stupid heart out.

BAOH is trying to escape along with 9-year-old psychic Sumire and her marsupial, Sonny-Steffan Nottsuo. They are being watched by Dr. Kasuminome, who created — perhaps too well, as he says — BAOH, along with his assistant Sophine and an army of monsters, including Number 22, Colonel Dordo and Walken, a psychic killing machine who melts objects before they can reach him. He sees BAOH as a worthy target and even burns the sigil for the creature onto his chest like some deranged Dr. Manhattan.

Hideaki Anno, who co-directed Shin Godzilla, was an animator on this movie.

Call Me Tonight (1986): We’ve all been there before, right? Phone sex girl Natsumi Rumi decides to actually meet one of her callers, Sugiura Ryo. The problem? When he gets worked up, he turns into a monster. She tells him that she’s familiar with Freud and decides to work out his issues.

So yeah, an anime, My Demon Lover, but also one that has references to Fright Night. It also doesn’t skimp when it comes to the transformation parts, as each time it’s almost a totally different monster. For all the promise of tentacle sex that you would expect in this, it’s more about titillation, as Natsumi wants to keep teasing Sugiura until he can control his transformations. Then what? We never find out, as another girl — and some bikers — ruin everything.

Dragon’s Heaven (1988): In the year 3195, humans and robots have gone to war. During one of the battles, a sentient combat suit named Shaian loses its pilot and shuts down for a thousand years. His enemy, Elmedin, is still alive, but Shaian has found Ikuru, a junker, who joins him as his new partner.

Obviously, creator Makoto Kobayashi loves Moebius, as this looks like his art come to life. He was also a major name in Japan’s scratch-build model world, which means that in this, he decided to make human-sized versions of the robots and have them fight in a live-action opening to the film.

Since making this, Kobayashi has worked as a mechanical designer on Space Battleship Yamamoto 2199 and on everything from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to Giant Robo, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Urotsukidôji: Legend of the Overfiend.

I’ve never seen anything look this gorgeous in an anime. Thanks to the Chattanooga Film Festival for introducing this to me!