Directed and written by Manuel Lagos Jr., this is the story of Buddy (Joshua Michael Payne) and Catherine (Evangeline Wurst), who have their 4th of July holiday interrupted by Catherine’s estranged childhood friend Juliet (Erica Boozer).

This might not be for everyone — well, if you like mumblecore you’ll dig it — as it’s a hangout film about three people trying to figure out how everything and everyone fits. The leads are all really talented and come off as really authentic, which helps keep you invested.

This is the first full-length film that Lagos has made and it’s definitely worth a watch. Well-shot, great angles and just a lived-in vibe that I totally enjoyed.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

There’s a Trim Season comic book that came out in 2022, which was based on an original concept from Megan Sutherland, Sean E DeMott and Cullen Poythress. They were inspired by the story of several women who went missing in Humboldt County, CA during a marijuana harvest. That turned into a screenplay, written by David Blair and Ariel Vida, and then the comic book by writer Jake Hearns, pencils and inks by Mara Mendez Garcia and colors by Lorenzo Palombo.

Directed by Ariel Vida, Trim Season is about Emma (Bethlehem Million) and Julia (Alex Essoe), who get recruited by James (Marc Senter) to head up into Northern California for trim season and make $5,000 cash. They’re joined by Harriet (Ally Ioannides), Dusty (Bex Taylor-Klaus) and Lex (Juliette Kenn De Balinthazy) and when they get there, things already seem odd. There are guns everywhere carried by masked men. None of those men join them, because the only trimmers are women.

Then they meet their boss, Mona (Jane Badler, still terrifying me ever since she ate a rat in V), who looks like the kind of female villain that would once have battled and bedded James Bond. And as they work 16 hours days, they start to learn that this isn’t the job they were promised, what with Mona having some kind of magical powers thanks to a strain that only he can inhale and survive.

Somehow folk horror meets Suspiria meets body horror, Trim Season exceeded any expectations I had for it. Balder owns every moment she has on screen and man, how many costume changes did she get? As many as she wanted, that’s how many.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Directed and written by its star, Matt Farley, Local Legends is a black and white loose adaption of, well, Matt Farley’s life. It’s probably the best explanation for why the films of Farley and Charlie Roxburgh work so well.

How can one man have seventy bands, make a movie or two a year, release 23,000 songs as of February 2022 and get so much done? Focus and drive.

This film features songs by Farley’s bands Moes Haven. The Toilet Bowl Cleaners, The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, The Hungry Food Band and Papa Razzi and the Photogs while the film takes a near commercial sell for everything Matt has made and will make. You get to watch him play basketball and impersonate famous players (and yes, he really did have someone do statistics for his one on one games). You see him walk all over town and interact with his friends, many of whom play his friends — and enemies — in his films. And you get real slices of life, like someone who wants to critique his movies and has better ideas, yet has never made a film of their own. Or the girl who has every Billy Joel album, but really just the greatest hits.

Look, Matt would rather have made some movies than had some cars. He walks just about everywhere, when you think about it.

I found this movie utterly charming and inspirational. I love when people are out there in the world making things and no one makes more things than Matt. He’s also willing to place his phone number into movies, so when I texted him mid-movie and we started chatting, it added a strange metatextual experience that I will never ever get from any other movie or filmmaker ever.

That blows my mind.

Just watch it on YouTube for yourself. And check out the interview with Farley that came out of those texts. And buy this from Gold Ninja!

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Carla (Millie Valdes) and Dean (Ernesto Reyes) have left behind the hustle and bustle for the quiet of the woods. Except that they’re living next to a cult whose leader is able to telepathically communicate with The Spirit, which is a lot like Bigfoot.

Directed and written by Jon Garcia and co-written by Zach Carter, the movie has Carla and Dean coming to terms with a miscarriage, which may be why they’re missing so many of the signs that perhaps their new home is not safe. Or maybe all that depression might make them perfect candidates to join Arlo’s (Jesse Tayeh) growing collection of worshippers.

I’ve always said that I would have never survived the seventies, because I would have totally either led or been in something like the Process. Even I see the dangers of picking Bigfoot as the person to worship. Did you see Night of the Demon? Bigfoot will straight up tear your dick off.

The Oregon woods in this look amazing and I’d just like to be The Spirit, wondering them and hoping that all the humans would leave.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Gwen (Samantha Westervelt) and James (Amanda Drexton, who co-directed this with Michael A. Drexton and co-wrote this with him and Westervelt) are going nowhere and doing nothing but still have to get to a baby shower for Gwen’s sister where the only gift left on the registry is Baby’s First Wellness Kit, complete with essential oils and tarot cards.

Except it’s $150.

And they have nowhere near that kind of money.

The journey to get the money will take them through Los Angeles and into the heart of glittery darkness. Gwen wants to show her family that she can be a success — or at least not a major foul up — and arrive with the gift. But when there are cult leaders (Corey Feldman),  a thrift store called Twin Sneaks, Reggie Watts, the liberation of succulents, a cockroach gathering and a shrine to Nicholas Cage. And oh yeah, neon smoke farts that will revolutionize the online sex industry.

Gwen and James feel like the kind of people who have been friends forever and might be holy terrors when you see them in a bar or they show up at your party, but when everyone is telling stories about them, they realize that they kind of love them afterward even if in being in their orbit can be a hurricane.

I’m a sucker for comedies where friends are oblivious to the world and defeat it just by being themselves.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Poundcake is a slasher killer who hunts white cis men and quite literally pounds them to death. As we see the Greek chorus of podcasters comment throughout the film, no one really cares that white straight men are being killed, much less the fact that they’re chained around the throat and sexually assaulted. And then Poundcake moves on to those very same men as a target, but ones that are woke, and yet the lack of caring seems to continue.

You know how it seems like every comedian has a podcast? Well, it feels like almost every character in this movie has one, too.

Either you’re going to absolutely love Onur Tukel’s (That Cold Dead Look In Your Eyes) film or you’re going to hate almost every moment of its running time. At once, it asks you to be enraged about the bad deeds of white men of power while also tearing at every single other group, as if being equally offensive makes up for the offensive ideas like, oh, rape can be funny.

It’s also about Asian women being anti-black, woke white men becoming too weak, dudes who want to be gay but want to do it with their wives around so that it’s not as gay, bad standup and then the fact that we should all just try and get along.

The actual slasher part is just a small portion of the movie. The podcasts and reaction are the rest and some parts work — everyone wants to be connected to the killings, even if it’s by the smallest of ways — and others don’t, as you start to lose track of who all these people are and if they even matter because, after some time, they don’t.

This is one of those movies that people will get upset and say, “You just don’t get it.”

Well, I did, it wasn’t as smart as it thought it was and where it could have really been incendiary, it came off as a prankster child so smugly sure of its own success that you don’t want to agree with any of it.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The Bigfoot trap is located in the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest in the southern part of Jackson County, Oregon. It was built by the North American Wildlife Research Team (NAWRT) and in six years, all it caught was bears. Today, the trap has been fixed and is maintained by the United States Forest Service as a tourist attraction. It’s a wooden box — ten feet by ten feet — made of planks that are bound together with metal and secured by telephone poles.

Josh MacMahon (Tyler Weisenauer) makes a video for the new site he’s working on where he makes light of flat earth conspiracy theorists. He goes viral and now he has to go after every other weird theory. His next target is Red Wilson (Zach Lazar Hoffman) and the Southern Sasquatch Research Foundation. It has one other member, Kyle (Andy Kanies).

Things don’t go as well.

Red knows Josh’s plan of making him look like a moron all while the would-be serious journalist is morally conflicted about doing exactly that. And then Josh accidentally shoots Kyle and ends up in, well, the Bigfoot trap.

Director and writer Aaron Mirtes (American Hunt, The Alpha Test) plays with your feelings — if you have negative Squatcher feelings, but not me, I’m a believer, I saw that one in a cooler outside a K-Mart when I was little — and makes you consider whose side you’re on before all that drama turns into the actual scares. It’s not perfect, but there are some great moments of character in this.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Silas Brewster (Jacob Ryan Snovel) and his wife Priscilla (Leah N.H. Philpott) have gone beyond wanting to kill one another and saying they want to murder each other to actually doing something about it on the very same night.

This dark comedy feels more like a broad farce you’d see on stage than a movie, but I think some may enjoy how over the top that it is. Director Zachary Burns and writer Jacob Leighton Burns have put together a movie filled with the kind of coincidences and cliches that go hand in hand with a slapstick story like this, including the fact that Silas is having an affair with Lily (Michaelene Stephenson) and Priscilla is sleeping with Thomas (Clinton Kubat) and both of their new partners have teamed up to help kill their respective despised partners. Plus, the next door couple, Andy (Yousef Kazemi) and Theo (Laron M. Chapman), keep coming to visit at the worst and most dangerous moments.

If you’re looking for a fun and somewhat frothy piece of murderous marital madcappery, well, this will do quite well.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Known in its native Lithuania as Rūpintojėlis (Caregiver), this is at once a teen drama, a folk horror and a slasher and when it leans into the latter, it goes all the way. Once known as Pensive, the new title is a much better explanation of what happens in this shocker.

After their graduation party location gets canceled, a group of teens are saved by Marius (Šarūnas Rapolas Meliešius), who has been one of the more misunderstood and unpopular students. His mother has an empty property that she’s been trying to sell forever and he knows where she keeps the keys. It seems like the perfect strategy to get his crush, Brigita (Gabija Bargailaitė), all alone.

Sounds like a teen sex comedy, maybe? Well, when the students arrive, there are statues all over the property, wooden figures that one of them claims are representations of grief and loss, as the last person to live here lost his family in a fire, which led to his suicide. When they go inside, the walls are covered with black soot. Yes, people died here.

Let’s party?

Once the drink starts to flow, someone gets the idea to destroy the statues. But those pieces of wooden remembrance have a caretaker willing to give out the same treatment to flesh that has been visited upon wood.

The difference with nearly every other slasher that you’ve ever seen is that these aren’t disposable teens. Some of them are quite nice. But just because they’re at the house and were around when the statues were defaced, they must all pay.

If this were the 80s, Hollywood would hire director Jonas Trukanas (who co-wrote the script with Titas Laucius) and have him direct the next sequel in a horror franchise. As it is, the wood-masked charred caretaker named Algis (Marius Repsys) just might be a better Cropsy than the one that shows up in The Burning. It also takes most of the things that you expect from a traditional slasher, references them and then throws them into a blender where they come up bloody and unrecognizable yet perfect in their new execution.

This is a movie to get excited about.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Lilly (Alison Walter) has finally escaped a horrible relationship and has found the courage to tell the world on social media. That’s something that Tom (Sam Brittan) is just licking up. I mean, he literally is, because he’s the Tearsucker of the title, a maniac who lives for the taste of women’s tears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Anu-ks_IRRU

Tom is the kind of guy that goes to support groups to do homework to better figure out how to break women down. So when Lilly falls for him, you want to warn her. And when she quickly decides to go away for the weekend with him, you want to scream at her.

Director Stephen Vanderpool fixates on tight shots of faces often in this and it works. He’s working from a script by  Brittan that gives more to its antagonist than its protagonist, although her one speech online is heart rendering. The romance moves a bit fast from Lilly being shattered to her falling for a stranger, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Even if it’s to lick the salty tears off someone’s face.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.