On Halloween, 2020, Jesse and Jacob Warner (Braydan Wade and Jacob) disappeared while they were in the middle of a social media live stream. Project Eerie is the found footage film that purports to be that live stream.
Directed and written by Ricky Umberger (The Fear Footage, The Fear Footage 2: Curse of the Tape and The Fear Footage: 3AM), this film is debuting at The GenreBlast Film Festival. Unlike so many found footage films that are either about the supernatural or just slasher with a different POV, Project Eerie is the story of a top secret project of the same name and the United States government’s PEI division.
On the tape, there’s a tied-up Kevin Wickers (Austin Greene), the most wanted man in America who killed his wife Alice and daughter on a camping trip or so the media would like the world to believe. Instead, they were buzzed by a UFO and in a lost 90-seconds, an ultrasonic weapon caused his Alice to kill their daughter and attack him before she fell off a cliff. Two men, Wes (Jacob Waeyaert) and Jesse (Braydan Wade) are interrogating him when the Emergency Broadcast System warns all of America that a space station has lost power and fallen and an astronaut is on the loose. The entire country is told to shelter in place during this emergency.
I’ve seen a lot of found footage but I’ve never seen one where an astronaut shows up just walking through the woods. That’s absolutely incredible, you know?
There’s also an Amish farm and…you knew it was coming…a Ouija board. Throw in the normal screaming of someone’s name as the camera gets shaky and close with some Men In Black and you get a big mystery in Dundalk, Maryland.
As always, I’m not the biggest fan of shakycam found footage, but if you are, I think you’ll probably enjoy this. The astronaut is, again, an inspired touch.
Project Eerie was watched as part of The GenreBlast Film Festival which is from August 31 to September 3. All screenings for GenreBlast are held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. Passes are on sale through The Alamo Drafthouse Winchester. Learn more at the official site.
Directed by, written by and starring Blake O’Donnell (who also co-directed, co-wrote and co-starred in Bergeron Brothers: Wedding Videographerswith Benjamin Dietels, who is also in this movie), Guerilla Dogs is the story of three soldiers — Runway (O’Donnell), Hedgetrim (Dietels) and Wax (Ryan Lintner) who are struggling to not only keep it together but to keep a hostage named Mr. Money (Seth Gontkovic) in a time of war.
Denied nearly everything and forced to survive in the midst of a thick forest — never have the woods of my beloved Western Pennsylvania felt more like Apocalypse Now — these three feel like more of a danger to themselves than to any other military.
Everything is for the cause, which is never truly defined, yet that seems to be the way war works in the real world, even if you don’t spend it chasing a ball made of torn-apart underpants. Each night, they force Mr. Money to speak highly of the Cause and tell the world that he is being well taken care of.
And then they meet the Effect, who they have to escape being political prisoners of. There’s also some moonshine that very well could be poisonous in a bonding time gone wrong and then things seem to go on a downward trajectory for our boys. Yet if they find themselves adaptable, they’ll survive this war.
Guerrilla Dogs is weird and I mean that with the best of intentions. It’s earned weird. There’s no real description of why or where or how this war is happening, just that we’re in the middle of it and for these guys, it’s Hell. Yet they’re finding some way to survive or at least find the kind of routines that will make them delirious. Honestly, I have a lot of questions and luckily, I can pester Ben the next time I see him at the drive-in.
Also — I love the way this way filmed. The initial chase between the guys has some incredible overhead shots and is really well edited, too. It set up that this was a next level from the already great Bergeron Brothers.
Guerilla Dogs was watched as part of The GenreBlast Film Festival which is from August 31 to September 3. All screenings for GenreBlast are held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. Passes are on sale through The Alamo Drafthouse Winchester. Learn more at the official site.
Here are some of the shorts I watched at GenreBlast Fim Festival:
They Call It…Red Cemetery (2022): Director and writer Francisco Lacerda has seen the same Eurowesterns that I have — there’s a line that directly references Cemetery Without Crosses — and he uses it so well in this story of two men who meet in a cemetery for one last standoff. Rolando (Thomas Aske Berg) has a gun wrapped in rosary beads and Jose (Francisco Afonso Lopes) has one good eye, but they both want the treasure that so many have died for.
I have to tell you that I can make it through nearly anything in any horror movie but my real life terror is seeing someone put money in their mouth. This movie has extended scenes of a man eating silver dollars and I nearly threw up while watching it. There’s no way that it will upset you as much as it did me.
This looks and feels like the movies of the 60s that I love so much and it feels like it’s made with love.
We Forgot About the Zombies (2022): Chris McInroy made GUTS, one of the few movies of the last few years to make me physically sick, which is some kind of standing ovation. This one isn’t as intestine churning, but it does have multiple neon-colored liquids inside syringes, formulas that transform people into cake, a zombie ripping off chunks of its arm to appear more pleasing to look at, a clone and, man, I forgot the zombies too. Four minutes, dude. This movie did more in four minutes than some films and their sequel do in four hours.
Sucks to Be the Moon (2022): Creators Tyler March, Eric Paperth and Rob Tanchum have created an animated short in which the moon, tired of being lonely and in the shadow of the sun, decides to escape to meet other planets and falls in which a bad crowd — Pluto — and somehow comes back together to be friends with the Sun, only for both to realize just how important they are — were — to Earth.
This is a movie that has taught me that the universe is basically a club where all the planets hang out.
What have you been up to, Moon? “Hard drugs and crime.”
I’d say this was perfect for kids, but man, in no way should you let your kids watch it.
When You’re Gone (2022): In the midst of heartbreak, a writer-turned-party girl (Kristin Noriega, who also directed and wrote this) learns what it means to face pain, as her issues suddenly become moot when she becomes hunted by a subterranean mother and its horrific progeny. Is what’s happening real? Or is this just how emotional agony can make you feel? Either way, this has so much goop dripping into nearly every frame of its action, as well as a heroine not afraid to get her hands dirty and her teeth bloody by fighting back against whatever these creatures are that have her trapped. The elevator to stairwell transition scenes are dizzying and I feel like this needs to be a full-length to expand on each character and learn more.
Content: The Lo-Fi Man (2023): Brian Lonano, who co-directed this short with Blake Myers and wrote it, just wants to tell you about Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Yet he’s been replaced by the new and improved Brian Lonano (Clarke Williams) who is now a streaming content aggregator and influencer, asking you to smash that like button and ring the bell so you get the updates. Breaking free from the mouse-eared androids that have him locked up, he battles the Content Seeker by, well, kind of becoming Tetsuo and joining up with film revolutionaries Kino, B-Roll and Wild Track.
We live in a strange place now, a reality where you can get almost every movie you want but may not have the time to watch it. Or maybe you do and when you want to break it down and discuss it, you get lost in the machine of likes and shares. I try to keep my mind open to both sides, as sure, it’s nice to have the most perfect quality home media ever, as well as streaming materials and everyone deserves the opportunity to find and appreciate pop culture in their own way. But man, if I see another listicle or YouTube video that posits theories like “maybe all the shot in the Eastern Bloc SyFy sequels in the 90s were high art” or ten slashers you never saw before and #3 is The Burning, well…
It’s a fine line between discourse and gatekeeping, I guess.
Everyone really seems like they were having fun with this and it made me think about how I present what I love about movies with more thought. So…mission accomplished.
Stop Dead (2023): Directed by Emily Greenwood and written by David Scullion, this a short and sweet piece of horror. Detective Samantha Hall (Sarah Soetaert) and her partner Nick Thompson (David Ricardo-Pearce) stop Jennifer (Priya Blackburn) as she walks down a deserted road, telling them that if you stop, you die. Hall stops her with a taser and watches her die in front of her, then her partner, before whatever is in the shadows (James Swanton) emerges and forces her to walk the whole way through the credits, which was an inspired idea.
Gnomes (2022): Joggers have no idea that they’re about to enter the world of murderous sausage making gnomes who lure them in with mysterious glowing mushrooms. This movie has shocking amounts of gore and I say that lovingly; director Ruwan Suresh Heggelman, who wrote this with Jasper ten Hoor and Richard Raaphorst, knows how to keep things moving as fast as possible. We’re here to watch gnomes eat human beings and we get it. Oh do we get it.
These shorts were watched as part of The GenreBlast Film Festival which is from August 31 to September 3. All screenings for GenreBlast are held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. Passes are on sale through The Alamo Drafthouse Winchester. Learn more at the official site.
Fat Fleshy Fingers is an anthology film that draws its inspiration from the lyrics of Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal psychedelic folk album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It’s made up of all-new segments directed by alumni filmmakers of the Sick ’n’ Wrong Film Festival. The thread that ties it all together is the appearance of “a nasty little sexually transmitted parasite that bestows otherworldly effects on its host.”
Starting with “The King of Carrot Flowers,” directed and written by Sophia Cacciola, interprets the song in quite a strange little way. I mean, it is a song that has the lyrics, “And this is the room / One afternoon I knew I could love you / And from above you, how I sank into your soul / Into that secret place where no one dares to go.” Somehow that involves Michael St. Michaels from The Greasy Strangler telling his dying granddaughter to tell people to go fuck themselves and a mummy.
Other segments include “Oh Comely” directed by Rebecca Daugherty and Anthony Cousins (who also made the quite good Every Time We Meet for Ice Cream Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes), Heather Cunningham’s “The Point When You Let Go,” Some Stranger’s Stomach” by Michael Elliot Dennis, Lauren Flinner’s “We Move to Feel,” Sara Nieminen and Artturi Rostén’s “The Fool,” “Blow Dee Sky Jesus Christ” by director Zach Strum and writer Michah Vassau and Iris Sucres’ “All the Different Ways to Die.”
“So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving / And pluck all your silly strings and bend all your notes for me,” are the words of one of the many songs that inspired this film. I’d compare it to the latest of the late night Adult Swim with no filter or anything holding anyone back. If you love the album that it comes from or experimental animation or just need your mind exploded, this is ready for you.
Fat Fleshy Fingers was watched as part of The GenreBlast Film Festival which is from August 31 to September 3. All screenings for GenreBlast are held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. Passes are on sale through The Alamo Drafthouse Winchester. Learn more at the official site.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is entering its’ sixth year of genre film goodness. It’s a one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers to celebrate genre filmmaking in an approachable environment. Described by Movie Maker Magazine as “summer camp for filmmakers, ” this festival screens the latest in independent, cult, niche and underground films that aren’t easily accessible. Other events include filmmaker Q&A’s, special guests, giveaways, after parties and an awards ceremony.
The GenreBlast team is hard at work creating a destination event that will have the independent film industry talking about it all year long. GenreBlast is a festival for filmmakers, by filmmakers that strives to become one of the best independent film festivals around. They celebrate the finest in true genre cinema and look for the best features, shorts, animation, music videos, and screenplays you have to offer.
This year’s full-length films include:
Cryptids
Murdercise
Livescreamers
Poundcake
Forever Home
The Once and Future Smash
End Zone 2
Love Will Tear Us Apart
Project Eerie
Guerilla Dogs
Crypto Shadows
Fat Fleshy Fingers
Seventy-plus short films
You can see all of the movies on our Letterboxd list. Look for coverage all weekend and into next week!
The GenreBlast Film Festival runs from August 31 to September 3. All screenings for GenreBlast are held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. Passes are on sale through The Alamo Drafthouse Winchester. Learn more at the official site.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is entering its sixth year of genre film goodness. A one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers to celebrate genre filmmaking in an approachable environment, it has been described by Movie Maker Magazine as a “summer camp for filmmakers.”
Over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing several movies from this fest, based in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. This year, there are 14 feature films and 87 short films from all over the world. Weekend passes are only $65 and you can get them right here.
ManFish (2022): If anything, this movie does one better than The Shape of Waterand Creature from the Black Lagoon by proving that love between aquatic creatures and humans doesn’t have to be strictly undersea male and air breathing female. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a heterosexual romance.
When Terry (Dean Kilbey) finds a half-man, half-fish creature (Matty Noble), he thinks that it will make him rich. But then he falls in love, even if he can’t communicate with it. Can he protect the creature from his girlfriend Tracy (Emma Stannard) and his brother? Will he figure out that his girl and brother are sleeping together? Or will he end up ostracized and watching the new love of his life in a sideshow or worst sliced up and experimented on?
Shot on Canvey Island — when Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green moved after leaving the band — this is a hardscrabble British take on interspecies love and it’s quite amazing that it doesn’t make fun of its subject and instead finds humor in other places. If anything, the love story between man and fish is the most innocent and special part of this film.
Director and writer Marc Coleman has done a great job with this movie that could have quite easily been just a silly parody of its influences. Instead, it shows that love can exist anywhere, with anyone, even in a place that seems grim, gray and hopeless.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is entering its sixth year of genre film goodness. A one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers to celebrate genre filmmaking in an approachable environment, it has been described by Movie Maker Magazine as a “summer camp for filmmakers.”
Over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing several movies from this fest, based in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. This year, there are 14 feature films and 87 short films from all over the world. Weekend passes are only $65 and you can get them right here.
Gouge Away (2022): Tony the Stamper (co-writer Matthew Ritacco) uncovers a nasty secret when his mentor Stanley Pedious (Jacob Trussell) goes missing as a hazardous narcotic gas is unleashed upon the streets of the city. That’s a basic description for a movie that goes absolutely wild and eventually becomes nearly indescribable and I’m using that as a compliment.
Directed and co-written (with Ritacco) by Jeff Frumess, Gouge Away is the follow-up to Romero’s Distress and started life as another film, Wash Away. That movie also had Stanley, but in this story he was a therapist given the opportunity to get revenge against a former nemesis who ruined his life.
This movie is a real journey through whippets and stronger inhalants, as well as a neo-noir underground and yoga breathing, if that makes sense and I think it does. It’s definitely something different and works hard to create its own universe that you can’t help but sit back and watch unfold.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is entering its sixth year of genre film goodness. A one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers to celebrate genre filmmaking in an approachable environment, it has been described by Movie Maker Magazine as a “summer camp for filmmakers.”
Over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing several movies from this fest, based in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. This year, there are 14 feature films and 87 short films from all over the world. Weekend passes are only $65 and you can get them right here.
Artists In Agony: Hitmen at the Coda Teahouse (2021): This mockumentary follows four hitpeople who all died in the infamous Coda Teahouse Massacre: Frosty (Jason Frost), a new father balancing killing with child-rearing; stay-at-home mother Lucien Mercy (Ariadne Shaffer); Red Rick (Pall McQueen, but there’s also a musical version played by Paul Byrne) and his apprentice Lady Faith (Kate Huffman, but again, there’s a musical version of this character played by Liz Fenning).
A documentary crew has been following each of them to this final moment and shows how things got here and just how everything got so out of hand. The entire doc is narrated by ex-CIA Agent Jonathan Sully (Chance Hand) and explains how the greatest artist — as this movie refers to killers for money — Rockstar (Frank Kitchin) just may have killed them all.
Director Kenneth Lui has an interesting concept here and excels at the action scenes in this. It just feels like so many ideas and the mockumentary format keeps getting broken so that we’re in the loop on every thought of every character instead of letting the action play itself out. It also feels way longer than its runtime, as every time it feels like it’s nearing a moment of clarity or resolution, there’s still so much longer to go.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is entering its sixth year of genre film goodness. A one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers to celebrate genre filmmaking in an approachable environment, it has been described by Movie Maker Magazine as a “summer camp for filmmakers.”
Over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing several movies from this fest, based in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. This year, there are 14 feature films and 87 short films from all over the world. Weekend passes are only $65 and you can get them right here.
In the Shadow of God (2022): Rachel (Sara Canning) has returned home after the death of her father and discovers that there may be something supernatural under the trap door inside their home.
Directed and written by Brian Sepanzyk, In the Shadow of God transcends its 18 minute runtime and low budget to deliver a film that could easily surpass so many modern horror films. There’s a real sense of absolute dread in this, as well as the rapidly deteroriating vision of her father on the series of videotapes that she watches. He didn’t just have a heart attack; his fingers were bruised and torn from what looks like an attempt to escape something with the house. Now, everyone that comes near it is overwhelmed by visions that can only be ended with death.
I really think this could be a full-length but if this is all we get, it’s still pretty great.
The GenreBlast Film Festival is entering its sixth year of genre film goodness. A one-of-a-kind film experience created for both filmmakers and film lovers to celebrate genre filmmaking in an approachable environment, it has been described by Movie Maker Magazine as a “summer camp for filmmakers.”
Over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing several movies from this fest, based in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Winchester, Virginia. This year, there are 14 feature films and 87 short films from all over the world. Weekend passes are only $65 and you can get them right here.
Lily’s Mirror (2022): I loved every single minute of this short and it definitely deserves to be a full-length movie.
Lily (Linnea Frye, who directed and wrote this with Adam Pinney) has had a major setback. While on a dinner date, a man named Bart (Matt Horgan) uses a hatchet to chop off her hand. He calls for the bill and leaves her with the check, which is covered in blood. No one cares, which is a major theme of this movie, and she has to deal with her loss with only the help of Dr. Taylor (Mary Kraft) who gives her a therapeutic mirror box that will get her past the phantom pain of losing her appendage.
However, when Lily uses the mirror box, she discovers that it allows her to transform a photo of slain news anchor Maria Estando Cortez (Viviana Chavez) and help her prove that her co-anchor Tim Davis (Jamie Moore) has been murdering female news anchors for years.
This movie exists in its own world with its own rules, a place at once brighter and darker than our own, yet one that has the same issue with the same men getting away with the same crimes. Yet the end promises that Davis will soon be on the hand of some justice. Closure is fine; crushing your enemy feels so much better.
You can learn more about the movie at the official site.
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