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.