Category Archives: Movie reviews

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Pitfall (2026)

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When a movie starts with a line like “Family is forever,” you know you’re about to watch a family get absolutely decimated. Directed by James Kondelik, Pitfall is a gritty, backwoods survival-horror mixed with dysfunctional-family drama. 

The Williams family—patriarch Drew (Grant Vlahovic), mother Loraine (Teresa Laverty) and their adult kids, Scott (Marshall Williams) and Ashley (Alex Essoe)—start things off on a camping trip that goes south. A horrific road accident leaves the family shattered, with the survivors carrying scars that run deeper than their physical ones.

Five years later, the guilt-ridden siblings return to the same woods with a group of friends — Lars (Richard Harmon), Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins) and Charlie (Matt Hamilton) — to go head-to-head with all that trauma. Bad move. They aren’t just battling their own fractured psyches. They’ve wandered into the private hunting grounds of a primal, nameless serial killer played by the legendary MMA fighter Randy Couture. This guy doesn’t do firearms. He prefers axes, arrows, and, as the title spoils for you — elaborate, body-piercing pit traps.

Scott takes a fall into a concealed pit and finds himself impaled through the leg. He starts to hallucinate — straight out of Evil Dead II, lifting a line and even seeing an evil double — and is near death the entire movie. 

This seems a bit slow and not in a good way, as characters appear that have nothing to do with the main list of potential victims. Keeping things a bit tighter would have benefitted this film, but you know, I judge all slashers made after 1981 pretty harshly. Your mileage through these woods may vary.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: The Peril at Pincer Point (2026)

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Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayn) is a man with a singular mission. As the sound recordist for a movie, he is determined to finally prove he isn’t the total disaster everyone assumes he is. His destination is the titular Pincer Point, an island that reeks of salt air, isolation, and, according to local legend, a dark nautical prophecy.

What begins as a technical endeavor quickly descends into a struggle for survival. As Jim tries to capture audio, he finds that the island has its own frequency, one that wants to erase him. Between the crumbling landscape and the creeping dread of ancient superstition, Baitte realizes that finishing the movie is the last thing he needs to worry about.

Directors Noah Stratton-Twine and Jake Kuhn have come up with a great angle by featuring a protagonist whose job is to listen to the environment. This enables them to play with the audio landscape in a way that feels genuinely unsettling. If you’re watching this, turn the volume up or put on some headphones. 

As for the location, Pincer Point feels like a spiritual successor to those lonely, windswept locales found in 70s British folk horror.

This is a film that understands that the most terrifying thing in the world isn’t a monster. It’s the realization that the equipment is failing, that the sun is going down, and that the environment itself has decided to end you. Plus, it looks incredible, and crabs are always terrifying.

PS: The sequel has already been announced.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Subterranean Psychotronica 2026: Rattlers 2 (2021)

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Week 2 (June 28 – July 4) – Dawna Lee Heising: Our beautiful QWEEN

45 years after Rattlers creeped its way into drive-ins, the lethal snakes are back to terrorize the California desert. If you haven’t caught the Harry Novak-produced 1976 cult classic, don’t sweat it—this sequel is practically a primer. Director Dustin Ferguson relies heavily on archival footage from the original, creating a jarring, grindhouse-style contrast between the weathered 35mm flashbacks and the modern-day digital production.

Writers Josh Price and Lee Turner do the heavy lifting to bridge the decades, weaving the classic narrative into this new installment. While the film leans heavily on the past—perhaps a bit too much at the expense of a fully fleshed-out original plot—and stumbles into a hurried climax, it remains a testament to Ferguson’s relentless output.

Ferguson has a regular cast that he turns to in film after film and many of them show up here, like Mel Novak as Commissioner Lewis, Brinke Stevens (yes, that Brinke Stevens!) as Rebecca, the always fabulous Dawna Lee Heising as Lindsay, Jennifer Nangle (Malvolia herself!) as Sally, Shawn C. Phillips, Julie Anne Prescott, Peter Stickles and more.

If anything, I wish that the film relied less on the original film and that the ending didn’t feel so rushed. But that’s fine — Ferguson seems to be learning with each film and I’m always interested in seeing anything that he makes when it crosses my path.

You can get this on demand from SoCal Cinema Studios or grab the DVD from Kunaki.

JUNESPLOITATION: Rolls-Royce Baby (1975)

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DAY 29. Free space!

I was trying to think of a movie I could watch to fill my free time and remembered that, somehow, some way, I had an unwatched Lina Romay movie. It’s kismet because yesterday I was looking back at my review of Jack the Ripper, and I had not succumbed to the Stockholm Syndrome of being pulled into the cinematic universe of Jess Franco. In fact, I wrote that I didn’t understand why people loved his movies so much. 

What was I thinking?

Rosa Maria Almirall Martinez was still in high school five years before this movie was filmed, not yet taking the stage name Lina Romay, not yet being the muse of Jess. Also not yet taking on even more stage names — “I’m Lina Romay when I have brown hair, Candy Coster when I have blonde hair, and Lulu Laveme when I have red hair.” — or leaving her husband for Jess. 

But in 1975, Lina was in a ton of movies, including Female Vampire and Barbed Wire Dolls. Here, she may play the “Rolls-Royce Baby,” but she’s really an idealized movie version of herself. The film begins with her shaving herself with a straight razor, which could give one the notion of sharp steel blades against young flesh because one tends to think big and obsess when watching Lina Romay movies. 

That said, this isn’t a Jess film, even if he may have directed a scene or two (I’m no Stephen Thrower, so I can’t just pull that knowledge out; Ian Jaye did say, “Right out of the gate when asked about this movie Dietrich says that he co-directed it with Jess Franco and that Lina was on loan from him, which is at odds with what most have believed about this film for years. It was commonly held that Franco was not involved in making this movie at all.”). Instead, it was directed by Erwin C. Dietrich, a former actor who moved into directing krimi films like The Strangler of the Tower before turning to adult films, where the money always is.

At some point, after touching herself and taking photos like cosplaying Sylvia Kristel in the wicker chair from Emmanuelle, Lina gets worshipped by Eric Falk (Mad Foxes), whom we’re introduced to when he does full-frontal karate. She then decides to head out in the titular luxury car, picking up a variety of men, from truck drivers to hippie hitchhikers, while he sulks in the car. Some of her lovers include Roman Huber, Ursula Maria Schaefer and Kurt Meinicke. 

Those are just facts; as for whether this is a good movie, all I have to say is that I had it playing in the background while I was in a meeting and audibly gasped the moment Lina appeared. Her giant eyes, her porcelain skin, just knowing it’s her… somehow Franco — and by extension Dietrich — were able to take what they loved about her and share it with the world, which is really the finest example of the sharing-caring paradigm I can imagine. 

I love that there are reviews that claim this is boring. Lina Romay wears lace and a big hat, staring right at you through the camera, fifty years ago in our time, gone from our realm of existence, but still vibrant, still young, still alive. 

You’d gasp too.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Making Megaforce (2025)

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If you grew up staring at the comic book ad for Megaforce—that indelible image of Barry Bostwick in a spandex jumpsuit, the tagline “Deeds not words” —you know exactly why it’s etched into the collective psyche of every nerdy 80s action movie fan. Bob Lindenmayer’s Making Megaforce finally gives this cult relic the deep dive it deserves, transforming what could have been a standard look-back doc into a poignant, high-octane exploration of why we hold on to the movies that everyone else told us to throw away.

At its core, the documentary follows director Lindenmayer as he tracks down the ghosts of the film. He isn’t just looking for the locations, like the wind-swept Nevada Salt Flats where the film’s legendary, physics-defying tank battles took place. He’s looking for the people who built the dream. Through interviews with the original stunt coordinators, costume designers and crew, the film peels back the curtain on how a massive, over-budgeted 80s action spectacle was pieced together.

The heart of the doc is the relationship between Lindenmayer and Barry Bostwick. Bostwick, a genre legend known more for The Rocky Horror Picture Show and presidents than for playing the iconic Ace Hunter, brings warmth to this totally unexpected project. He isn’t dismissive of the camp classic he starred in. He’s a willing participant in the absurdity, sharing memories that bridge the gap between Hollywood glitz and the blue-collar reality of film sets. Seeing their friendship evolve on screen adds an emotional anchor, elevating the movie from a mere trivia hunt to something genuinely moving.

Lindenmayer treats the fans with as much respect as the stars. It’s a reminder that to them, Megaforce wasn’t just a flop. For a generation of kids — me included — it was an invitation to dream big, even if those dreams involved flying motorcycles, jumpsuits and headbands. And beneath the kitsch, there’s a surprising search for a lost father figure. It turns out that tracking down a movie is often just a proxy for tracking down the parts of ourselves we left behind in the 80s.

Whether you have the original Megaforce poster framed in your living room or you’ve never heard of Ace Hunter, this documentary is essential viewing. It’s rare to find a film that captures the specific, manic joy of loving a movie people make fun of and yet tells it with such sincerity.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: W.T.F. FUNSIZE EPICS VOL. 2

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Dual Wielder (2026): Directed by Julia Boyd, this reveals why the initials E.E. sit atop every Time Crisis leaderboard in Los Angeles. Those high scores are from Eddie Esguerra, who has mastered the art of holding two light guns simultaneously, dodging virtual bullets, and clearing levels with surgical precision. It’s not just a movie about gaming; it’s a character study of a guy who has found total flow state in the middle of a dying medium. I love how he acts in front of a crowd, almost like a John Woo character, and his goal of hitting three arcades and beating the whole game alone, playing for two. So awesome.

Brian Won’t Wear Condoms (2025): Directed by Genna Edwards, this is about the strained dynamic between two friends: Abby (Jordan Chin), a wellness influencer living in the curated, pseudo-spiritual bubble of online health culture, and Kayla (April Consalo from Cannibal Mukbang!), her decidedly more grounded and skeptical best friend. When the influencer decides to undergo an alternative contraceptive procedure—a concept that sounds suspiciously like something whispered in a dark corner of a wellness retreat—the results are anything but harmonious. As the title suggests, the catalyst for this madness is the titular Brian, a man whose refusal to use basic protection triggers a surreal, visceral downward spiral that tests the limits of their friendship and their physical well-being. This was incredible and hey — it has a HELLBENDER song!

Long’s Long Lost & Mini Mart (2025): Directed by Julian Doan, this is set within the claustrophobic, flickering confines of a Little Saigon mini-mart. Our protagonist is a young man struggling under the crushing weight of a recent loss who turns to a medium who runs the register. She shows him a menu of the ways that she can reanimate his dead father for one final conversation. But when she brings his father back, it’s not all happy. Actually, it’s barely happy as it drags up decades of repressed history, unspoken grievances, and the kind of generational trauma that doesn’t just vanish when you say goodbye. As a convenience store lover, I would totally buy a beef stick and ice tea here.

BlueBeard GasLight (2025): The story follows a woman (played by director Kyla Miller) deep in the trenches of mounting an ambitious, artisanal puppet production of the legend of Bluebeard. While we see that, we get a deep dive into the feminist story of what Bluebeard is all about, as well as the many men who — of course — had no idea what it was trying to say. Really interesting!

Dry January (2025): Directed by C.J. Arellano, this is all about Maya (Akanksha Cruczynski). Looking to escape the haze of her partying lifestyle, she commits to a full month of sobriety. But what do you do with all that free time in a dry January? She finds her calling in sculpting. Her masterpiece? A jagged, menacing crab sculpture that seems to radiate a strange, malevolent energy and gives off fortune cookie like messages about the both of them. Maya feels fulfilled and gets great messages. Toby (Zak Ma), her drinking buddy and brother, not so much. In fact, the crab seems to hate him. He just wants to get back to getting wasted. She just wants to hang out with the crab. Man, this whole movie blew me away and I had no expectations, but I was rocked by it. We all need that crab man. And a drink. Maybe not all that paper eating.

Strip Mall (2025): Directed by Andrew Appelle, this finds Nate (Nate Wilson) — an average, aimless shoplifter looking for a quick score — getting busted. He expects a lecture or maybe a call to the local police. Instead, he encounters a store supervisor (Howard Linscott) who has been waiting for a special case. The punishment the supervisor doles out isn’t jail time. It’s a psychological and physical gauntlet designed to break Nate down to his core. I remember when Hills Department Store used to have a sign up front about how they’d prosecute anyone that stole and even at a young age, I was fearful that someday I would be in such a situation. Also: Those baby changing tables can really hold some weight. I loved this — such a strange piece of film.

The Last Cheap House (2026): Directed by Meg Favreau. In 2021, home-renovation influencers Josh (Jakeem Dante Powell) and Anna (Sami Griffith) Connelly vanished. Their bodies were eventually discovered three years later, tucked away and rotting in the crawlspace beneath their dream home. The film is presented as the final, recovered footage from their cameras. It’s a descent from bubbly content creators to a state of paranoid, trapped exhaustion. As someone who woke up yesterday to ten new doors randomly showing up to be added to this house, I felt like this may have been the most horrific film I’ve watched all year.

I Hate Babies (2026): Directed by Sidney Leeder and Alona Metzer, this has a protagonist who is dealing with a chronic, undiagnosable pain linked to her IUD. Once she finally removes the device, the world around her stops making sense. It turns out the pain was a filter—or perhaps a warning—because once it’s gone, she begins to perceive the terrifying reality of her social circle. Every woman in her life who has embraced motherhood is undergoing a grotesque transformation into a Mombie. Yes, a hive-minded, baby-obsessed group of creatures that view her lack of interest in reproduction as an existential threat. Terrifying.

It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time Travel (2025): Directed by Michael Charron, this has two friends — Swann (Taylor Fredricks) and Randall (Ronald Short) — stuck in a cycle of personal stagnation, who decide that the best way to move forward is to literally move backward in the hopes that they can erase the framed-up crime that ruined their lives. Armed with nothing but a significant amount of weed and a theory that love is the key to bending the space-time continuum, they manage to land five years in the past. But this isn’t about grand temporal paradoxes or changing the fate of the world; it’s about the terrifying realization that even if you have the power to go back, you’re still the same broken person you were when you left. PS: I call a time machine when I take edibles on a road trip and sleep until I get there. Also another PS: I love that Somewhere In Time was the inspiration for romantic time travel.

Lady Puritan (2026): Directed by Justin Streichman and Gustine Fudickar, Lady Puritan is a heavy, atmosphere-drenched short that follows a woman who finds herself trapped in a waking nightmare. There, the barrier between her current life and the grim, oppressive world of her Puritan ancestor is thinning. As she becomes increasingly unmoored from reality, she discovers that her family tree is rooted in something far darker than standard history. Gorgeous scenery and wild visuals in this.

Legend Has It (2026): Directed by Thomas Lorber, this has Adam (Jon Cor), a male stripper who is known as The Legend, arrive for a private booking. He’s dressed to get undressed, he’s prepped and he’s ready to work. But when he walks through the wrong door, he finds himself in the middle of a scenario that is definitely not a bachelorette party. There’s already been one mobster killed and it seems like a second is nearly dead. The brilliance here is that the film refuses to let the joke burn out. Adam doesn’t immediately realize he’s in over his head and the film milks that disconnect for every drop of tension it’s worth. Cor is great in this able to do plenty of action and yet handle the humor. Also: Dildo fight.

Violet Vendetta (2025): Directed by Ted Hayden, this is about Luke (Brandon H. Lee) and Hunter (Hector Melgoza), who are two wannabe auteurs who are just trying to get their masterpiece in the can. The problem? Their backer is a shadowy, dangerous executive producer whose idea of notes involves sending a squad of hitmen to their set. What follows is a frantic, blood-soaked descent into DIY action. Instead of calling cut, the boys have to trade their camera rigs for improvised weaponry. You know you know they’re bad guys? They roll up in a Cybertruck. Also, other than Ninja 3, this is the only movie I’ve seen that combines martial arts and golf carts.

Scullion (2026):Samantha (Whitney Garner) and Greg (Cody Parr) discuss how he grew up with a very fixed idea of how to wash the dishes. She tells him to change it up and go against what his mother taught him, which angers a sort of poltergeist (Jim Close) of poor housekeeping. Look, I have OCD too, and this is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t follow the rules.

My Severed Arm (2026): Directed by Casey De Fremery. After a masked killer leaves her trapped and alone, a woman turns to the internet to discover how she can survive the night. Ads during videos have never been more annoying. As someone streaming all day, this killed me. I am dealing with Roku’s incessant ads for Blossom and Cougar Town to the point that I am yelling at them during the day. Anyway, back to the movie. I love how close this looks to a mid-2000s slasher, along with all the humor. Even the killers need to search for help when it comes to cutting off their arms! And love that the slasher killer is like a mix of Madman Marz, Victor Crowley and Humongous with a gas mask!

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Subterranean Psychotronica 2026: The Paradise Motel (2022)

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Week 2 (June 28 – July 4) – Dawna Lee Heising: Our beautiful QWEEN

Walter Hochbrueckner directed, wrote and appears in this film which tells the story of Nikki Travis (Dawna Lee Heising), who has left her abusive husband Eric (Hochbrueckner) and while she doesn’t follow the lyrics of Tom Waits (“gonna drive all night / Take some speed”) as she goes out west, she sure finds plenty of weirdness.

She soon meets Misty (Llenelle Gibson) and Crystal (Angel Princess), two other women who are running from something too. Their three paths converge at a town called Paradise and Jackie’s (Vera R. Taylor) diner.

Paradise is a misnomer, as masked killers roam the streets, salarymen disappear regularly, Raymond Taylor (Mel Novak) seems to have the taxidermy skills and mommy issues of another hotel owner we know and fear and Nikki’s ex is still hunting for her, demanding the money she stole from him.

There are moments in this film that seem like they’re repeating, like you’re stuck in a dream where time moves like heavy mercury beneathe the waves, as you attempt to figure out why everyone has found this town, who left that knife just sitting out and why no one thinks it’s al that strange that Nikki wants to be known as Joan Crawford now. Also: a perfect amount of cheetah print.

The Paradise Motel is a quirky movie that succeeds because of its oddball nature. It’s not trying to be weird; it just is naturally. And isn’t that the best?

JUNESPLOITATION: Firepower (1993)

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DAY 28. PM Entertainment!

If you’ve spent any time digging through the bargain bins of VHS history—or if you’ve spent your weekends scouring Tubi for the kind of low-budget, high-adrenaline junk that puts modern CGI-fests to shame—then you know the name PM Entertainment. They were the kings of the direct-to-video era, a studio that understood a fundamental truth about action cinema: nobody cares about the plot as long as you blow up enough cars and someone gets kicked in the face with artistic precision.

Firepower (1993) is the quintessential PM production. It is a glorious, neon-soaked movie that feels like it was written by someone who had only ever seen RoboCop and Enter the Dragon and decided the best way to merge them was to set the whole thing in a future where crime is legal, and the fashion sense is pure early-90s dystopian chic.

Welcome to the year 2007. I know, I know—we’ve lived through that year, and it mostly involved dial-up internet and the rise of social media, but in the world of Firepower, it’s a lawless nightmare. Cities have been carved up into Hell Zones, essentially pockets of urban collapse where the police are forbidden to tread. It’s a brilliant setup for a low-budget movie because it explains why everything looks like it was filmed in a half-abandoned industrial park in Sun Valley.

Enter our dynamic duo: Darren Braniff, played by Chad McQueen, and Nick Sledge, played by tGary Daniels. Braniff is the straight man cop, the guy who plays by the rules until the rules stop working, and Sledge is the loose-cannon Brit who is basically a one-man wrecking crew. They’re tasked with infiltrating the Hell Zone to bust a racket involving a counterfeit AIDS vaccine.

It’s the kind of high-stakes, socially conscious plot point that was ripped straight from the headlines of 1993, then immediately discarded in favor of guys fighting in a death-cage. Once they step into the zone, the movie stops pretending it’s a police procedural and starts being what it actually is: a collection of excuses for Gary Daniels to display his world-class kickboxing prowess.

Daniels is the crown jewel of this production. Long before he was holding his own against Stallone in The Expendables, he was the go-to guy for legitimate martial arts talent in films that couldn’t afford a massive budget. He’s agile, he’s mean, and he has that quintessential cool that makes him the star of every scene he’s in. Even when he’s playing second fiddle to McQueen, your eyes are naturally drawn to his technique.

But why did I choose this movie?

Firepower is famous for being the only film role for the late, legendary WWE Hall of Famer, The Ultimate Warrior. Cast as the main villain, The Swordsman, Hellwig is an absolute wall of muscle. The film handles him perfectly: he doesn’t have much to say, which is smart, because his job isn’t to deliver Shakespearean monologues. It’s meant to look like a mountain of neon-colored menace, crushing people in a cage. Watching him move against the more technical martial artists is a bizarre, fascinating contrast.

The heart of Firepower is the Death Ring, an underground tournament run by the villainous Drexal (Joseph Ruskin). The plot eventually forces our heroes to enter the tournament, which turns the movie into a series of increasingly elaborate death matches. This is where the film earns its reputation. PM Entertainment was famous for its practical effects. They didn’t have the budget for big-screen explosions, so they made sure their small-screen ones were everywhere. The car chases are well-executed, featuring daring stunts that feel genuinely dangerous. They had a knack for blocking off streets and turning Los Angeles into a playground of burning rubber and flying steel.

The fighting, meanwhile, is classic 90s DTV. It’s not the polished, wire-fu spectacle of Hong Kong cinema (though Daniels brings some of that training to the table), nor is it the slow, heavy brawling you’d see in a modern UFC fight. It’s raw, it’s rhythmic, and it’s over-the-top. The scene where the characters are forced to perform in a continuous take in front of the cameras shows just how talented these guys were at adapting to tight schedules and limited resources.

To prepare for his role, Jim Hellwig reportedly trained for three weeks with martial arts instructor Richard Rabago and the film’s fight coordinator, Art Camacho (who also plays Viper). It wasn’t enough to make him a world-class kicker, but it was certainly enough to make him look like a terrifying physical threat on screen.

Daniels initially turned down the role because the pay wasn’t up to his standards, and he was sick of deathmatch movies. The executives at PM finally convinced him to read the script, and he realized the character of Sledge had enough sarcastic wit to be worth the trouble. Thank goodness he changed his mind. Without him, this would just be another forgotten relic.

Like many films of the era, Firepower relies on that specific 90s vision of the future: dark, gritty, filled with leather trench coats and neon lighting. It’s an aesthetic that has aged into a kind of nostalgic perfection, even as it becomes outdated, even though it’s supposed to be the future.

Spoilers: Poor Darren. Not only is his fighting name Alley Cat, but his wife gets killed because he’s poking around and well, maybe that’s not so sad because all she ever did was yell at him and one of the girls in the fight club, Lisa (Alisha Das, who is also in Nightwish and has gone on to be “considered a global authority on spirituality with a special focus on angels”), was already showing him interest. So in the PM Entertainment world of men writing men’s movies, I guess that’s happy. What isn’t is seeing Warrior slice his partner’s head clean off and hold it up, which I wasn’t expecting.

The P in PM, Richard Pepin, directed, and the script was by Michael January. Keep an eye open for George Murdock (the voice of God in Star Trek V), stunt coordinator and former pro wrestler Nils Allen Stewart, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (who played Joe Jackson in The Jacksons miniseries because he looks exactly like Joe Jackson to the point that I thought, “Why is Michael Jackson’s dad in this movie?”) and, of course, Gerald Okamura. 

This is the movie where Gerald Okamura fights Ultimate Warrior and I’m glad I watched it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Subterranean Psychotronica 2026: M 10.28 (1999)

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Week 1 (June 21 – 27) – Welcome to HELL

The summer’s here, so get ready to broil!

Bruce Neubauer somehow made this movie in under an hour, and unlike so many Christian scare movies, this isn’t for a strictly religious audience. It also presents a world where teen parties are filled with strobes, people who want to fight you at every turn and dudes being amped up for no reason. It’s why I stayed in my room as a teen and just watched horror movies.

The title comes from Matthew 10:28, which says, “Do not fear the one who can kill only the body. Fear the one who can kill both the body and soul in Hell.”

But yeah, if you spent your formative years wandering the aisles of a religious bookstore or caught a weird, low-budget educational film during a Sunday night youth service, you know exactly the feel. This is a low-budget religious horror cautionary tale shot in the heart of Lorain, Ohio, right near where Superhost once lip-synced “Convoy” on WUAB.

Mary is a young woman doing everything in her power to burn the bridge between herself and her Christian upbringing. She’s fighting with her parents, running with a crowd that has zero interest in going to church and generally acting out. Mary yells at everyone, from her mom and dad to her friends, to people trying to drive drunk and blast some alt-rock, and anyone else she talks to. If I went to high school with Mary, I’d be making her mix tapes and getting more obsessed about her the more she shouted barbed epithets at me.

After a night of carousing leads to a near-death experience — man, the dudes in Lorain are aggressive and just want to murder — Mary is forced to confront exactly what the title promises: a vision of the afterlife that is intended to be as terrifying as possible. And that’s after watching nearly all of her friends die.

Yes, religion as cosmic horror.

You aren’t watching this for the cinematography or the high-end special effects. You’re watching it for that one specific sequence where the low budget actually enhances the surreal, unsettling nature of Hell. It’s a classic example of how limited resources often force filmmakers to get weirder than a studio ever would. It’s not the Hell you expect, with flames. Instead, it’s a black void where shafts of light and Italian movie fog pour out, and all the demons have big teeth like something out of a Todd McFarlane comic. Where most modern religious movies just go to the Spirit Store, the filmmakers went into their heads to make something that feels not just alien, but terrifying.

Two asides:

  1. I’ve been reading a lot lately about how the reveal of aliens will upend religion, perhaps because, as Bob Lazar claims, Jesus was a created being made to keep humans taking care of the containers that are our souls. If this is revealed, people feel like the world would go to pieces. But the millennial kids — or the 90s ones here — seem like they couldn’t care less.
  2. When people go on and on about hidden movies or lost films, it’s always the same ones. Instead of obsessing about the next 4K UHD, you should open your mind to the sheer volume of underseen religious cinema, which is often way weirder, more earnest — and yes, both things true at once — than anything else you can find hunting for little-cared-about movies. Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, Mondo Macabro — no one is going to release a slipcover special edition of this film.

This is a movie with a teen in a vampire mask telling us how drunk he is, living in a town where white kids drink 40s while hanging out the window of their parents’ cars, and everyone is packing guns. I don’t want to live there, but the visit was interesting.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026 Red Eye #1: Night Angel (1987)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

Screenwriter Joe Augustyn (Night of the Demons) uses the legendary character of Lilith for Night Angel, the story of a centuries old succubus who is planning on infiltrating the minds of men via the cover of a magazine (yes, we are back in the 1990s folks).

As the story goes (in the Talmud), Lilith was Adam’s first wife before the creation of Eve. She was banished from the Garden of Eden for not being subservient to Adam. This disobedience allegedly included refusing to lie in the missionary position. Depending on the source, once Lilith leaves the Garden, she gives birth to hundreds of demons, many of whom die daily. In retaliation, she kills the infants of the Jewish people.

In Night Angel, Lilith is a demon herself, a succubus posing as a high fashion model, hoping to bring death and destruction to anyone who comes across her. It appears that humanity’s only hope for Pearl is 227 (Helen Martin), a woman who lost the love of her life to Lilith years ago, and may be the only person who has a way to destroy her forever.

In one of their earliest efforts, the special effects team of KNB provides the effects for Lilith’s transformation into her true demonic form at the end of the film. As always, great work by them.

Personally, I’m always fascinated by the incorporation of Jewish folklore into horror movies. We just do not see it enough in my opinion, although the source material is ripe for exploration.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.