Director and writer JT Mollner — working with producer and cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, who shot this in 35mm — has created a twisty tale that is “one day in the twisted love life of a serial killer” yet also one that unfolds in the narrative technique that Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction. Read that as time doesn’t matter and expectations are continually dashed.

Told in six out of order chapters and an epilogue, this is the cat and mouse survival battle between The Demon (Kyle Gallner) and The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), as well as the people pulled into their storyline, often at the cost of their lives, such as Genevieve (Barbara Hershey) and Frederick (Ed Begley Jr.).

An opening text explains that — just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — that we’re about to see a real story. Except just like that film, this sets us up for a true crime experience that isn’t. There’s even Jason Patric’s voice narrating a true crime story later in the film. The truth in every frame of this movie, every single moment in fact, is subjective and ever-changing.

It even knows when to slow down, as the leads discuss a sexual encounter before it happens. The Lady says, “Do you have any idea the kind of risks a woman like me takes every time she decides to have a little bit of fun?” She declares that women love casual sex just as much as men. The difference is, they don’t die more often when they have it.

While I’d love to tell you more, I want you to go into this as cold as I did. Just let me tell you, it combines giallo style lighting, as well as the forms embrace of kink and ambiguous motivations. Some may be put off by the fact that it narratively takes such wild jumps, almost feeling like a totally different film from moment to moment. Yet that’s the joy of this, a movie that is going to win over audiences if they give it just 15 minutes.

It’s as close to perfect cinema as I’ve seen this year with Fitzgerald making the kind of star turn that young actresses often only dream about.

I watched Strange Darling at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Directed and written by Ludvig Gür, Gudstjänst — which is being released in the U.S. as In the Name of God — is about Theodor (Linus Walhgren), a priest who is often the only person at his masses. The worshippers are dying off and his wife Felicia (Lisa Henni) wonders if they should move on. He’s happy that his mentor Jonas (Thomas Hanzon) has come to town. The problem is that it seems like he may be deranged. After all, he just killed a dove right in front of him and sprayed him with hot blood.

Yet when Felicia collapses and is soon hospitalized, dying from a mysterious ailment, Jonas offers to save her if Theodor follows him just as he did by going into the priesthood. Now, he must accept the true priesthood of God and kill sinners to save his wife’s life.

Jonas has already captured a rapist and all the younger man has to do is snuff out his sinful life. He does. His wife is healed. He becomes known as a faith healer and people come back to the church. His wife is with child. God has a plan.

Yet to make the prayers of his new followers come true, he must keep killing. Because the God who has listened to Theodor is the Old Testament one, the vengeful demander of sacrifice, the God that asked Abraham to murder his own son just to see how far he would go.

This is the very definition of a moral quandary. Isn’t murder a sin? Yet aren’t the people who Theodor is hunting and destroying evil incarnate? Isn’t all this murder making the world a better place? And if he can make miracles happen at the same time, isn’t that God’s will? Can you become addicted to creating magic happen in the lives of those who follow your teachings?

I watched In the Name of God at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

When I first saw The Hitcher, I was probably 14 years old and saw it as a straight-ahead story of violence on the highway. I probably cheered at the end when Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) blew a hole into John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). But age and the miles wear on every man and now when I watch it, it does more than make me raise my fist in the air and shout. It makes me ruminate on the journeys life has taken me and how I’d rather be launched through a window and blasted down a hillside than live a slow, tedious and quiet death.

Halsey starts the film with the kind of confidence that someone at the end of their teens has. He picks up Ryder, who immediately confides to him that he’s killed someone else. But he says something else. Something we don’t expect. “I want you to stop me.”

That’s the whole point of this film. Ryder will transform Halsey into the empty man he is, whether through attrition or forcing him to blast him into oblivion. This road only goes one way.

What does it take to get Halsey to realize this isn’t a nightmare, but reality? Of course, it’s easy to think that this could all be a dream, in the same way that long stretches of drives with no one speaking seem to be visions that last and last. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m still driving and every moment up until here, up until this realization, is just me imagining my life and any moment now, I’m going to wake up with my fiancee asleep next to me.

For our hero, it takes seeing trucks plow into truck stops, station wagons filled with the blood of all American families and the typical movie love interest torn in half by two semis.

Halsey is stripped of his identity, not just because his license and keys — let’s face, the manhood of most red-blooded boys — have been taken away. Everything he may have believed was true — the goodness of giving someone a ride when they need it, that love can conquer fear, even that the role models and lawmakers that society sets up can protect us against one lone man who isn’t just unafraid to die but willingly chases it — is a lie.

Not even suicide can save our hero.

So who is at fault for all the crimes that come out of this spree? If Halsey just shot Ryder in the truck, while Nash (Jennifer Jason Lee, looking like the gorgeous girl who surely will survive all of this madness, right?) is tied between it and another, life would be different.

Look, when a killer says, “I want you to stop me,” you listen.

Eric Red wrote this story while traveling across America, wondering about the lyrics to The Doors “Riders On the Storm.” Pretty simple, really: “If ya give this man a ride, sweet memory will die. Killer on the road, yeah.”

Critics hated it. Both Siskel and Ebert gave it zero out of four stars, with Ebert even decrying the film by saying, “I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary. But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.”

Whatever.

The end of this film, as Halsey stands against the sunset and smokes as we process what has just happened just attacks the viewer. The credits just stand there as we feel no celebration or victory. Maybe not even relief, because while it seems like this is over, there’s no way it is over.

The fact that this movie spawned a sequel and a Michael Bay remake are two things that I have added to the many things that I have tried to forget so that I can keep on living my life*. Kind of like how director Robert Harmon makes the Jesse Stone TV movies for Tom Selleck now instead of getting to create more movies like this (that said, I’ve heard good things about They, a movie he did with Wes Craven and I kind of don’t mind his Van Damme film Nowhere to Run). Red would move on to write a few other films that break the mold and are on my list of favorite films: Near Dark and Blue Steel.

The last thing that this movie makes me feel is loss. Rutger Hauer is such an essential part of my film nerd stable of actors, someone who always makes a movie way better than it seems like it will be just by his presence. Nighthawks is so intense because of him. Films like Wanted Dead or Alive, The Blood of Heroesand Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with Hauer getting to finally play the vampire lord that Anne Rice, who always wanted him as Lestat, saw him in) are actually great because of Hauer. And Blade Runner means nothing without him as Roy Batty.

Hauer astounded the stunt people in this movie, pulling off the car stunts by himself. And he also intimidated Howell, scaring him even when they weren’t acting. He even knocked out a tooth when he flew through the windshield himself. There is no one who could have played this character quite so well and stayed with me so long after the film was over.**

*The fact that René Cardona III made a Mexican version of this called Sendero Mortal does give me the energy to keep on living.  I’d also like to recommend the absolutely insane Umberto Lenzi in America  Hitcher In the Dark, which makes me wish that more Italian directors made their own versions of The Hitcher.

**Hauer said in his autobiography, All Those Moments, that Elliott “was so scary when he came in to audition that Edward S. Feldman was afraid to go out to his car afterward.”

I watched The Hitcher at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Produced by six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) and directed by John Farrelly, this is the first Irish language horror film ever made.

In 1852, during one of the worst famines in Ireland’s history, Éamon Finegan (Tom Kerrisk) and his daughter Máire (Livvy Hill) take on a caretaker role at an isolated mansion, renovating it during an unforgiving winter. I think if I’ve learned anything from horror movies, it’s never work in an large hotel or house during the winter, because there’s definitely going to be something inside the house that either possesses or tries to off you.

As he works to improve the estate, Éamon has an accident and slams his axe into his foot, leading to him having to stay in bed. Máire works on the property and takes care of him as he begins to drink and lose his grasp on reality. As she hides from his rage, she also must beware the specters that exist on the grounds. She’s been haunted before and thought she had escaped. But now, within this home and the elements beating the windows, she’s trapped all over again.

What happens when a third party, the land steward (Anthony Murphy) arrives? And is the ghost who has followed Máire for years, Alexander, real? The close of this movie, with its strobing imagery and overlapping faces, is incredible and unlike anything I’ve seen in film. If the ghost isn’t real — and Máire says that she wishes that it was — then what horror has she truly gone through?

I watched An Taibhse (The Ghost) at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Dr. Grant Walker (Mike Capes) is a paleontologist who discovered the fossilized anus of a raptor, the kind of artifact that should have made him a legend but instead was stolen by the Tyler Corporation — not run by Steven Tyler — and the depression that came with this loss cost him his girlfriend Amber (Caitlin McHugh) and now finds him working in a dinosaur theme park, attempting to teach kids about science but instead doing dances with security guard and dinosaur suit wearer Denny (David Shackelford).

Yet life is looking up. It turns out that Amber is back in town, even if she has a young daughter with a name that no one can remember. There’s also a mystery, as a child and the guard dog for the park are both missing and gigantic piles of excrement are left in their place. Dr. Grant is sure its a raptor, but then he learns that his fossil created an invisible raptor which was to be used as a weapon for the government but has escape its captivity.

The journey to find the raptor will bring Dr. Grant and Amber back together, perhaps make Dr. Grant and Denny pals for life and definitely have them digging through a pile of raptor road apples in a child’s bedroom and finding a retainer, which is a definite sign that the raptor has a sweet tooth for little kids, even if they don’t want to tell the child’s grieving, drunk and attractive mother that news. The trail leads them to a chicken farm, run by Henrietta McCluckskey (Sandy Martin), where the raptor keeps assaulting the chicken mascot statue.

How did they make this monster? The answer is simple. “‘Did you see Jurassic Park? We did that.” Yet what this hilarious movie from director Mike Hermosa and co-writers Mike Capes (yes, the same person playing the lead) and Johnny Wickham does is audacious. It’s not just a loving homage to the biggest dinosaur movie ever, it’s also the second invisible dinosaur movie after Sound of Horror.

This is set in Spielburgh County and the jokes come fast and ZAZ-style furious, even having a moment that echoes Gary Busey’s weapon-filled vehicle in Predator 2 and so many nods to Amblin productions.  Yet even in this film that laughs at nearly ever demise and is filled with copious gore, it has a heart, an appearance by Richard Riehle as the town’s sheriff and several redemption stories. And oh yeah, a Sean Astin cameo and Vanessa Chester, Ian Malcolm’s daughter Kelly in Jurassic Park: The Lost World, shows up as a DJ.

I loved it, but then again, I’m a sucker for movies that reference movies and are filled with poop jokes and gore. You can even get an action figure of the Invisible Raptor here!

I watched The Invisible Raptor at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Joanne Mitchell makes her debut as a full-length director by taking her short Sybil and creating Broken Bird. Based on a story by Tracey Sheals and written by Mitchell and Dominic Brunt, it tells several stories about loss and grief, most importantly Sybil (Rebecca Calder), an assistant undertaker who styles herself like a modern day Louise Brooks, attends open mike nights where she reads obtuse poetry and dreams of being in love with Mark (Jay Taylor), a man who works at the Roman funeral museum.

There’s also Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), who has lost her child and is drinking herself into oblivion, which starts to impact her job as a cop and keeps her from investigating her case.

Meanwhile, Sybil’s imagination runs wild, always being disappointed by real men and choosing to romance those who are dead and unable to disappoint her. Sadness has infected her whole life, as she’s the only survivor of an auto accident that killed her entire family. While strange, she’s a hard worker and prized by her boss.

Once she learns that Mark has a fiancee named Tina (Robyn Rainsford), Sybil is let down yet again. When Mark dies — maybe not an accident — she finally gets the chance to touch him, even if he’s joined the choir invisible. At the same time, Emma gets closer to where her dead son’s body disappeared from after it was at the very same funeral home where Sybil works, a place where wonders what her boss Mr. Thomas (James Fleet)(James Fleet) keeps in the cold room.

Calder is incredible in this, pulling off a balancing act that requires her to be monstrous and yet sympathetic. There are moments where you will be on her side, despite the fact that she covets a widow’s lost lover and does all she can to possess it, even dancing before him and covering his face with her panties. It’s enough to wake him up, at least in her fantasies, and maybe that’s all she needs. Maybe this world isn’t for her.

I watched Broken Bird at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

If American audiences know director Lau Kar-leung and star Gordon Liu for anything, it would be this movie. A lot of credit for that goes to the Wu-Tang Clan, who referenced it in an album title and have as many alternate names for one another as audiences do for this movie (The Master Killer, Shaolin Master Killer and Shao Lin San Shi Liu Fang).

Liu Yude (Liu) has been radicalized into the rebellion against the Manchu government, which ends when General Tien Ta destroys his school and then kills not just the students, but their friends and family as well. On the run, he goes to the Shaolin temple in the hopes of learning the fighting skills he’ll need for revenge.

As an outsider, he is turned away until the chief abbott has mercy on him. Yet a year later, Yude is now San Te and begins working his way through the 35 training chambers that each monk must complete. The top chamber is too much for our hero, where he must recite Buddhist philosophy from memory, so he begins on the bottom, amazing everyone at becoming the master of 35 of the chambers in just six years.

After numerous battles, he finally defeats one of the elders and announces that his goal is to create the new 36th chamber, one in which ordinary people will be given the skills to defend themselves. The temple officially banishes him but only does so to allow him to go back into the ordinary world and continue the revolution and stopping Tien Ta.

“The wall may be low, but the Buddha is high.” With dialogue like this, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin shows that the journey to master oneself through fighting skill is not even about the actual fighting. It is mastering emotion and going inward to better oneself. The war is often with ourselves.