Billed as a “film about memory and discovery,” Ball Lightning is about two scavengers — Addie and Sundance — Niamh O’Connor and Julie Helthaler — who harvest the parts of derelict automatons to survive.
As they explore a huge and abandoned estate, a place where junk is everywhere and automatons wander around, Addie begins to experience the life of an auto called Carlo (Ellis Hampton) and decides that she has to find him and discover what connects them.
I’m a big fan of ruined tech and cassette tape programming, so this works for me. There’s a low budget and it isn’t the most professional film you’ve ever seen, but that’s so much of the charm.
Lillian (Brianne Solis) comes back to an abandoned and fog-filled cemetery that has haunted her since childhood in an attempt to come to terms with the recent loss of her sister in this quick but gorgeous short film.
The directors The Barber Brothers (Matthew and Nathan, who also made Go Back and No One Is Coming with Solis) said that they saw this film being about “dealing with grief and the lengths at which it can take someone. The story of the titular Specter is inspired by a traditional theme in paranormal hauntings in which a ghost searches for a loved one that has long passed.”
Naming Glory — which had horror master Freddie Francis as its cinematographer — as well as The Changeling, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the visual style/ editing of 70s horror films as inspirations let me know that I need to be on the lookout for anything they make. The fact that this looked amazing and was imbued with true emotion made it all that much the better.
Director and writer Alexandra Magistro has had some high profile behind the scenes jobs, working as an assistant to Mike Flanagan on Doctor Sleep and Midnight Mass. This is his first directing and writing credit and he tackles a tale filled with darkness, as a woman tries to get past the death of her father. Trust me, this is a subject we’ve dealt with over the past year as my dad is day to day post-stroke, dealing with dementia and becoming less like my father by the day while my wife lost hers to COVID-19 right before the holidays. There are days when you feel like you want to tell them something and they will never be there again. The grief is always there, it just changes with time.
Magistro also got a great cast for this: Samantha Sloyan and Matt Biedel from Midnight Mass and Madeleine Arthur. This is not a simple story to tell, but for a first effort, it’s quite well told.
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Director and writer Jean Grant is enjoying a first directing credit after previously writing A Short Film By Shauna Lee and Birth of a Pomegranate. With help from story consultant Tom Bissell (writer of The Disaster Artist), this is the story of Rowan (Marnee Carpenter), who is searching for her missing girlfriend, who very well may be not missing, as well as dealing with a UFO that seems to be interrupting every one of her calls.
It’s short, sweet and strange, which are three perfect words for what it should be. Bonus points for a banana flask that I would drink out of every five minutes.
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Inspired by David Boone’s 1980 movie Invasion of the Aluminum People, this shot on Super 8 concerns two would-be astronauts getting ready to be part of the space race as two illuminated glasses-wearing secret men watch on as they sit before the earnest gaze of Bonzo and Reagan.
At one point, getting off Earth seemed like a good idea. Hell, it still seems like a good idea right now. And yet fifty-plus years past landing on the moon, we don’t really go back, like a theme park we saw enough of. I mean, you landed on it, planted a flag, hit a golf ball, what else can you do?
Nathaniel Hendricks also wrote a movie called Butt Fiesta, a movie in which a magic hat allows a man to have a very special episode-style flashback to the good and bad times his rear end has had. I think knowing that is reason enough for you to try this short.
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Cass (Liza Scholtz) is the sole survivor of a ship that has crashed on a much darker version of her Earth. She has no memory of who she is and how she got there, only that she has a device constantly counting down to zero as she’s chased by miscreants, scavengers and something…else.
Exo Sapien looks gorgeous and has quite the pedigree, as director and writer James C. Williamson was also the co-producer of another bonkers movie from South Africa, Fried Barry. His production company, The Department of Special Projects, is a film development and production company that specializes in auteur-driven genre films. You can learn more about them here.
This is just the first part of this story, as there’s a full-length feature being planned. I can’t wait.
You can watch the films of the Chattanooga Film Festiva for half price now until Wednesday. Get your badge right here.
Jennifer Pan’s parents left Vietnam for Canada where they toiled at Magna International, an auto parts manufacturer in Ontario, working hard at car part manufacturing so that their children would have a much better life than they did.
They were also incredibly strict and had extremely high expectations. Jennifer was already training to be an Olympic-level figure skater and concert pianist by the age of 4. Jennifer was dropped off at school and picked up, monitored even when not home and not allowed to date boys or go to school dances. By the time she was 22, she had never been drunk, never gone on vacation without her family and never even been to a club.
All along, her parents thought that she had good grades. The truth was, other than music, she was a C-average student. To get around that, she continually forged her report cards and she even secretly taught piano and worked in a restaurant to earn money that she told them was a scholarship for her to study in the pharmacology program at the University of Toronto. She even bought textbooks and faked notes from YouTube classes to further allow her parents to think she was in school.
The truth? She was living with her mixed heritage — a big issue with her family — marijuana dealing and Boston Pizza-employee boyfriend. Her parents eventually found out when the deceptions grew too big to explain and it was discovered that she never even graduated high school. She was forced to break up with the guy, who got a new and younger girlfriend, and she went off the deep end, claiming that he had hired a gang of men to assault her and she was mailed one bullet by her lover’s new girlfriend.
After trying to pay a goth kid to kill her parents, she got back with the old boyfriend and they spent $10,000 to hire real hitmen to kill mom and dad, knowing that she’d get $500,000 in the will. That’s what we call business sense. Well, the killers did get her mother, but her father survived and when the case fell apart, she was convicted for 25 years in jail, never permitted to contact her family or lover again.
That story inspired Munkie, in which Stephen Chow directs the tale of Rose (Xana Tang), a young woman rebelling against her tiger parents. And by that, I mean paying to get them killed. Yet in the way that the film is made, you feel for her and understand perhaps what drove her to this point. You still understand that she’s not a good person, but again, she didn’t get to this point by herself.
You can watch the film here:
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Director and writer Alexandra Pechman (who wrote an episode of the lamented Channel Zero, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”) has an audacious idea here: film Kate Adams (who was also in her film Thumb) for nearly four minutes in the same unmoving shot as she loses her mind at the sound of home invaders just feet away from her.
Bonus — many bonus — points given for ending this as a variation of the urban legend of the licking dog, yet adding plenty more to that tale. No spoilers — this is an inspired film that truly could only work as a short. Well done.
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With just 7 minutes and $6,000 in the budget to tell the story, Douglas Wicker (Bang the Drum: The Life & Death of a Small Town Music Scene, Bad People) deals with a family’s trauma by way of mysterious creatures that they’re been worrying about since grandfather first saw them fifty years ago. Now, it seems as if those things — whatever they are — have returned.
The best part of seeing this as part of the Chattanooga Film Festival was getting to see Wicker interact and explain more of the film, including behind-the-scenes shots. He said that the film is “a love letter to films with amazing folklore and creature biologists like Alien and Pumpkinhead, but also channeling a lot of emotional conflict and concepts I’ve struggled with in my life.”
He also discussed how the run time didn’t allow him to do all that he wanted to do, as he saw the first act as the setup, the second as a rescue mission and the third as a full-blown siege film. I’d love to see him expand this story and get to make this as a larger and longer film, because what is in this short has enough for three movies worth of effects-driven horror.
You can get a back half half price badge to watch all of the awesome movies at the Chattanooga Film Festival and see them until 6/29! Get yours right here!
If you told me that a movie about a man struggling to sell the last three trees out of his lot on Christmas Eve would be one of the best films that I saw at a festival, well, I probably would have laughed. And then probably asked you to show me this magical movie.
I’m so glad that I watched the story of Bernie Davis, a Christmas tree salesman fueling his night with hard sell tactics and no small amount of Jack Daniels served into a coffee cup.
John R. Smith Jnr, who plays Bernie, is beyond fantastic, feeling like he’s lived these cold nights waiting for customers to rid him of the trees that he’s tended to for an entire year. He’s all carnie on the outside and frazzled neurotic on the inside, a man trapped by life to live in a trailer and keep selling these trees every year for some dark reason that we can never, ever know.
Kyle Kutcha also made Survival of the Film Freaks and Fantasm, a movie about the importance of horror conventions. He’s made something great here, a film that focuses its lens nearly throughout on Bernie and finds sad, hilarious, frightening and finally resigned moments in his very strange life.
You can get a back half half price badge to watch all of the awesome movies at the Chattanooga Film Festival and see them until 6/29! Get yours right here!
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