June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 200s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
“Through analysis of thousands of recorded gunfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically-predictable element. The gun kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically-traditional trajectories of return fire. By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120 percent. The difference of a 63 percent increased lethal proficiency makes the master of the gun katas an adversary not to be taken lightly.”
If a movie has dialogue like this, I’m going to love it.
After World War III, the survivors founded the totalitarian nation of Libria, a place that outlaws all emotion, forces the population to take the emotion-suppressing drug called Prozium II and hunts down anyone who goes against this, labeling them Sense Offenders, who are soon hunted by the Grammaton Clerics. When they show up, you’re dead, and they’re also going to destroy any art, music or books you have before shooting you a thousand times.
Yet Libria, the its leader, Father (Sean Pertwee) and the Tetragrammaton Council are being challenged by the Underground.
John Preston (Christian Bale) is one of the clerics and he’s a single father after his wife was killed for being a Sense Offender. When his partner Errol Partridge (Sean Bean) saves a book of poems and takes them to the Nether — you know, the Cursed Earth or the Forbidden Zone — to read, he tells Preston that now that he has felt emotion, he can die. So Preston kills him.
The poem that he reads is “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats. Here’s the poem: “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
His new partner, Andrew Brandt (Taye Diggs), looks up to him. Yet since killing his partner, Preston has stopped taking the drugs and spares a Sense Offender, Mary O’Brien (Emily Watson). He soon meets the leader of the Underground, Jurgen (William Fichter), who convinces him that he must kill Father. At the same time, he’s also been charged with finding a conspiracy within the clerics by Vice-Counsel DuPont (Angus Macfadyen).
When O’Brien is terminated, he has an emotional breakdown and is arrested by his partner. He soon learns that DuPont is the new Father, having started a new group within the Tetragrammaton Council of those who don’t take the drugs either. As you can imagine, this leads our hero to killing everyone he can with a sword and guns. It’s why you came and saw this movie. I mean, the hero kills 118 people in this movie.
Equilibrium was produced by Jan de Bont’s production company, Blue Tulip Productions. The budget was covered by tax incentives thanks to de Bont’s Dutch citizenship and the international sales paid for this movie’s budget. So when critics didn’t like it and it only had a limited release, it didn’t matter.
When he was told about those reviews, director Kurt Wimmer said, “Why would I make a movie for someone I wouldn’t want to hang out with? Have you ever met a critic who you wanted to party with? I haven’t.”
This movie has been forgotten but I’d love if more people watched it. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from other literature, but it also has warrior monks who have guns that form the logo of their country when they fire them and it takes place in some side future that looks like a gothic world.
June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 2000s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Kurt Wimmer directed the Brian Bosworth movie One Tough Bastard and wrote the remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair and Sphere before he directed Equilibrium, the first movie of his I took notice of. He created a style of fighting, Gun Kata, for the film and it just stands out from so many of the 2000s science fiction action movies. I was beyond excited for Ultraviolet, but wow it had so many problems that I was sure I’d never see it.
Shot digitally on high-definition video, this movie was Wimmer’s attempt at making a comic book movie. There are even tons of Ultraviolet comic covers to give the idea that we’re in the middle of a much longer story. The basic idea is sometime in the near-future, a super soldier experiment leads to the creation of hemophages, vampiric humans that are stronger and smarter than normal humans. Like mutants…keep that in mind.
The war between humans and vampires leads to the end of civilization. There is now only the ArchMinistry, a powerful corporation and joint world government. There’s a resistance that is fighting back and one of their soldiers is Violet Song Jat Shariff (Milla Jovovich). Her latest mission is to break into a blood bank and steal a weapon that can kill her kind. It ends up being a child named Six (Cameron Bright) who is a clone of Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund) and filled with a virus that can destroy the hemophages. Despite this, Violet is sentimental and allows him to live despite hating all of humanity.
By the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Daxus and the hemophages are working together to create a new virus that will allow them to control even more of the world. William Fichtner also shows up and if I ever make a movie, that guy has to be in it.
Not a lot of it makes sense, but really, we’re here to watch large battles and gun fights. In the post Matrix world, everyone was making movies like this. I just happen to like this one because, well, it’s fun. Who cares that Six spends most of the movie living in a briefcase? Do I need to know motivations? Rotten Tomatoes said, “An incomprehensible and forgettable sci-fi thriller, Ultraviolet is inept in every regard.”
Um…this is a movie where you watch Milla Jovovich in various cool outfits, she has color changing hair and she shoots a whole bunch of religious zealots when she isn’t racing around on a motorcycle. I mean, you tell me that’s what I’m going to see and I’m going to see it.
Anyways…
Wimmer and Jovovich were locked out of the edit by Sony, who said that the movie was too emotional and it needed to be PG-13. They cut it from 120 minutes to 88 minutes. Because of this, the visual effects are visibly unfinished and use incomplete temp-renders that were never meant to be seen outside of the editing room.
Everywhere in the world, this didn’t do well. Well, Japan loved it. They even made an anime sequel, Ultraviolet: Code 044.
In the very same year, Cameron Bright played Leech in X-Men: The Last Stand. His role is to cure mutants, which is just like this movie. He would play a vampire again once he got older. He’s Volturi vampire Alec in Twilight New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn Part 2.
An aside: Gun Kata was taken from Gun Fu. Wikipedia refers to it as a “style of sophisticated close-quarters gunfight resembling a martial arts combat that combines firearms with hand-to-hand combat and traditional melee weapons in an approximately 50/50 ratio.” This martial art first shows up in A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo, and gives guns the same style that open hand combat and wuxia movies had within Hong Kong cinema. In the 1990s, it came to America in movies like Desperado, The Replacement Killers (which had Woo’s star Chow Yun-fat in it) and The Matrix. Today, John Wick has taken Gun Fu as far as it can go, but in 2002, Wimmer would use it in Equilibrium.
After the failure of this movie, Wimmer didn’t direct for years until he made Children of the Corn. While he was recovering from this, he wrote Street Kings, Law Abiding Citizen, Salt, the remakes of Total Recall and Point Break, Spell, The Misfits, Expend4bles and The Beekeeper. I hope he gets the opportunity to make another movie and prove his talent to his detractors.
Wild Zero is not a movie. It is an experience, an in your face, melt your brain piece of pure crazy. The kind that makes my wife say, “Do we really own this?”
Yes. We do. I’m going to buy it again just to have it twice.
Ace is our hero, Guitar Wolf’s biggest fan. After he saves the band from a tense standoff with The Captain, an evil music executive, he becomes blood brothers with Guitar Wolf himself (the other members are Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf) and receives a signal whistle for whenever he is in trouble.
Guitar Wolf is so great that flames come out of their mic stands and they blast the crowd with lightning when they play. They sound like fuzz and noise and menace. They are everything perfect about rock and roll.
On his journey to the next Guitar Wolf show, Ace meets Tobio, a Thai stranger on the run. He saves her from a robbery then leaves, but on the road he encounters zombies. Realizing that he’s in love — and inspired by the spirit of Guitar Wolf — he goes back to save her.
There’s a lot of other shit that happens. The Captain comes back to fight Guitar Wolf with a grenade launcher (which Guitar Wolf shrugs off, only pausing to tune his guitar). There are zombie fights galore. Many, many heads explode. A naked military girl kills zombies from her shower. Oh yeah — and Ace finds out that Tobio is really a guy, a fact that this movie celebrates. Yes — instead of making jokes, the spirit of Guitar Wolf tells Ace that “Love has no borders, nationalities or genders! DO IT!” Keep in mind this movie was made nearly twenty years ago, so this is pretty amazing.
Everyone finds love. Ace and Tobio find it. Two kids find it even after becoming zombies. Guitar Wolf and his bandmates find it for rock, roll and beer.
Oh yeah and Guitar Wolf plays Link Wray’s “Rumble,” then takes the headstock off his guitar and cuts a UFO in half.
I can’t say anything else. If that sentence doesn’t make you watch this movie, you are dead to me.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
I say it with every movie he releases, but Chris Stokes is the best creator of all of the Tubi Originals.
When I saw Rock the Boat last year, I wrote that it had “an ending that teases a sequel that knowing Stokes, Houston and Tubi that I feel sure that we will receive.”
He did not do me wrong.
After the end of the last movie — in which not only a boat blows up but there’s a car crash that gets replayed many times in this — Millie Barnes (Parker McKenna) has lost her memory and has nightmares of whatever happened in the past.
This doesn’t waste any time being a remix of I Know What You Did Last Summer, as Channel (Janina Gordillo) and Sommer (Iyana Halley) go over what happened in the first film, only to end with Sommer going to work at a dive bar — despite being a rich girl — and Channel opening a pizza with a sinister note before she’s murdered.
Millie works in marketing along with Halle (Katlynn Simone) who seems to take a sisterly interest in her. Keep that in mind. Millie is being constantly questioned by Detectives Jacobs (Jarell Houston) and Daniels (Judi Johnson), wondering what has happened to her boyfriend Kaleb (Marc John Jeffries) and how his father Mr. Weber may have be behind not just what happened on the boat but he also may have murdered Millie’s parents Eric and Tracy.
To get away from it all, Millie decides to go visit her grandmother Paula (Loretta Devine), who is probably the most important citizen in her beach town. Despite being told that this is party central, no one is here, the club is closed — other than a bartender, Captain Keller (Steven Littles) and Paula’s servant Greg (Dwight Boyce) — and things are dead. It’s like this movie skipped right to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer as Halle, Millie, Durell (Ozie Nzeribe), Sophia (Zonnique) and Todd (Justin Sweat) all get notes letting them know that someone knows what they’ve done.
Oh man, how can you even explain what happens next? There are multiple secret siblings, an aunt named Olga (Carnetta Jones) who can do the Get Out spoon hypnosis to people, a grandmother who goes completely mental and another ending that promises another movie as this ends with Detective Jacobs (Jarell Houston) saying he has people in Miami and Millie brainwashed yet again as Olga does the mental magic and her grandmother laughs for a full minute.
To Chris Stokes and his co-writer Marques Houston, please hurry with the next one. And if The Stepmother is in it too and you build to an Avengers: Endgame of your many Tubi Originals, you will make me more than overjoyed.
I’m a huge fan of John Russo, so when I learned that a documentary of his life was getting made — thanks to director James Harland Lockhart V — I was worried. Would someone love Russo and his contributions to horror as much as me? Would they treat him either too reverently or like too much of a joke? To be honest, I didn’t get to watch this as soon as I should have and I made a big mistake.
Because it’s really great.
It helps that Russo wrote this and basically it’s an on camera interview of him discussing his career. That way, we get it unfiltered, with him explaining what it was like to be one of the creators of Night of the Living Dead and work with the mythic cast and crew. From the actual filming to him wanting to go to court and sue the Walter Reade Organization for the money they stole from the filmmakers, it’s a passionate section of this movie, just as you would hope that it would be.
As a Pittsburgher, I also love that he went to Oyster Bar owner Louis J. Grippo as his counsel.
I’ve seen a few reviews on Letterboxd making light of the fact that this movie spends twenty minutes on Night of the Living Deadand then moves on to Russo’s other movies. Look, I love that movie. I own so many copies of it, I grew up minutes from the cemetery and I’ve watched it more times than I can even count. But everyone knows just about everything there is, down to the fact that Russo, Bill Hinzman and Gary Streiner were both set on fire making the movie.
What we don’t know is about Russo’s other films.
There’s some dirt on Return of the Living Deadand how Romero and Russo couldn’t agree on the sequel they had planned. The compromise was that Russo would get “Living Dead” for his titles and Romero would own “of the Dead.” That said, due to mistakes in how the original movie was retitled, it was already all in the public domain. Throughout, however, Russo speaks glowingly of Romero but not of Dawn of the Dead producer Richard P. Rubinstein.
Ass one of the biggest fans of Midnight and The Majorettes, so getting to hear behind the scenes info — much less learn the alternate British title of the latter is One by One because they have no idea what majorettes are overseas — is exactly why I’m watching this.
He also discusses how difficult it was to work with 21st Century on the remake of Night without mentioning Menahem Golan. I was concerned with how he’d discuss working with Karl Hardman, Hinzman and Streiner on the poorly received 30th anniversary remix, much less Children of the Dead, a film that he is very honest about. That movie is shot near the biggest swingers club in miles and you can see the bowling alley my uncle played league games in while zombies are eating people.
When I was in my late teens, I was obsessed with seeing Heartstopper. It’s on this! Santa Claws? You know it. For a Russo superfan like me — who has a signed Midnight poster in a place of honor in my movie room, despite being stained with coffee from Russo’s mug — you can’t believe how exciting this all is, even if it misses out on things like Midnight 2, his Scream Queens softcore magazine, Monster Makeup, Horror Rock, Horror Effects with Tom Savini, Scream Queens’ Naked Christmas and Zombie Jamboree: The 25th Anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, which is nearly a home movie of Russo walking around the old Monroeville Expo Mart during a convention. But I realize that my mania will go deep and want to know such minutiae when others just want to hear about his first movie.
I mean, seeing the Calgon commercials — I grew up near the plant — and hearing Russo discuss them is why I’m going to watch this again.
There have been some discussions about the audio quality of this but I didn’t notice. I watch everything with close captions, so I had no issues. Then again, this is the kind of material that I’m going to pay close attention to. So yes, I may not be the most unbiased of reviewers on this — I feel like this was made for me — but if you have even the slightest interest in one of the most important American horror films ever made and the man who helped make it, this is well worth you taking the time to see this documentary.
You can watch this on Tubi or buy the DVD/blu ray here.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!”
You know how I always say, “They could have stopped making movies after this?” This is the movie at the center of my argument. I really don’t know how any movie gets any better than this, unless Russ Meyer is directing it.
The three worst women you’ve ever met — and also the finest — finish their dance routines at a club and then head out to the California desert where they race their car and verbally abuse one another. They are Billie (Laurie Williams), Rosie (Haji) and Varla (Tura Satana, perhaps the finest thing Satan ever made for the Lord). They follow that up by sizing up the guy mansplaining things to his girl and snap his neck before drugging his woman, Linda (Susan Bernard).
Stopping to fill up, they learn that a wheelchair-bound man and his feebleminded son are literally sitting on a treasure. So they do what you or I would do — manipulate, manhandled and murder everyone in their way.
Originally known as The Leather Girlsand then The Mankillers, this isn’t a movie as much as a religion to me. No less a cultural giant as John Waters said, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”
Tura Satana is the kind of woman that if she wasn’t born, we would have created her and made her into a goddess. There have been many pretenders to her throne, but none will ever ascend it.
Seriously, I wore the t-shirt of this movie for most of the 90s before it fell apart. If you dislike this movie, we can never, ever be friends.
This played in person at CFF. You can watch so many of the movies online by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posted reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
After her mother dies, Inga (former ballet dancer Marie Liljedahl, who really hit the trifecta of late sixties sleaze being in this Joe Sarno movie and its sequel The Seduction of Inga, Massimo Dallamano’s Dorian Gray and Jess Franco’s Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion; she retired from acting by the time she was 21) goes to live with her aunt Greta (Monica Strömmerstedt), who only wants to set her up with a rich older man named Einar (Thomas Ungewitter) and make money off of her. Yet once Inga meets Karl (Casten Lassen) — her aunt’s younger lover — she runs from this rich world of decadence.
In November of 1969, the police busted into the Dakota Theater in Grand Forks, ND and arrested the manager and the projectionist, charging them with running an obscene film. They were found not guilty, which was a major step toward legally showing pornography.
That said — this is quite tame by today’s standards. And it’s filled with so much story and emotional content, it’s hard to compare it to what pornography has become.
There’s a gorgeous scene in the beginning of this as Inga, nude but for a diaphanous nightgown, takes a series of wind-up toys and lets them race across the floor in front of her. Inga continues to return to these toys as her sexuality is awakened and her innocence left behind.
The film is just as much about Greta, a gorgeous yet aging woman clinging to her youth by dating increasingly younger men which comes with it a price: these young men need money to stay around, not love or sex.
Sometimes, the feeling of sin is better than the sin itself.
Named in honor of the wild collections of short genre fiction curated by the luminary author Harlan Ellison, CFF’s Dangerous Visions block has long been the dark heart of their short film program each year, and this year, there were too many fantastic horror and sci-fi shorts for a single block to contain them so they’ve expanded things to include our virtual SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE DANGEROUS VISIONS block. No summer spent at Camp CFF is complete without the heaping helping of HOLY SHIT that are these two blocks!
13th Night (2024): Directed by Benjamin Percy, this is a film all about the lengths a father will undertake to save his daughter, who has become ill with a chronic condition. It starts with the subtitle “sounds of murder” and we see a man taking a Polaroid photo of someone he has killed via s shovel to the throat before cutting to the title.
The long haired man who did the killing comes home to his daughter, asleep in bed as cartoons play on the TV. He has a massive arsenal of bladed weapons, just as she has an array of prescriptions near her nightlight. He falls asleep after drinking — and checking the locks to the basement — before discovering that all of the locks have been removed. A strange man in a suit and American tie appears, says “Hello, Jacob. It’s time.” He passes the demonic figure the Polaroid of his last murder and is told on the 13th of the next month, he must kill again. The always smiling man passes pills to him and tells Jacob that he didn’t promise a cure for his daughter, but he did tell her that she will have a heartbeat. However, their arrangement can end tonight if he wants his daughter to die.
Then, the demon appears to his daughter and Jacob knows that he’s stuck in this arrangement.
This short has some confident camera work, gorgeous lighting and really solid sound design. In fact, I’d love to see this become a full length feature, as it feels like there’s so much more of the story to tell. You can learn more on the official site.
Butterscotch (2023): A young boy (Reid McConville) spends several moments in a nursing home tormenting a man (Clifford Deeds) who obviously can’t move and may not be aware of what is happening around him. As the child whistles and waves in front of his face, we notice that the entire room is blue and the only other color is provided by the comic book red hue of the kid’s hair. He steals a piece of butterscotch candy from the man — I’ve often heard only old people like this candy, so I must have been old my whole life — and then notices that the senior citizen is sticking his tongue out at him and bugging his eyes. I won’t spoil what happens next in director Alexander Lee Deeds’ short but sometimes, people get what they deserve.
Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded (2023): Kyle Garrett Greenberg and Anna Maguire directed and wrote this short, which stars Maguire. She plays Anna, who is visiting a new lover in Los Angeles. We notice that her kitchen has wine and weed, which she uses before she goes out the door and talks on the phone with a friend, discussing how easy it is to get lost here, how everything feels so extra. Before too long, all the neighborhood watch signs seem to come alive and the idea that everyone is filming her becomes too much to bear. This takes the horror in the mundane, the everyday and shows how we can feel like an alien within our own world, even if it’s just in a different city. I once got lost in Tokyo trying to make a pay phone call and couldn’t remember which of the many similar apartment buildings my friend lived in. I just wandered the streets until he found me and he just laughed. This is sort of like that and kind of like how I tried to take a video of a cute dog last week to show my wife and a neighbor — with faith over fear and Trump flags all over her house — came out and accused me to potentially stealing her dog. Have you ever tried to steal a chihuahua?
Let’s Go Disco (2024): Austin Lewis, along with writers Jake Gates Smith, Alexis Stier and Megan Stier created this tale of a woman trapped inside, you guessed it, a disco. The colors as if they’re living in a Mario Bava nightmare and the pulsing beat was enough to set my dog barking. Fog fills the air as the disco ball spins and soon, she finds her way to a table of people who know her but she has no clue who they are. She overhears stories of people getting killed by an axe murderer as laughter fills the soundtrack and even drinks being delivered feel sinister. The cab ride home is no escape either and she comes back all over again, as the girls become more violent with her, saying that she’s going to stay there and do whatever they say.
Wow. Just wow. This movie knocked me out. You have to see it whenever you get the opportunity because it looks and plays perfect, getting more done in its 12 minute run time than any film that I’ve seen go over two hours. If you’ve ever felt trapped in public, this will make your hands shake as much as it did mine. Also: So much screaming.
Accidental Stars (2024): Aspiring actress Nerissa (Madeleine Charmaine Morrell) has been attending David’s (Kyle Minshew) acting class as part of her dream of being a star. But it’s not enough and if she wants to have him love her work, she needs to be part of his private lessons. Yet all the pressure is seemingly too much for her. After all, this starts with the T.S. Elliot line from Hysteria, “As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.”
Directed and written by Emily Bennett, this makes the experience of acting feel like being a captive. I wonder if that’s what it’s like. I’ve found that being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life, so maybe dreams kind of come true, even if you’re not ready for what they are.
Maybe I’m glad I never became an actor.
The Influencer (2023): Director and writer Lael Rogers has made a tale of a social media influencer whose dream day is being able to harvest the eyes and minds of her followers as she reaches for immortality. I mean, all those numbers on the live stream have to go somewhere.
This not only embodies the influencer characters that the characters — Ivy (Deisy Patiño), Shea (Laura Hetherington) and Madison (Mackenzie Wynn) — are all about, but the film effortlessly makes the switch over to horror with no issues, as the true influencer (Bria Condon) rises from the sea and guides the women to the sea.
Now I understand why”You all give me life” sounds so horrifying.
Pitstop (2024): A prisoner, Quinn (Emily Sweet) and a guard, Hannah (Mary Rose Branick) are stranded and out of gas. I’d say this only happens in movies, but it used to happen to my in laws all the time. The dialogue suggests that the world they live in is split between a walled-off city run by the government and a resistance who lives outside the walls. Quinn tries to reach out to Hannah and explain what she believes to be the truth, but she refuses to listen.
Quinn has been playing with a paperclip and is able to unlock her handcuffs, which causes the two to fight. As Hannah discharges her weapon, they hear a growl which belongs to a creature (Deryk Wehrley) that can embody your worst fear. Somehow, this brings the two closer or at least able to talk to one another. I really liked how director and writer David A. Flores has put together this story and I’d love to see where these two characters go next.
Souling (2023): An unsuspecting woman (Jacquelyn Ferguson, who also directed and wrote this with Jason Anders, who is one of the disturbing people who gather) finds herself at the center of an ancient Pagan tradition when she was just trying to take a bubble bath.
According to the filmmakers, this modern-day folk tale was inspired by a medieval practice that led to trick-or-treating. There’s a banquet put in front of the woman, who stares at the sack masked faces of those who have sat around her table, finally grabbing fistfuls of food and devouring it before enlightenment arrives.
While I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I did learn that Souling was done during Allhallowtide and Christmastide. It included eating soul cakes (“sets of square farthing cakes with currants in the centre”) singing, carrying lanterns, wearing a costume, setting bonfires, playing divination games (including one that has been slightly altered to become bobbing for apples), carrying a horse’s head around and performances.
I kind of want to try Souling now.
The Thaw (2023): In 19th century Vermont, a young woman named Ruth (Emily Bennett) watches as her parents Alma (Toby Poser) and Timothy (Jeffrey Grover) drink sleeping tea in order to survive the harsh winter. They can only be awakened in the spring and she will be left alone, allowed to slaughter the sheep if she needs to. However, seeing as how this is a New England folk horror story, things don’t work out as they planned as there’s an early thaw.
Directed and written by Sean Temple and Sarah Wisner, this finds Ruth in this situation because her husband has returned her to her family. She speaks to her mother and cries, “He said I wasn‘t worth the cost of my keep.” Men are uniformly horrible to women in this, blamed for everything, including making the tea incorrectly, which keeps Alma asleep as if she were dead. Now, Timothy is filled with a hunger that can’t end and as they run out of canned and live food, he may start turning his eye to the living. Or, in the case of Alma, the asleep.
Filmed in black and white, this is stunning. Its monotone look and setting will remind some of Robert Eggers, but this can definitely stand on its own. In fact, it deserves to be its own full length feature.
Dream Creep (2023): David (Ian Edlund) and Suzy (Sidney Jayne Hunt) are asleep when she wakes him up. Someone is in their room and wants to attack her. However, they soon learn that the sounds that she hears are coming from inside her ear. The voice soon tells him that if he wakes her up, she’ll die. Well, what happens if she stays asleep?
Director and writer Carlos A.F. Lopez does so much with sound design and pacing in this. This is the kind of movie that you’ll wake up and think about as you watch your partner sleeps and hope that you never go through the horrific moments that these two do. It saves the grisly parts for the close but don’t worry. They’re coming.
You can watch so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
New Line was doing so well with Freddy that they thought that they could do the same with Leatherface, not realizing that while he’s the most out front member of the Sawyer Family, there is an entire brood to tell the stories about.
The final film to get an X before NC-17 was created, I will say that this movie brings the gore, even after the battle between the MPAA and New Line. I mean, the movie starts off with Leatherface taking off a woman’s face, so know what you’re getting into. Yet this was submitted eleven times for a review and most of the gore was lost; this was after the original script by David J. Schow (who also wrote the scripts for The Crow, Critters 3 and 4 and many other movies) had a naked man being literally sliced into two pieces. I assume the MPAA had more issues with seeing a nude man than the gore.
The original trailer for this might be better than the actual movie — that’s Kane Hodder as Leatherface! — but you can’t deny a movie that has Ken Foree and Viggo Mortensen in the cast. And hey — Caroline Williams shows up in a cameo as Stretch, now a reporter.
This starts off going for it, as Leatherface kills a woman and skins her face for a mask while her sister Sara (Toni Hudson, Denise in Just One of the Guys) watches. We then meet Michelle (Kate Hodge), Ryan (William Butler) and Benny (Foree), who will be menaced by this film’s version of the Sawyer family, which includes Edward “Tex” Sawyer (Viggo Mortensen), Tinker “Tink” Sawyer (Jow Unger), “Mama” Anne Sawyer (Miriam Byrd-Nethery), Alfredo Sawyer (Tom Everett) and a little girl (Jennifer Banko).
Before long, Leatherface has killed Sara — after murdering her entire family — and caught Ryan in a bear trap. Michelle is taken into the Sawyer home and saved only when Benny shoots like ten thousand bullets into it, but hey, we still have Leatherface with a golden chainsaw that has “The saw is family written on it.
Burr wanted to shoot the film in Texas using 16 mm film just like the original, but New Line turned him down, as they had already built the house in California. I mean, they also shot that trailer before they had a script or a director, so all they cared about was money. That same house was used in Alice Cooper’s “House Of Fire” video. They also wanted Peter Jackson to direct.
Benny and Leatherface both died in the original cut, but New Line shot a new ending with editor Michael N. Knue in which both characters survive after test screenings replied well to Foree’s character. Burr was shocked when he saw this in the movies, as he was never told there was a new ending.
This was also shot so close to a Six Flags that you can hear screaming all over the movie even when it may not need it.
This was cut to pieces — and not like how the Sawyers want to slice things up — to avoid an X rating. That’s why it had to be exciting to see Jeff Burr’s work print of this at CFF.
Speaking of the fest, you can watch so many of films by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
This film was described as “An exploration of one’s relationships with food, sexuality, and revenge.”
Director and writer Aimee Kuge wrote this movie while experiencing a period of disordered eating and the end of toxic relationships. That led to a movie about an introverted nerd — Mark — who finds himself dangerously deep inside the crazy world of mukbanging after he falls head over heels for a mysterious woman named Ash. She’s super into mukbanging so he finds himself getting into it.
Also: Murder.
What is mukbanging?
The term is from South Korean and means “eating broadcast.” There, professional mukbangers make up to $10,000 a month not including sponsorships from food and drink brands. Basically, they eat huge amounts of food while interacting with their viewers.
Cannibal Mukbang is one strange movie and it looks really gorgeous. I’m excited to see what Kuge does next.
You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.