Directed by Jay Oliva and written by Heath Corson, the nineteenth film of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies and the second film in the DC Animated Movie Universe is based on the New 52 Justice League series by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee.

This is the original of the Justice League — Superman (Alan Tudyk), Batman (Jason O’Mara), Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan), Flash (Christopher Gorham), Green Lantern (Justin Kirk), Cyborg (Shemar Moore) and Shazam (Sean Astin and Zach Callison) — as they battle the forces of Darkseid (Steve Blum). These are new and younger heroes than you may be used to with Batman seemingly the lone adult teaching them how to work together and use their powers.

The New 52 may be gone but this cartoon formed the start of the new DC Animated Universe, followed by Son of Batman and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis. The kid in me is happy to see so much of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World in animated form, including Desaad and the Parademons.

You can watch this on Tubi.

After the death of his twin brother, Dante (Luis Machín) starts to become fearful of death, unable to deal with the thought of it, which comes up quite often, seeing as how his wife Beatriz (Julieta Cardinali) also dies. That’s when he starts having hallucinations and starts to experience multiple versions of himself. As Dante is a tailor, there are a lot of mannequins as well, which allows this to be painted with the yellow tones of a giallo brush, helped by the masked and gloved killer who keeps murdering everyone around our protagonist.

Director and writer Daniel de la Vega has nearly too many ideas here with multiple duplicates and even time travel and scenes we’ve seen before repeated later and then shown how they impact the film. Sometimes when you shoot for the moon, you explode on the launchpad.

The good parts: the visuals look great, the Claudio Simonetti score helps and the 3D technique is more about depth than throwing things at you. It’s also nice to see a good budget for a horror film from Argentina.

The bad: Near the end — massive spoiler — Dante must choose between sawing off his own hand to escape or dying. He chooses to hack himself to bits except, you know, he’s in a wood chair. I’m all for giallo asking a lot and making you make narrative leaps, but sometimes, a bridge can be too far. Also: Dante has necrophobia, a fear of being around dead bodies. Isn’t nearly everyone?

Directed and written by Stewart Thorndike, this is about Leah (Gaby Hoffman) and her girlfriend June (Ingrid Jungermann) have fallen in love with a New York City apartment building and that love — just like whatever once existed between them — seems to fade after the sudden death of their young daughter Lyle (Eleanor Hopkins). Soon, Leah is nearly left to deal with her rush of paranoid feelings, particularly her belief that the landlady Karen (Rebecca Street) is behind multiple child sacrifices. Karen also pretends to be pregnant, even if she’s much too old for it.

Coming after Rosemary’s Baby but before the Q-Anon and Pizzagate stories of Democrats drinking the blood of babies — even if that came from a long tradition of antisemitic stories — and five years before the occult-rich The Scary of Sixty First, And hey — there’s Michael Che!

This movie is 65 minutes long, a length that all movies should aim for. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t a slow burn that gets agonizing and shows you that Gaby Hoffman is a long way from Uncle Buck.

I have had times in my life where my belief that everyone is out to get me has been proven correct and this movie reminded me of the sheer rush of sweat and terror when people are unmasked.

Is it easier to accept that a Satanic cult is all around you than the fact that your child has died as the result of a whim of fate? Your answer to this question will tell you how much you understand the crutch that conspiracy has become.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The effects for The Evil Dead were created by Tom Sullivan. He’d been friends since college with Sam Raimi,  Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert. This movie tells the story, including Super 8mm film footage, Hi8, VHS and vintage audio tapes and photographs. Beyond all this behind the scenes footage, you also get location visits and interviews with Campbell, Ted Raimi, Josh Becker, Danny Hicks, Hal Delrich, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly and more.

Beyond his work on that movie, Sullivan also worked on the Call of Cthulu games and shows off plenty of his incredible art. The tours — what is left of the original cabin, the cellar, the home where everyone lived and the theater where it premiered — are also really great.

The Synapse blu ray release of this movie also has Other Men’s Careers, which is about Josh Becker, a vintage Tom Savini interview, two of Ryan Meade’s short movies Bong Fly and Cosmos Lovos, extended interviews and new slipcover art by Joel Robinson. You can get it from MVD.

Made in 2014, How to Save Us prefigures the last few years of our reality by being about Brian Everett (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his younger brother Sam (Coy Jandreau) during the middle of a mysterious quarantine. When Sam goes missing in Tasmania, Brian has to travel there to save his brother.

In the world of this movie, Tasmania is filled with the spirits of its many dead souls, so Brian must cover himself in the ashes of the dead to move amongst them. After his sister Molly (Tallay Wickham) asks him to search for their missing sibling, she givcs him Sam’s notebook, which has the title of this movie scrawled on the cover.

There are some big ideas here, with the entities being heard on the radio, Brian dealing with the loss of both of his parents and the fact that electricity can stop the dead, which means that a Nintendo Power Glove can become a weapon. Despite the addition of that nostalgic game gear, this movie has a darker edge than Trost’s The FP series.

When I got the chance to speak with Jason Trost, we discussed the end of the world that we’ve been living through. When discussing the actual pandemic, he said “You sit there and watch it outside and it’s like the laziest zombie apocalypse ever. (laughs) None of these movies really prepare you for it, because it was very tame in comparison to what we’ve watched. I think we’ve all been built up towards something and what we got wasn’t Mad Max.”

I really enjoyed the dark world that this movie shares and how it’s characters only speak through voiceover. It’s a way different film for Jason Trost and I enjoyed its challenges to the viewer.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 9: Easter Sunday – You don’t have to believe to watch and share a religious movie.

I saw Jerusalem Countdown but in no way was I prepared for Harold Cronk’s God’s Not Dead, a movie that I’ve been considering over and over, deciding what to write about it.

Written by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, who were inspired by Rice Broocks’ book God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty, this feels like the kind of echo chamber afforded by cable news and self-owned social media networks. I always wonder how white upper middle class Americans constantly can feel like they’re under assault and people are trying to destroy their way of life when they continually win.

Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper) went to college to be a lawyer, but the school he chose was the third choice of his girlfriend Kara (Cassidy Gifford, yes, the daughter of Frank and Kathie Lee). That said, she’s planned their whole life together. What she was not ready for was the class of atheist philosophy Professor Jeffrey Radisson (Kevin Sorbo), who makes all of his students sign a paper claiming that God is dead. Josh disagrees and begins a movie-length battle with his teacher who acts as no instructor ever before, going all in to hate the Lord and his believer Josh. Their final debate ends when Josh asks Radisson why he hates God so much, to which the man replies, “He killed my mom,” and instead of reacting with empathy, Josh says, “How can you hate someone you don’t believe in?” and then Martin (Paul Kwo) stands up and says, “God’s not dead,” the class joins in and the professor runs from the room after being dumped by his girlfriend Mina (Cory Oliver) and gets hit by a car and dies, but not before Reverend Dave (David A. R. White) helps him pray and then an entire Newsboys concert is led by Willie Robertson from Duck Dynasty into haughtily laughing that Josh got one over on his teacher, which is intercut with him dying in the street.

Whew.

Also, in the middle of all this, is Mina’s brother Mark (Dean Cain) who hates their dementia-having mother who reveals that Satan made him successful, a Muslim woman named Ayisha (Hadeel Sittu) being thrown out of her house for converting her religion, Mark dumping left wing blogger cancer news getting Amy (Trisha LaFache) as she goes after the. aforementioned Duck Dynasty and man, this whole movie feels like 21 Grams except the stories never really wrap up. But I can imagine that people — well, persecution complex having folks — loved this, because it tells it like it is, as nobody has shades to them, there are no multitudes in anyone, just shrill God-hating liberals out to decimate the American way of life, which, when I checked, guaranteed religious freedom even if it was written by unrepentant slave masters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this American giallo on Wednesday, Jan. 25, at the Central Cinema in Knoxville, TN. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Astron-6 is — well, was as the recent release of the collected Divorced Dad is supposedly their last project together — a Canadian film production and directing company founded in 2007 by Adam Brooks and Jeremy Gillespie which later expanded to add Matt Kennedy, Conor Sweeney and Steven Kostanski. They’re known for producing low-budget horror/comedy films that evoke the 1980s. The fact that their name sounds a lot like Vestron is no accident.

After their initial films — Manborg and Father’s Day — the team moved on to create this tribute/parody of the giallo genre. Gillespie and Kostanski also directed the incredible 2016 horror film The Void, which moves away from the humor of Astron-6.

Film editor Rey Ciso (Adam Brooks) was once a brilliant editor — the best in the world — but that time is far away. Now, he struggles to complete Francesco Mancini’s latest film Tarantola with his assistant Bella. He needs her, as an accident while lost in the madness of editing cost him all of the fingers on his right hand, which are now made of wood.

The loss of those fingers all goes back to Ray getting his start working for Bella’s father, art house director Umberto Fantori, whose debut film The Mirror and the Guillotine won him the success he craved and introduced him to his wife Josephine Jardin (Paz de la Huerta, Nurse 3D, Enter the Void). Eventually, Josephine went mad on Mancini’s next film, which was made to be the longest movie ever. Now, Ray is getting footage of murders sent to him. And to complicate matters, while his wife treats him with disdain, Bella tells him that she loves him.

An unknown killer stalks the studio, killing lead actor Claudio Valvetti and his girlfriend Veronica in a scene that echoes the curtain ripping and blood spraying of Argento’s Tenebre. Margarit Porfiry — another actress on the film — stumbles upon Veronica’s body — hung exactly like the first murder in Argento’s Suspiria — and is struck blind on the spot, making her look exactly like Emily from The Beyond, which the film extends by giving her a dog named Rolfie instead of Dickie.

While her husband Inspector Peter Porfiry (Matthew Kennedy) interviews suspects, co-star Cal Konitz (Conor Sweeney) has his hopes of taking over the movie ruined when a stand-in is found for the lead. Porify’s boss Chief O’Connor wants the case dropped because Margarit is his daughter, but the cop is convinced that the editor is behind the killings, as each murder takes away the fingers of the victim.

Rey has a vision of a dark man with bright blue eyes — Ivan Rassimov, we miss you so — coming after him. Meanwhile, the inspector goes to the insane asylum where Rey lived for some time, meeting Dr. Casini (Udo Kier!), who tells him all about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The detective returns home just in time to make love to his wife in a near shot-for-shot remake of the glass smashing love in Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. The killer then makes his or her way into their home and when the cop tries to break into the room with an axe to save her — kind of, sort of like the cemetery scene in City of the Living Dead by way of The Shining — the killer throws her in the way. In order to not be seen as a murderer, Porfiry cuts off his wife’s fingers and feeds them to her dog.

His boss — and remember, the father of his dead wife — screams at Porfiry back at the station while the killer calls to taunt the cop in a scene much like The New York Ripper. That won’t be the last callback to that Fulci film, either.

Rey has gone over the edge, believing himself to be the killer as his wife treats him horribly. He dreams that he is trapped in a world of smoke and gigantic film cans that seems much like the world inside the painting in The Beyond. He gets a psychic flash that Bella is to be murdered but arrives too late to save her.

Giancarlo tries to finish the movie himself, but an army of spiders — again, The Beyond — attacks and he is killed as well. Rey is brought back onto the film and Father Clarke (Laurence Harvey, Frankenstein Created Bikers) explains to him that editors are the vital connection to the other world that Rey glimpsed in his vision. We’ve now gotten to the part of the giallo where reality stops and the Lovecraftian vision takes over.

Everything goes even crazier, if that’s possible, with Cal menacing Rey with a chainsaw before attacking his wife in front of him, ending with his wife laughing it off as she’d been having an affair with the actor. There’s also an ancient bell tower, more tarantulas, a film canister filled with fingers, occult rituals, Josephine declaring herself to be death itself ala the end of Inferno, a fake-out ending that pulls off The Wizard of Oz while again recalling Fulci — both The Psychic, The Beyond — and a post-credits happy ending where Rey and Bella end up together.

This is one strange film. If you’re not hyper aware of giallo, you may be lost by all the references. And if you are, you may be unable to totally take in the narrative as so much of the film feels like spot the reference. That said, I found myself liking The Editor and excited to see where it would go next. The final sequence as the detective and the editor battle the real killer is actually pretty thrilling. And wow, the music is awesome, with Claudio Simonetti composing the main theme.

There are also references in this film to The Fifth Cord, Black Belly of the Tarantula, Fellini’s Amaracord, Videodrome and even Murder Rock. Obviously, I’ve seen just as many giallo as the Astron-6 guys.

Even better, the credits keep the story going with Rey Cistro listed as the film’s editor. I also adore the posters for the films within the film, which were created by Graham Humphreys.

This is another review that was inspired by Good Bad Flicks.