Directed and written by its star, Matt Farley, Local Legends is a black and white loose adaption of, well, Matt Farley’s life. It’s probably the best explanation for why the films of Farley and Charlie Roxburgh work so well.
How can one man have seventy bands, make a movie or two a year, release 23,000 songs as of February 2022 and get so much done? Focus and drive.
This film features songs by Farley’s bands Moes Haven. The Toilet Bowl Cleaners, The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, The Hungry Food Band and Papa Razzi and the Photogs while the film takes a near commercial sell for everything Matt has made and will make. You get to watch him play basketball and impersonate famous players (and yes, he really did have someone do statistics for his one on one games). You see him walk all over town and interact with his friends, many of whom play his friends — and enemies — in his films. And you get real slices of life, like someone who wants to critique his movies and has better ideas, yet has never made a film of their own. Or the girl who has every Billy Joel album, but really just the greatest hits.
Look, Matt would rather have made some movies than had some cars. He walks just about everywhere, when you think about it.
I found this movie utterly charming and inspirational. I love when people are out there in the world making things and no one makes more things than Matt. He’s also willing to place his phone number into movies, so when I texted him mid-movie and we started chatting, it added a strange metatextual experience that I will never ever get from any other movie or filmmaker ever.
That blows my mind.
Just watch it on YouTube for yourself. And check out the interview with Farley that came out of those texts. And buy this from Gold Ninja!
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Dedicated to the famed UFO researcher Lt. Colonel (USAF Ret.) Wendelle C. Stevens, this movie feels like listening to Coast to Coast in the middle of the night in the 90s, convinced that the next call on the wildcat line is going to be someone flying over Area 51 again.
There’s a lot to get into here, beyond the main fact that aliens exist — “Up all night long / And there’s something very wrong / And I know it must be late / Been gone since yesterday / I’m not like you guys / Twelve majestic lies” — we get into everything from what NASA knows to underground bases, gene splicing experiments, alien implants — I sneezed one of those out once — and cattle mutilations.
Cybela Clare is the only person that could have a bird perched on her shoulder while talking to people like former prime minister of Canada Paul Hellyer, Jim Marrs, U.S. Air Force Captain Robert Salas, Air Force Colonel/nuclear engineer Don Ware, UK Ministry of Defense spokesman Nick Pope, astronomer Jacques Vallee, professor/abduction researcher David Jacobs, nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, President Carter’s investigative consultants Daniel Sheehan, Alfred Webre, Richard C. Hoagland, Stephen Bassett and more.
I mean, between aliens telling Gorbachev to get peaceful and tales of whistleblowers being killed, this really does have it all. It has so much that there are seven more after it. The only thing that takes it down for me is using the Fox alien autopsy video, which makes me wonder how much is real and how much is disinfo. Then again, I wonder the same thing when people give me a compliment.
In the sequel to All Superheroes Must Die, journalist Vicky O’Neil (Tallay Wickham, who co-wrote this with director Jason Trost) wants to find out who killed Ally Andrews, who takes her into the dark world of superheroes and an interview with the last surviving hero, Charge (Jason Trost). As he explains his life and all the loss within it, she explores what it takes to become — and keep on being — a hero.
Since the first movie, The Four has broken up after the deaths of Cutthroat and The Wall. Later, Shadow also died and Charge was the prime suspect. It turns out that his real name is John Ford and before he became a superhero, he dated Ally. There’s also a masked man who is killing heroes one at a time, absorbing their powers and who may be working for the world’s governments, who want control over the heroes.
A lot of people seemed to dislike that this film was a fake documentary, but I felt like it was a really brave choice for Trost and Wickham to make. The budget doesn’t really allow for much in the way of powers to be shown but I found the story so enthralling that at no time was I wondering how the actual powers looked. There are big budget superhero stories and down and dirty ones, like this. Trost’s superhero films have felt more like Bratpack than Titans and that’s the way that I like them.
Maya (director, writer and star Cybela Clare) isn’t understood by her parents, who wonder why she sleeps with her parrot Romeo (Clare’s real-life parrot Baby Rainbow) and also why she cares so much for animals and their place on our planet. They send her to a psychiatrist, Dr. Zerkov (Yanni Posnakoff), who understand her and gives her hope.
Then she heads off to Thailand, a place where she learns how elephants are being endangered and also meets a seductive man who has a secret agenda. Monks sleep with tigers, elephants can paint and we all learn something.
Clare makes documentaries about similar subjects as well as narrative movies. This one tells a story that seems autobiographical about how she came to love and take care of animals despite the way her family treated her. As always with her films, I’d love to learn more. Her bio says, “Fluent in six languages, Cybela Clare is an Ivy League graduate and former Drama Tutor at Harvard University. A proud member of the Explorers Club, Cybela has traveled the world documenting international wildlife rescues, as incorporated in several of her films.”
But how did we get here? How much of this movie is true? And what motivated her to make it?
Bad Cat may seem like a parody of Garfield, but in truth it’s Kötü Kedi Şerafettin by Bülent Üstün. The cartoon was made by Mehmet Kurtuluş and Ayşe Ünal and was self-funded with some of the budget raised through product placements.
It’s wild that it ended up on Tubi, but there you go.
Shero is an orange cat that has a bad temper and a hate/hate relationship with his owner Tank. One day, he gets Riza the rat and Rifki the seagull to go get some booze while he and his feline friend Black break into another apartment and try to seduce the gorgeous Princess, but in all the excitement, she’s accidentally killed.
Right there, you should know that no matter how cute this looks, it is in no way for kids.
Princess’ owner comes back and kills Black in a rage, while Shero knocks him out a window, killing the human. Or so one would think until he’s brought back to life and wants revenge, all while Shero is trying to get with another lady, Misscat. Oh yeah. He also meets Taco, who claims to be his son.
Tank has locked his cat out of his home and all Shero wants to do is get drunk and get laid. And maybe finally bond with his son, except Princess’ owner keeps coming back from the grave. Can this cat destroy his owner, escape his enemy and finally get some?
After the film’s television premiere in Turkey, the Radio and Television Supreme Council fined the Kanal D television channel for airing it. I mean, it has a cat that smokes and drinks!
Despite being made a few years ago and on a budget much lower than your average American animated film, this looks really good. I had fun with it and actually worried for the crew when the cops were shooting at them during a bank robbery. Who knew that I’d be so entertained by this?
April 1: New boss, same as the old boss — Start the month off with something that’s April Fool’s in nature.
Directed by Alexis Wajsbrot and Damien Macé (working as part of Framestore, they’ve done visual effects for most of the MCU films) and written by Joe Johnson (The Skulls III), Don’t Hang Up is all about some young pranksters in over their heads. Those boys are Brady Mannion (Garrett Clayton), Sam Fuller (Gregg Sulkin), Jeff Mosley (Jack Brett Anderson) and Roy (Edward Killingback) who is known as PrankMonkey69. Most of their pranks are harmless, like sending pizza to neighbors or getting Peyton Grey (Bella Dayne) out of work.
But one of their pranks wasn’t so nice. Now Mr. Lee (played by Parker Sawyers and voiced by Philip Desmueles) is going all torture porn Saw by way of Scream by way of I Know What You Did Last Summerto them, calling and sending them video footage of loved ones all tied up. They take him seriously, as after all, he’s already killed Jeff and Roy and has the video to prove it.
He’s also using more captured video to turn them against one another, as Brady had been sleeping with Peyton, who is Sam’s girlfriend. Of course, he videotaped it, because he’s a scumbag. They’re all scumbags. That’s why Mr. Lee has been after them for a year, ever since one of their pranks killed Mrs. Kolbein (Sienna Guillory, Jill Valentine from the Resident Evil movie series) and her daughter Izzy (Connie Wilkins). And those may have been Mr. Lee’s wife and daughter, but regardless of that implication, he’s getting rid of anyone who loves April 1.
It’s weird that to these filmmakers, the later works of Wes Craven and imitators mean more than the slashers I grew up on, but that’s how time and influence work. I mean, I don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is.
This is fine, though, and I do appreciate an ending this cynical and mean spirited.
Somehow — and I don’t know legally how this has happened — there are several films that outright use the Purge as their plot. I understand how the parodies happen but there’s one movie that. just can’t figure out how no one was sued.
Then again, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “Universal, Platinum Dunes Productions and James DeMonaco have finally put an end to a four-year-old lawsuit that alleged the horror smash The Purge was ripped off from another writer. On Friday, the parties informed a California court that the case was being dropped after a settlement.
Douglas Jordan-Benel brought the lawsuit alleging the film — about an annual 12-hour period where all crime is legal — derived from his screenplay called Settler’s Day. As the plaintiff navigated one hurdle after another in litigating his copyright and breach of contract claims, The Purge spawned sequels and a TV series. Jordan-Benel stated in court papers that the plot of both works was “virtually identical” and in his complaint, the plaintiff focused on the submission of his script to the UTA talent agency, which also represents DeMonaco.”
After a four-year case, the article goes on to reveal certain documents suggested that DeMonaco’s script may have predated Jordan-Benel’s. Then, a huge fight broke out over whether there was any evidence tampering, which led to Jordan-Benel gaining great access to early versions of The Purge screenplay and emails. There was a settlement and the notice of the dismissal was unusually specific and favorable to DeMonaco, with the court stating, “In light of information produced in discovery demonstrating Defendant James DeMonaco’s independent creation of The Purge, Plaintiff has agreed to dismiss his lawsuit with prejudice, in exchange for a waiver by Defendants of any claim for an award of fees and costs.”
Here are the movies that came after and how they relate to the original films:
Meet the Blacks (2016): Directed by Deon Taylor, who wrote this with Nicole DeMasi, Meet the Blacks finds that family — led by Carl (Mike Epps) — getting out of Chicago after stealing some money from drug kingpin Key Flo (Charlie Murphy in his last role). Once settling in Beverly Hills, Mike and his wife Lorena (Zulay Henao) and kids Allie Black (Bresha Webb) and Carl Jr. (Alex Henderson) discover that they ended up in town at the absolute worst time. Yes, they’re here on the day of The Purge.
The best joke is that George Lopez is President El Bama, but hey, Paul Mooney is also a Klan member, plus Mike Tyson, Tyrin Turner and Perez Hilton are in this too. It’s not exactly great, but the fact that this movie just outright uses The Purge is pretty audacious. If the racial issues of the first few movies were too under the surface for you — they are not — this movie goes all out.
Not to be outdone, Taylor and most of the cast returned for The House Next Door: Meet the Blacks 2, which is literally Fright Night with Katt Williams as a pimp version of Jerry Dandrige. Maybe this was the movie that Herschell Walker was really watching?
Evil At the Door (2022): For almost a hundred years, The Locusts have treated their followers to one night — three hours — where they can do anything they want to a selected home and any of the people they find inside. The Locusts have selected the home of Daniel (Matt O’Neill, Candy Corn) and Jessica (Sunny Doench, Coffin). Complicating matters is that there may be a Locust who isn’t on the same side as everyone else, plus Jessica’s sister Liz (Andrea Sweeney Blanco) is hiding under the bed trying to escape.
Like a combination of The Strangers and The Purge, the film begins with John Doe (Bruce Davison, who has nearly 300 credits, but may be best known for being in X-Men as Senator Kelly; you may also recognize him from The Lords of Salem or The Crucible) invites the cult’s member to initiate the Night of the Locusts.
A family that barely gets along being surrounded by four cult members who can get away with anything that happens. Great set-up, right? Yes, it is. The execution — CGI stabbings instead of practical effects and costumes that look like the Wish version of Ghost from Call of Duty — take away the good will that the opening created.
Fans of TV’s Dynasty and The Colbys will, at least, be happy to see John James (Jeff Colby!) show up. His next movie is My Son Hunter, playing President Biden. It’s directed by Robert Davi and stars Gino Carano so…
Director, writer, producer, editor and one of the actors — he’s Truman — Kipp Tribble did more than just two or three things on this movie. I wish that he could have followed up on pieces he set in motion. That said, he’s figured out how to pull this movie together with a small crew and a low budget.
The Binge (2020): Directed by Jeremy Garelick and written by Jordan VanDina, The Binge is about a world where no one can drink or do drugs except for 12 hours, once a year, just like…yeah, you got it. This follows the adventures of Griffin (Skyler Gisondo), Hags (Dexter Darden) and Andrew (Eduardo Franco), three guys who have just turned eighteen and are now eligible to take part of America’s one part day of pleasure.
Griffin is in love with Lena (Grace Van Dien), whose father (Vince Vaughn) is the overprotective principal of their school. Of course he ends up being an old partier and everyone is happy, yet a 2020 drug movie has none of the wacky ramshackle charm of Cheech and Chong, its plot as manufactured as the scientifically grown weed. You know where the highs are coming from, but some of those old bags of comedic hash sometimes could give you the kind of laughs that stay with you for the rest of your life. This is not that strain.
The Binge 2: It’s A Wonderful Binge (2022): Hulu has bought another The Binge film and set it at Christmas and man, we hit the algorithm right on this week. Directed and written by Jordan VanDina, this year’s Binge comes during the holidays, which seems like when it should always be if you can only drink and do drugs for 12 hours a year.
Hags (Dexter Darden) is trying to stay sober so that he can propose to his girlfriend Sarah (Zainne Saleh) while his friend Andrew (Eduardo Franco) wants to use all those powders, pills, drinks and smokes to get through the time he has to spend with his family. All while Mayor Spengler (Kaitlin Olsen) is trying to get her town — and her daughter Kimmi (Marta Piekarz) to end The Binge just as her brother Kris (Nick Swardson) escapes from prison.
It’s nice to see Tim Meadows, Danny Trejo and Paul Scheer get some work, but this movie seems like a child who has just learned to swear or worse, a college kid who comes back home for Christmas obsessed with smoking grass. It tries — the animated part is kind of humorous — but I just know we’re going to get a third one. And you know me. I’m going to sit through it.
2025: Red White and Blue (2022): I get the urge to purge a The Purge ripoff from your system, but how can you make a parody that’s 2 hours and 15 minutes long?
In the year 2025, the 45th President of the United States of America — look, this is automatically the most horrifying film of the year just with the rest of this sentence — gets back in the White House, restarts the Purge, rebuilds the wall and gets ready to Make America Safe Again.
Bill Wilson (Grid Magraf), agent of FIRE (Forest and Immigration Raking Enforcement), is two weeks from returning, getting too old for this excrement and has just finished the bust of his life taking down a Mexican drug cartel. However, some dirty agents want the evidence and plan on using The Purge to get it from his house.
This is an equal opportunity movie, making fun of Biden as a pedophile, Trump as a man reduced to filming The Apprentice and urinating online for hits and liberals maybe even more devoted to murder than the right wing gun owners they argue against. There’s something for everyone to be offended by here, mostly that this takes so long and can get away with outright being a Purge movie despite it being made by anyone other than Blumhouse.
Am I missing any more Purge-inspired ripoffs? Let me know!
I mean, one can argue that The Purge was ripped off from “The Return of the Archons,” an episode of the classic Star Trek.
This is not a test.
This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge sanctioned by the U.S. Government.Weapons of class 4 and lower have been authorized for use during the Purge. All other weapons are restricted.Government officials of ranking 10 have been granted immunity from the Purge and shall not be harmed.Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.Police, fire, and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. when The Purge concludes.Blessed be our New Founding Fathers and America, a nation reborn.
James DeMonaco was born in Brooklyn but spent eight years in Paris. When he came back to America, he “put a microscope” on his life after realizing the difference in the relationship our country has with guns. He stated, “I’m terrified for my country. So I think that cynicism seeps into the film. America itself becomes the canvas, instead of the haunted house, the canvas is America. We don’t need ghosts or vampires anymore when we’re just killing each other, you know?”
Then, a drunk driver nearly killed him and his wife and she said — she’s a doctor, mind you — “I wish we could all have one free murder a year.”
That’s how we got The Purge.
In 2014, the New Founding Fathers of America are voted into office, promising to fix the economic collapse. One of the ways that they do that is by passing a law sanctioning the Purge, an annual event where all crime is legal and emergency services are temporarily suspended.
Somehow, it works, because the news claims that the U.S. is crime-free and unemployment rates have dropped to 1%. However, that only works if you’re upper middle class and white, just one of the many ways that these movies — while a bit too on the nose — really reflect reality almost way too much.
The Purge (2013): Just like Sinister, the first movie in this series stars Ethan Hawke and really is there to lay the groundwork before the much more interesting sequel. Not that either movie is bad, but they create the world that the other film (or films) get to explore.
Hawke is architect James Sandin and his family — wife Mary (Lean Headey), son Charlie (Max Burkholder) and daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane) — are aware that the Purge is coming but he’s invented a security system to protect them all. Well, it works until a stranger shows up injured and Zoey’s boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) decides to bring a gun and confront James about their relationship.
What follows is a night of horror as the assembled neighbors, led by Grace Ferrin (Arija Bareikis), want the homeless man that asked for James’ help and to gain revenge against them as the Sandin’s wealth has come from all of them, as everyone needs the security system that he has invented to survive this night.
That mysterious man, known as the Stranger (Edwin Hodge), will become more important as the series continues. The budget for this was low and the idea of multiple Purges wouldn’t be possible, but DeMonaco said, “We only had 19 days to shoot and $2.7 million to work with.” And if he ever got the chance to do another, it would be like Escape from New York.
Good news. He got the chance.
The Purge: Anarchy (2014): Frank Grillo is the kind of actor that I love, someone who would be starring in Cannon movies if this was the 80s and instead is the lead in this movie as Leo Barnes, an LAPD Police Sergeant who wants to use Purge Night to avenge his son’s death, with the killer going free as the boy died on Purge Night.
Before the sixth Purge can begin, a resistance group led by Carmelo Johns (Michael K. Williams) and Dante Bishop (Edwin Hodge), the Stranger from the first movie, hijack the American media to denounce the government and the fact that the Purge has reduced poor and non-white people to target practice.
The other storyline in this concerns waitress Eva Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo), her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul) and her terminally ill father Rico (John Beasley) who has sold himself to a rich family as someone to be hunted so that Eva and Cali can live in confront after his death.
There’s also Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez), a couple ready to leave one another, who also are trapped in the inner city on the worst night of the year.
Complicating matters is that the Purge has not worked out how its creators thought: people wait to enact revenge based on personal grudges, killing friends and family instead of random poor people. The government has sent out death squads to up the body count and destroy the lower class.
The Purge: Election Year (2016): It’s kind of crazy how The Purge finally found its real footing three movies in, moving Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo) into a Secret Service hero protecting Senator Charlene Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), a U.S. Senator running for President on an anti-Purge platform. She has a true belief in this, as her family was killed during the first Purge.
The New Founding Fathers of America use the Purge to try and kill Roan legally, as this year government officials have no immunity. This film also goes all in on just how close the NFFA is to right-wing religious zealots, even praying for death in church and having a sacrifice on an altar. Minister Edwidge Owens (Kyle Secor) is the other Presidential front runner and he’s been targeted by the underground led by Dante Bishop (Edwin Hodge).
Of all The Purge movies, this feels the most like something John Carpenter would make, as it feels like a non-stop chase and the good guys up against the wall for the entire running time. It expands the world of the film without forgetting the normal people caught up in the Purge, those truly battling for their lives and not just arguing about money and politics.
This is also the most violent in the series with 116 deaths, nearly one every single minute. It also shows that the rest of the world has begun to be part of the event with death tourism increasing along with the government sponsored death squads.
Directed by Chris Peckover, who wrote the script from a story by Zack Kahn, this film starts with 17-year-old babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla in Elvis) dealing with an awkward seduction by the five years younger Luke Lerner (Levi Miller). Then a brick flies through the window that says “U leave and U die” and it looks like someone has shot his friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould). That intruder breaks into the house with a shotgun as Ashley and Levi hide inside the closet.
And then…well, wouldn’t that be giving the whole movie away?
With cameos for Virginia Madsen and Patrick Warburton as Levi’s parents and enough twists and turns to fill twelve days of Christmas movies, Better Watch Out’s biggest surprise is that it was shot in Australia. Peckover was going to shoot this on a lower budget in North Carolina, but then Australian producer Brett Thornquest heard his mother was an Australian native and gave him $3 million to make it there.
My favorite idea in this movie is that the big city Ashley is moving to is Pittsburgh. What small town is she leaving?
Don’t read up on this movie. Just go into it cold, like I did, and get ready to discover if that paint can trick in Home Alone really would kill someone.
I had no idea that Brian Dorton directed and wrote a remake of Nick Millard’s Criminally Insane. One could argue that Millard did the same with his sequel, as it uses so much footage from the original movie. Yet this time, we get more of the story of Ethel (Dixie Gers) as she annihilates everyone that gets in her way.
Ethel may have killed her Uncle Joe, which is why she’s been in a sanitarium all these years, but when two orderlies assault her, she’s released and in the care of her Aunt Joyce. Yet she eats so much food that her guardian must lock it away, which drives her to the brink and beyond, and before you know it, Aunt Joyce is dead too.
Made with real animal guts, this movie in no way shies away from the gore. There aren’t many movies that have a death by inserting a smashed wine bottle into someone’s nether regions, much less a POV anilingus shot.
Yet beyond all the sleaze and guts, this movie has a great performance by Gers. You actually understand Ethel a bit more by the end and if anything, feel for her plight if not understand it.
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