A polyamorous male couple decides to test the limits of the restrictive society that they live in when they become romantically involved with a young woman. Yes, this is the winner of the SIFF 2018 China Stars Award for Best Film and not usually the kind of film we feature on our site.

That said, it’s well-made and interestingly shot, starting off almost as a series of non-sequiturs.

Li Qi works at a dolphin show and his friend Ren Yu runs a mobile karaoke that is popular because he looks like screen actor Leslie Cheung. A young woman Bai Ling hooks up with both of them, but soon, an event rocks all of them to their very souls.

This movie is mostly dialogue-free, so if you’re concerned about the foreign language barrier, there really is none. The movie is known as Bing Lang Xue in its original language.

It’s the second film of Hu Jia, who also directed Dance With Me.

The Taste of Betel Nut is available on demand and DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR department.

One day when I was shopping at Walmart, my wife noticed a Valerian t-shirt. She said, “I have no idea what this is, put it looks like something you’ll be into.” I was already primed for this movie, which came and went in no time at all. I’m glad I bought that shirt — I’m wearing it now and it’s inordinately soft and comfortable, thanks for asking — but I’m not so sure about the movie itself.

This was written and directed by Luc Besson, who famously brought the world The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional and perhaps not so famously The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, a movie that this resembles not only because it is based on a comic book that few Americans know, but because it so deliriously cares so little about not making any sense whatsoever.

Valerian has been a comic book that ran in France from 1967 to 2010. One of its artists, Jean-Claude Mézières, worked with Besson on The Fifth Element and asked him. “Why are you doing this shitty film? Why you don’t do Valerian?”

It would take years for the technology to catch up to the point where all the many races of the comic could be depicted on the big screen. Besson was worried about the challenge, continually rewriting his script, which follows much of the sixth volume of the series, Ambassador of the Shadows.

The beginning of the film sets you up for magic, as it details how the International Space Station grew to meet more alien races and how the human race changed to adapt, with Rutger Hauer acting as the face of humanity. It’s totally awesome and packed with imagination and probably the last part of the movie that isn’t non-stop action.

Now that space station is called Alpha and its explored by the United Human Federation. Two of the best agents are Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline. This movie is about their adventures to save the alternate planet Müi after Valerian gets a telepathic message from the now-deceased Princess Lihö-Minaa.

What follows is a delirious odyssey, dealing with the deceptive Commander Arün Filitt (Clive Owen), meeting a shapeshifting entertainer named Bubble (Rhianna) and getting to the bottom of the end of planet Müi.

I want to love this movie — I mean Herbie Hancock plays a military leader and John Goodman is the voice of a gangster alien — but man, it’s all over the place. It’s confusing enough figuring out where you are in the movie when suddenly people are in more than one place at the same time and it’s playing tricks of people appearing and disappearing, as well as alternate worlds and duplicitous leaders. It’s as if you’re suddenly dropped into a sequel of a franchise you’ve never watched before — because that’s exactly what is happening.

This would work if everyone knew the story of Valerian, but nope. They don’t.

Besson is still holding out hope for a sequel, despite this movie costing $400 million and only making $225 million back. That’s the perils of big time moviemaking.

But man — I don’t hate it, the more I think about it. It’s audacious, with two hundred different alien species appearing and so many major set pieces that it took seven soundstages to film it all. Besson is a maniac — he wrote a detailed six hundred-page about the aliens and the worlds they’d be filming that the actors had to read before they appeared in the movie.

My biggest problem with the movie is Valerian himself. Dane DeHaan seems to be channeling Keanu Reeves and not in a good way. He comes off as perhaps the most unlikeable character and you never get any true sense why Laureline would have any interest in him whatsoever.

Despite the change in hair color from red to blonde, I have fewer qualms about Cara Delevingne’s acting. You may remember her as The Enchantress from Suicide Squad. She’s also in Her Smell and Paper Towns.

There’s also a Jessica Rabbit cameo, played by Sand Van Roy, an actress who has accused Besson of sexual assault. Delevingne has also discussed how Harvey Weinstein tried the same with her.

What would make someone who has a quickly growing career in the film industry give up everything to go live in Africa? Ask Katie Taylor, a Hollywood casting director who left a lucrative career to teach filmmaking to an impoverished South African community. Soon, she realizes that her students use their films as a means of self-expression and as art-therapy. The moral? The power of story and film can transcend culture and color.

I love the idea that movies can truly come from anywhere. We have the technology to make it happen. We just need the people ready to help others use it and create something special with it.

The best part of this movie is that it really is about the students and how they explain that while once art was only reserved for the rich, now they have the tools to tell their stories to audiences all over the world.

Film School Africa is available on demand from Global Digital Releasing. You can learn more on the official site.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.

With Amer and The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, the married co-directing couple Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani announced to the world that they were a new force, bringing back the look and feel of the giallo for a new century.

Based on the novel Laissez Bronzer les Cadavres, this film expands their narrative point of view to take in the crime and Western genres, or as we know them, the polizichetti and spaghetti western.

A thug named Rhino and his gang of malcontents are on their way to the island getaway of Madame Luce with 250 kilograms of gold bullion — about $1.3 million dollars worth. That said, they’re also in the same place as a bohemian writer, his muse and many, many jealous lovers and ex-lovers, as well as the cops that are ready to engage in an all-day gun battle with the criminals.

Throughout the film, there are flashbacks to the performances of a younger Luce where she is tied up, painted with gold, whipped and licked by worshippers when she isn’t urinating on an anthill that looks exactly like the house where all of this violence is taking place. It might not make sense to the non-giallo initiated, but to some, it’s going to be high art.

The soundtrack is also a reference to the past, featuring Morricone’s songs from Face to Face,  The Fifth Cord and Who Saw Her Die?, as well as Christophe’s song from Road to Salina and music from Matalo!, Zombie Holocaust and Death Walks On High Heels.

While the films mines the past, it does so to find its own footing. I’m intrigued to see what Cattet and Forzani do next.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Ready for a headache?

Amityville: The Awakening is both a direct sequel to The Amityville Horror and a metafilm that takes places in our world, so it recognizes the 1979 film, its 2005 remake and the sequels from 1982 to 1996 as fiction.

Much like Radio, you don’t have to choose between the strawberry or apple pie. You can have both.

Once upon a time, this movie was originally going to be made as Amityville: The Lost Tapes by  Dimension Films and Blumhouse Productions. Casey La Scala (whose Amityville 1974 is in pre-production) and Daniel Farrands (oh no — the director of The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and The Amityville Murders) were to write the script, which was about a female news intern leading a team of journalists, priests and paranormal experts into the house at 112 Ocean Avenue.

Franck Khalfoun (the remake of Maniac, P2 and eventually, the film that you’re reading about) was going to direct the movie before delay after delay struck the production. Khalfoun is a go-getter, though, and emerged with a new story and screenplay.

Originally scheduled for January of 2015, the movie kept getting pushed back further and further. Perhaps the Weinstein controversy had something to do with that, as soon Dimension was no longer involved. Well, at least in the U.S., where Harvey Weinstein’s executive producer credit was removed.

Test screeners came and went, a summer 2017 date was bandied about and then that faded away too. Finally, the film played in select theaters — ten of them, to be exact, making $724 — and then appeared for free on Google Play.

This is probably the best Amityville movie I’ve seen since the 1990’s Canadian made-for-video sequels. I wish this was great praise, but if you’ve seen the other films in this — well, saga is too nice of a word — then you know that it’s kind of a left-handed compliment.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie. In an Amityville movie! How does this happen? And she doesn’t get much to do other than be the grieving mother of a brain-dead son who she desperately wants to come back to life. Well, he does. And he can think Ron DeFeo for it. Actually, she does have one cool moment where she admits that she gave up on God and moved to the house hoping the demons there would bring her son back to her.

Cameron Monaghan plays the coma victim son, while Bella Thorne — who would hate that I would refer to her as a former Disney channel star, so let’s just say she was in Assassination Nation — plays the heroine, Belle.

Thomas Mann Jr. plays the geeky high school guy who knows just about everything there is to know about the house and the movies made about it. And hey — there’s Kurtwood Smith as a doctor for about, oh, two minutes.

It’s halfway decent, which makes it I guess the Return of the Jedi of Amityville films — the original being A New Home and Amityville II: The Possession being Empire. The rest of the films only wish they had Jar Jar in them.

Brian Cavallaro has mostly worked in reality TV and live sports and entertainment. But there’s no greater lure than making a movie that brings in some cash. Horror movies are usually the way that creators go. And hey — what’s a cheap title that people notice? Could it be…Amityville?

Originally called Against the Night, this found footage film would not have been playing on my TV if I hadn’t had the smart — or reckless — idea to watch every single Amityville film in one week.

A group of nine friends decide to stop playing flipcup and filming one another having sex, instead going to Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison to record paranormal activity. Those two towns are only 140 miles apart.

Of course, the friends are not prepared for what’s inside the prison because evil is way more frightening than spilling beer all over yourself or not getting to have access to your cell phone.

Frank Whaley, who was in Vacancy and Pulp Fiction (he’s Brett, one of the people accused of treating Marcellus Wallace like a female dog), is in this as the detective investigating why only one of the characters came back alive.

You can watch this under its original title, Against the Night, on Tubi.

The hubris to call this Amityville: The Final Chapter when I know that I have four more days of Amityville week left is so galling to me that I wonder if I even have the resolve to finish this film.

Of course I do, gentle reader. A steady diet of modern streaming dreck, Jess Franco films and way too many Bruno Mattei films have given me the kind of iron resolve that once led fifteen year old men to enlist in the war effort and lie about their age. Except instead of punching German soldiers, I’m up in the middle of the night watching what feels like the hundredth Amityville movie I’ve seen.

Sure, there’s a book with the same title by John G. Jones, but this movie was originally entitled Sickle and has next to nothing to do with Amityville. If you’re aghast, you haven’t been watching Amityville films after 2005 or reading our site. For shame.

Geno McGahee directed this. Perhaps you’ve seen his work in movies like Satanic Meat Cleaver Massacre or The Haunting of La Llorona. Maybe you watch Tubi and go to Walmart and look for new horror movies nearly every day. Maybe…you’re me.

Michael Hart was just twelve-years-old when he was convicted of murdering his babysitter. All along, he has claimed that a tall monster with a top hat did it. Now, as he’s released from prison to work in his Uncle Bill’s garage, the murders have started again. Michael needs to clear his name before he gets arrested for the crimes that look to be coming from his hands.

Notice that I never used the words Amityville anywhere here. That’s because Amityville: The Final Chapter is a much more marketable title than Sickle. The truth, as they say, will set you free. And for me, freedom is buying movies that cost $3.74 at America’s superstore.

You can watch this on Tubi.

“The Church won’t allow you to exorcise that house.”

“God will!”

Oh no. Mark Polonia is back in Amityville and this time, the culprit is cursed wood from the 112 Ocean Avenue house being used to make another domicile. That’s right. The lumber itself is evil.

Look — it’s 7:30 AM on a Saturday and life seems bleak and meaningless, so I’m going to metaphorically kick myself in the soul and force watch this.

Polonia has added a new directing tick in this one: random bursts of footage that have nothing to do with the scene he’s filming, as well as screaming and quick Fulci zooms.

This one has it all, if by all you mean drunk dads, a demon who bought his The Masque of the Red Death outfit at the Spirit Store on November 1 so that he got the 50% discount, night for day, day for night, Jeff Kirkendall as a priest, a demon stalking a girl who just wants to go swimming in the middle of the day, said demon attack in the pool intercut with drunk dad weenie roasting, shots that go on way too long, shots that don’t stay on the screen long enough to inform us what is going on within them, conversations that never happen with both actors on screen at the same time and lighting that’s as consistent as the work history of my ex-girlfriends.

You can watch this on Tubi. Please don’t.

Daniel Hall stars in this movie as Noam, a homeless amnesiac who has no idea if he’s been a good or bad person. His past is only a dream to him and when he gets close to it, he knows that it’s full of terrible things. Yet when his only friend is murdered, he sets out in search of the truth and to discover some form of justice. Now, he’s asking the hard questions. Now, he’s getting the truth he isn’t sure that he ever wanted to know.

Talk about the love of making film — the budget was so low for this movie that directors Stephen Gallacher and Jonathan Taylor Ashdown moved out of their homes and lived on set in a camper van.

It was co-written by Paul Butler, whose film Book of Monsters was recently released.

Think Memento on a smaller scale and you have an idea of what to expect. I’m interested to see what the creators come up with next, as this was a good effort.

Nothing Man is available on demand and on DVD from High Octane Pictures.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team.

Lost Gully Road tells the story of Lucy, a directionless young woman who travels to a secluded cottage in the forest to wait for her sister. However, time seems to drag on. Cut off from the outside world other than phone calls with her sibling, Lucy turns to drinking to pass the solitary days of waiting…until a potentially sinister presence joins her.

Director Donna McRae, on hero IMDB bio, cites the films of Val Lewton as an influence. I will say that this Australian horror film looks gorgeous and has a definite look and feel, which is a major plus in the streaming horror world, where nearly every movie and concept feels recycled.

This is pretty much a one woman acting show and Adele Perovic does quite well in it. While the story may be slow at times, the talent on display more than makes up for it.

Lost Gully Road is available on demand and on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing. You can learn more at the official site.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company.