First off, I don’t think this review needs spoiler warnings. Because to tell the truth, you can read everything below and the movie still probably won’t make any sense at all to you. That’s because I have a theory, which I will get to in, oh, give or take 1,690 words.

Unlike the vast majority of the world, I hated David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows.

Also unlike the vast majority of the world, I loved Under the Silver Lake.

I was prepared to despise it. It’s a movie that is completely and totally made within its own world, completely given over to ego-driven auteurism and pride. But in today’s world of either made quick for streaming films or overly huge blockbusters that have to play as well in Peoria as they do in Peiking, I kind of love that someone spent over $8 million dollars to create a movie that made $45,000 in its first weekend and completely does not give a fuck if you get it or not. This is the kind of movie that demands a scorecard, a map, a Wikipedia page and its own forum on Reddit for you to even come close to scratching the surface and it really feels like it  was made for either just its creator or a small group of mutants who only venture into the sunlight to see if their new blu rays came in the mail.

You know — people like me.

Sam (Andrew Garfield) — a great name for a pop culture obsessed conspiracy whackjob if I ever heard one — lives in Silver Lake where he does nothing. Perhaps he is a scriptwriter trying to make something happen. Who knows? It’s never revealed and it’s not that important. He has promise, but he’s wasted it pining over a lost love who he sees every day on a billboard that says, “I can see clearly now.”

There are a few things that come to our attention: a Dog Killer is on the loose. Nearly every woman in Sam’s building is gorgeous. And one of them, Sarah (Riley Keough, quite literally the granddaughter of the King himself, Elvis Aaron Presley Jr.) finally invites him over after he ogles her (after he’s finished having sex with an unnamed actress who for some reason magically brings him sushi, played by Garfunkel and Oates actress Riki Lindhome).

This is that magic moment of Kismet, the instant meet cute that Hollywood has trained Sam — and all of us — expect. And that’s kind of sort of what happens, as the film leads us along to the rug pull moment when Sarah disappears without a trace, leaving behind graffiti and a box of photos.

Much like a giallo hero who must become a detective or a lovesick puppy dog, Sam feels that he has to save his one true love while of course sleeping with just about every woman put in his path.

This path leads him to elite Hollywood parties where he always knows at least one person and isn’t banned even when he makes a big scene. He follows it to shows by the band Jesus and the Brides of Dracula and performance art affairs with LSD-laced cookies and bars with tombstones of famous dead people.

Of course, that struggling actress who was up for an Oscar last year and now is a prostitute sees something in Sam and wants more than sex. Certainly, that balloon covered artist will instantly fall for him while dancing. It all just adds up. Or does it?

There are so many connections and clues and yet, barely a crime. That all changes when the body of billionaire Jefferson Sevence — who has been missing as we learn in news stories that play throughout the film — is found burned up in a limo with the bodies of three women. And what do they find at the scene? Sarah’s hat.

Sam then contacts the author (Patrick Fischler) of Under the Silver Lake, an underground comic book that reveals the many conspiracies at the heart of this film. The author lives in fear of the Owl Woman, as he feels that the secret he possesses in a cereal box has marked him for death. He’s right. Or he’s killed himself. But there is evidence that shows the Owl Woman creep into his house.

Now, by following the backmasked messages in Jesus and the Brides of Dracula’s (actually Silversun Pickups, a well-known band that calls Silverlake home) three best-known songs, mostly their song “Turning Teeth,” Sam finds the Homeless King (played by The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow) who shows him an underground bunker that goes from Griffith Park to a supermarket. It’s probably no accident that this scene was filmed in the same location as the end of another transformative movie ready to screw with your brain, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

He undertakes another journey into a gated community, led by the three Brides of Dracula. Yes, this is a movie obsessed with one man surrounded by three women and it will get even more triad obsessed in a minute.

There, he meets the Songwriter, who claims that he’s written every single song that has meant anything to Sam, who has a poster of Kurt Cobain on his wall signed by Frances Bean, of all things. The man continually plays snippets of these songs while laughing that he did it all for money and they have no meaning. Those songs, all played by Ben Crippin Taylor, include:

• The Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way”
• “Where Everyone Knows Your Name” from Cheers
• Foreigner “I Want to Know What Love Is”
• Joan Jett (actually, this song was originally by Alan Merrill and the Arrows) “I Love Rock ‘n Roll”
• Harold Faltermeyer “Axel F: Theme from Beverly Hills Cop“
• Iron Butterfly “In a Gadda Da Vida” (a reference to the Garden of Eden)
• The Penguins “Earth Angel”
• Ritchie Valens “La Bamba” (the day the music died, if you will)
• Salt-N-Pepa “Push It”
• Ozzy Osbourne “Crazy Train”
• The Who “Pinball Wizard”
• Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
• The Pixies “Where Is My Mind?”

Those last two songs are integral to the film. The first is everything about rebellion that Sam held dear, being told that it was something that was a throwaway, a cash grab written between “a blowjob and breakfast.” The second is the song that plays as capitalism is destroyed in Fight Club, a movie that too many people think is some kind of rallying cry for them and them alone before realizing that they’re all part of the same gang of vanilla do-nothings. But here, we learn that even that song was written by an old man at a piano that laughs at anyone who believes in anything.

There are also songs that play in the movie that have major plot points hidden within them, like The Association’s “Never My Love,” a cover of Lulu’s “To Sir with Love,” DJ97’s “Your Woman,” Cornershop’s “Brimful of Ashra” (a song that references the history of Indian film and the longing those movies create) and R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” (which takes its name from something a man on the street yelled before attacking Dan Rather).

The old man begins firing a gun at Sam, destroying the instruments of the musicians whose soul he has taken. Finally, our protagonist finds the actual guitar of Kurt Cobain and repeatedly smashes in the head of the old man, as if he were on stage with the Who and Nirvana, both conveniently name-checked in the above list of co-opted bands (notably, The Clash is still safe. Whew.).

Sam then meets the daughter of Jefferson Sevence, Millicent. Of course she falls for him, kissing him in the waters of the Silver Lake as she slips a bracelet from her father onto his wrist before being killed by assassins. If all of this is getting way out of hand and too much for you, stay tuned.

Get this — by combining the bracelet, the map hidden inside the comic book writer’s cereal box and The Legend of Zelda map featured in the first-ever issue of Nintendo Power, Sam finds a location not on any map, where a man and three women wait in a hut.

Basically, the entire conspiracy is all about the select 1% of wealthy men who will take three brides — yeah, there it is again — and bury themselves in the Earth for six months until they ascend like pharaohs. And oh yeah, Sarah is one of Jefferson Sevence’s wives.

Once they went inside their bunker, it was sealed and no one can leave, but Sam can speak to her via videophone. She tells him she did this of her own free will and is at peace. They say goodbye as Sam — and the other four in the room — pass out and are taken away by the Homeless King.

When he awakens, the Homeless King is certain that Sam is the Dog Killer, but Sam’s story of missing his girlfriend and her dog touches him. He lets him go, but says he can’t be sure if they’ll kill him or not.

When he returns back to his home — where he’s been threatened with eviction by his landlord for not paying his lease — he finally meets the old woman with a bird that says something he can’t understand. They sleep together and she reveals that she has no idea what the bird is saying. 

Meanwhile, the police break down his door as he watches from across the apartments, laughing to himself as he smokes and they see the hobo code — which is throughout this film and supposedly It Follows as well — that means “Stay quiet.” Then, the strains of R.E.M.’s “Strange Currencies” ends the film.

At this point, I was shocked. I actually loved the movie. Maybe the song helped. Actually, it really did.

There are so many loose ends, like t-shirt codes that add up to BWAR DOG KILR, coded messages using What Three Words and the Copial Cypher, combining orange juice with saltines, Playboy being the gateway drug to men objectifying women, the Dog Killer being someone offing murderers or all women being dogs that men just want to kill, the number 23, Vanna White sending codes to someone via how she looks around and so much more that there’s no way I can understand it all.

So what’s it all about, Alfie?

My theory is that — going back to spoiler warnings — that this is a movie that operates as multiple films sometimes all at once. Therefore, any attempt to make rational sense of it are doomed to failure. In my opinion, those three options are:

It’s a regular movie:

The movie instantly falls apart as a straight-up film. It’s too strange and it has plot holes you can bury a rich man and three wives inside. And I think it’s meant to be such a shaggy dog story, as director David Robert Mitchell told Vulture: “The film is a mystery and there are mysteries inside of that mystery, and some of the characters could be considered mysteries themselves,. Will I explain any of them? No.” He also referred to the movie as a shot across the bow, an intentional f-you.

It’s an exploration of Hollywood itself: 

In that same Vulture article, Mitchell said “It’s a darker, skewed look at the collective consciousness of a city defined by capitalist, misogynistic, patriarchal, superficial values that have led people astray. It’s fascinating to me that people might miss the clues, and I think that says quite a lot about what they want to see rather than what’s being presented.”

He’s also discussed that this movie comes at a certain point in time when it felt like a shadow was growing across America and now, that shadow can be seen everywhere.

It’s also a film that knows the history of Hollywood enough to have all of Sarah’s dialogue in the swimming pool scene come from Marilyn Monroe’s uncompleted final movie, Something’s Got to Give. Just another doomed blonde caught up in the Hollywood machine? Perhaps.

You can also compare it to movies like Inherent Vice and Mulholland Drive, where the search for truth leads into strange corners and perhaps places its characters wished they never went. Which brings us to the final theory:

Sam is an untrustworthy narrator and really crazy:

In an interview with Little White Lies, Mitchell said that a lot of the movie is based on old adventure videogames saying, “There’s an oddness to the way that items and objects exist within the world and you and your character have to work out, do these objects build and equal something? Do they amount to something greater? Or is this toaster just a toaster. Can they become something else? There’s an element of that madness within the movie as well.”

I believe that Sam’s breakup with his girlfriend has sent him into a tailspin. You can really see this when he attacks the two young boys for keying his car and throwing eggs. The way that he tackles and attacks them goes beyond the need for teaching a lesson and simple revenge into outright being a sociopath. And as you may know, sociopaths have no true empathy, which means that his comments about the homeless make much more sense.

That’s not even getting into Vanna White speaking to people through the TV. Or the fact that the origin of the Dog Killer — a man who was spurned by an actress and began killing dogs in retaliation — mirror his life. Does he really need all those biscuits in his pockets?

To me, the major reason why this movie doesn’t take place within our universe is due to one of the major criticisms that its dealt with: this is a movie living within — and obsessed by — the male gaze. Even after having sex with a gorgeous actress, Sam can’t resist peeping on his neighbor. And every woman, no matter what, falls into Sam’s bed. This is a man who hasn’t taken a shower in days, has been sprayed by a skunk and shows up in a white t-shirt and instantly gets told, “I like your shirt,” by one of the most stunning women you’ve ever seen.

He has become the main character in one of the movies that he’d put a poster of on his walls. He’s retreated into a world of fantasy, of noir, of falling for the gorgeous rich woman only to have her killed as a result. The women in this film are merely stock characters: the lost blonde who needs saving, the kooky artist, the redhead hooker with a heart of gold and the woman with an owl for a head. Even when the rich girl dies, she descends in the water just like Janet Wolf on that cover of Playboy from July 1970 that Sam keeps next to his bed.

Oh yeah — about the Owl Woman. She’s not real — instead she’s the symbol for suicide, showing up at the lowest moments of the comic book author’s life, making sense of a death that is often senseless. When she shows up in Sam’s house, she arrives at the moment when he’s at his lowest, having learned that he’s about to be kicked out of his home and forced to change his carefully arranged life of nothingness.

The exact moment that Sam realizes his psychosis is when that Pixies song makes him realize that all of the manufactured Fight Club misogyny is a pose, that this rage has been manufactured by the machine.

He’s also the center of his own universe, a place where the magazines of his youth and the movies he love mean more to him than anyone else because they’re his. If you think this movie doesn’t hit way to close to home…

Mitchell told mubi.com that, the movie is at heart “a mystery… it’s a mystery on multiple levels: about the journey this character takes, and then also the mystery of this character. But essentially it’s a fabrication.”

But then again, as the performance artist says, “There’s nothing to solve. It’s silly wasting your energy on something that doesn’t matter.” At the same time that a character derides “an entire generation of men obsessed with video games, secret codes, space aliens,” the truth is that movie celebrates and gives that same audience something new to obsess over.

I’ve often said that I’d rather have an interesting movie that’s a complete mess than a boring piece of dreck that’s tied up with a nice bow. Never has that statement been truer than this film.

It’s not for everybody. In fact, I’m uncertain who would like it or get it other than me. Which kind of makes me exactly the same kind of person this film is celebrating. Or making fun of. Or both. Who can really say?

Three young thieves — Casper (Sam Striker from 2017’s Leatherface and the TV show Nightflyers), Iris (Virginia Gardner, the latest Halloween) and Dodge (Brandon Micheal Hall, the TV show God Friended Me) — decide to rob the mansion where Iris works as a caterer to raise the money to save Casper’s dad, but when the house locks down, everyone shows their true faces. Yep, this is a serial killer support group.

It’s awesome to see Robin Tunney (The Craft, Prison Break) in a big role and she’s great here. Julian McMahon from Nip/Tuck and Charmed is her husband who desperately wants to go back to his killing ways. Lance Reddick (Oz, The Wire) is great in a small role as their teacher and leader. Blue Collar Comedy member Bill Engvall even shows up here.

There are some cute asides to past movies, such as every family member being some slasher archetype down to the maniac chained up in the basement. The movie Mother’s Day is even playing in the son’s room. I’d probably like this more if it didn’t feel so indebted to Don’t Breathe.

Some have said this is a return to 90’s Tarantino filmmaking. I say that’s lazy easy labeling. This isn’t that good. It’s fun, but it isn’t that good.

You can watch this movie exclusively on Shudder.

Five New York City millennials escape the big city for a Thanksgiving weekend in the country. That said, as happens in horror movies, their peaceful getaway is soon interrupted by a local psycho, who may have a connection to one of them.

Luciana Faulhaber wrote, co-produced, directed and acted in the film, of which she says, “It was important for me to create work that shows the female characters as they are in real life – none of us are waiting to be saved by some Prince Charming.”

This throwback to slashers moves pretty quickly, looks good and has some fun scenes, such as when one blindfolded girl believes that her boyfriend’s blood being sprayed on her is just his premature ejaculation. I’ve never seen that in a movie before!

I’ve said this before — and will again, I can be a broken record — but even the lowest rung slashers of the early 1980’s rival the scares of the best films of today. Don’t Look won’t change your world but is a pleasant look back at the stalk and kill films that ruled the drive-ins and theaters of, let’s say, 1981.

Don’t Look releases on VOD and DVD May 14 from Wild Eye Releasing.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team but that has no impact on our review.

This movie is based on the real-life Mexican Zone of Silence, which shares the 27th parallel with the Bermuda Triangle, the pyramids at Giza and Tibet’s sacred cities. It’s a place where conversations stop dead, electronic devices stop working and supposedly aliens have been witnessed. Or it’s totally a made-up legend for tourist bucks.

In order to save her son’s life, Ana must find a powerful stone that her grandfather found inside that very same Zone of Silence. But now, she’s also learning more about her family, her life (and death) and the secrets of the Zone than she ever wanted to.

Director Lorena Villarreal has only one other directorial credit, 2004’s Las lloronas, made nearly 15 years before the Hollywood version that came out this year. Yet this was an assured and very interesting movie that asks, “What would you do if you had the power over life and death?”

There’s plenty of gorgeous scenery and some actual shocking moments. This one kept my attention from beginning to end.

Want to learn more? Visit the official site and then check this movie out when its available on VOD and DVD May 14 from Uncork’d Entertainment.

Literally from the first moment of this film — the logo for Dark Temple Films — I had the feel of renting a movie I had no idea about from my old haunt, Prime Time Video.

While hunting in the woods, Billy Cavanagh is accidentally shot. Looking for shelter when he’s taken in by the kind and kooky old lady Agnes, unaware that her isolated log cabin is being stalked by a bloodthirsty skinless creature hellbent on getting inside. And he’s even more unaware that Agnes is completely unhinged.

That’s a great beginning that makes you ask: And then?

Directed by Charlie Steeds (Escape From Cannibal Farm, The House Of Violent Desire), I’d compare this to a blend of Evil Dead and Misery. Yet it’s very much this film is its own story.

I enjoyed the film, as its a throwback to 80’s video store rental fare. The FX are solid, with plenty of gushing over the top gore. I just wish some of the outside shots had the same care as the inside ones, but that’s a minor quibble.

Winterskin is available on VOD and DVD May 21 from High Octane Pictures.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this film by its PR department but that has nothing to do with our review.

I often say things out loud to nobody in particular, like “Hey, why don’t they make movies like Daughters of Darkness or Kill, Baby, Kill any more?” The truth is, someone just did. Somehow, Mitzi Peirone, in the first feature-length movie she ever wrote or directed, tapped into the psychosexual DNA of the woman on the verge of madness and the supernatural genre, all while filtering pieces through psychedelia, the giallo, the art film and who knows what else. Throw in the fact that this movie was the first one to ever be fully financed through a cryptocurrency equity crowdsale — something and I do not even pretend to understand — and you have the makings of something big.

So a warning: if you haven’t seen the film, the only way that I can talk about it is by really going deep into what happens in the film. The funny thing is, there are so many ways to view this movie — and what’s real and what isn’t — that I’m not even sure what I’m writing are spoilers.

This movie could be about any — or all — of these things:

1. Two college students (they may also be reality stars and/or internet dom porn queens) run from a drug bust, losing $80,000 worth of drugs, which they had purchased with their college tuition. To get the money back, they decide to rob the developmentally challenged friend that they once pushed out of a treehouse, causing her to lose the ability to have children. However, she was always insane and the closer she has grown to adulthood, the further away she has moved from sanity. Can they get the money, get out and not be trapped by her game?
2. Three young girls have been playing the same game for so long that they could be anywhere from 8 years old to 20 years old to senior citizens, constantly replaying the same elaborately staged game. My theory here is bolstered by the taunts of Tiresias The Omniscient Homeless Man — named for the blind prophet of Apollo who was both clairvoyant and forced to be a woman for seven years — who yells, “You old witches always come back here.”
3. A druggy kaleidoscopic run through a playground that makes little to no sense, suffused with neon glows, flashes backward and forward, with plenty of noise and no small amount of pretentiousness. I mean, Variety went as far as to say that this movie is “so void of any substance beyond the pretentiously pictorial that one suspects (the director’s) real calling is in music videos or advertising.”
4. All of the above. Potentially more.

Imagine Grey Gardens with more sex and much more violence, as directed by a mixture of Jodorowsky and Jean Rollin, with lighting by Nicolas Winding Refn doing dabs with Mario Bava.

Shot in Alders Manor in Yonkers, NY (the one-time 20th century Renaissance Revival home of mining magnate W.B. Thompson that is available to rent for parties), this movie is technically about childhood friends gone to seed Petula (Imogen Waterhouse, Nocturnal Animals) and Tilda (Sarah Hay, Black Swan and a one-time attendee of the video You’re Invited to Mary-Kate & Ashley’s Ballet Party, no less) who are attempting to steal from their long-lost friend Daphne Peters (Madeline Brewer, The Handmaid’s Tale, Orange Is the New Black). The only real person — then again, maybe not — who comes into their lives is Detective Siegel, the cop who questioned Petula and Tilda after Daphne fell — was pushed? — from a treehouse all those years ago.

Now, the game begins again: Daphne is the mother, Petula is the doctor and Tilda is the daughter who is the patient. There are three rules: 1. Everyone plays. 2. No outsiders allowed. 3. Nobody leaves.

I have a lot of high faluting ideas about what it all means, but they’re probably all wrong. You’ll probably feel the same way after you watch it. I’d be interested in your take, though.

Run home, quit your job and watch this on Amazon Prime right now. I need more people to argue about its merits or lack of cohesion or what parts are real and which aren’t.

A married couple, trying to rebuild their relationship after one of them has an affair, decides to travel to a cabin in the woods. As things happen, they end up walking right into a blood feud between the Native American owners of the property and their neighbors who are trying to steal it, punishing trespassers in horrifying ways.

This is the fourth feature from writer/director Miles Doleac, who also made The Hollow, Demons and The Historian. He also acts in the movie with Sherri Eakin, Ritchie Montgomery and co-producer Lindsay Anne Williams.

Let me give you the elevator speech that probably sold this movie: devil worshippers versus Native Americas with a hot lesbian couple trapped in the middle.

They claim that this movie is in the tradition of The Green Inferno and Deliverance. Sort of, I guess, as they are all movies about local yokels decimating trespassers.

Hallowed Ground will be in select theaters on June 7 and on VOD/DVD June 11.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this film by its PR team and that has no impact on our review.

 

Directed by and starring Eduardo Castrillo, Worth is “a love letter to Muay Thai Kickboxing,” according to the filmmakers. It tells the story of Ricky, a top contender who meets and falls in love with a paralegal named Danielle. He has a championship match. She has a big court case. They fall for one another.

This has a star-studded cast, with Tony Todd (Candyman!), Clifton Powell (Pinky from the Friday movies) and Miguel A.Nunez Jr. (Spider from Return of the Living Dead and Juwanana Man himself!).

Once Danielle gets put into a coma when one of the defendants in her cases runs her over, Ricky has to fight for her care and learn to do whatever it takes. That’s the main story of this film, which is more about the relationships of the leads than actual fighting, despite how the movie has been marketed.

I really enjoyed the ending of this film. It achieves an elegance and mood that I thought that it would not be able to reach and it went past my expectations. While the pace of the rest of the film is slow, the last ten minutes make up for it.

You can watch this movie on Amazon Prime.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by the PR team for it, but that has no impact on our review.

Craig William Macneill directed the first season of Channel Zero that I loved so much, Candle Cove. I wish I could say the same for his latest movie, this exploration of the life of Lizzie Borden starring Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie and Kristen Stewart as her lover and maid Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan.

Lizzie is a 32-year-old unmarried woman, which makes her an old maid in 1892. Her father dominates her life and she’s sickly, but she has a new friend, an Irish immigrant named Bridget Sullivan who has come to work as a servant in the rich Borden household.

Threats are left at the door of the house, as many in the town are jealous of Lizzie’s father and the way he takes land. He informs a family member, Uncle John, that the girls are to get none of the money from the estate upon his death. Lizzie attempts to sell all of the family’s jewelry but is caught and her beloved pigeons are hacked to bits by her father’s axe.

The bond between Bridget and Lizzie grows after the death of the servant’s mother and the discovery that Mr. Borden is abusing her. Finally, her father catches the two making love in the barn and forbids their relationship.

You know what happens next: axe mayhem. But what should have happened was both girls committing the murders. Only Lizzie completed hers and she comes back to kill her father in front of Bridget. The two are separated by the court case and never see one another again.

I wanted to like this way more than I ended up enjoying it. Then again, I love the 1975 made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which this is nowhere near.

You can watch Lizzie on Shudder.