16. INCREMENTAL BREAKDOWN: Stop-motion films are hard to make. Appreciate that mania today.
Directed, written by and starring the voice of Mike Mort, this is the story of tough guy cop Chuck Steel, a man who lost his wife to the Yakuza. He drives Captain Jack Schitt (Mort) crazy with his ability to always blow things up and cause chaos. In fact, his new partner Barney (Paul Whitehouse) is so upset by the first day of riding with Steel that he shoots himself. Now, he gets to choose between a Swedish woman, a monkey or a cheese plant. He goes Swedish and ends up with a woman bigger than he is.
When they go to the hospital to check in on the victim of a violent crime, he meets Professor Van Rental (also Mort), a vampire hunter who informs him that bloodsuckers are basically unhoused people now, driven by a need for blood in the same way that winos need rotgut. Oh yeah — Steel also has to meet with the police psychiatrist Dr. Alex Cular (Jennifer Saunders) who is making all the rest of the policemen ineffective.
Chuck is bitten in a vampire attack, his new partner dies and he ends up working with the Professor in the hopes of stopping the curse before midnight. He also gets Giggles the monkey as his next partner.
As you can tell by this description so far, this stop-motion movie is ridiculous, combining 80s action hero silliness with vampires, good dumb humor and clay gore. It was made with 425 puppets and I’d never even heard of it, which is a shame, because it’s way better than I thought it was going to be, featuring dramatic romantic scenes with clowns, Chuck becoming the chosen one of the homeless and an Illuminati lizard.
These movies are based on the book Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists by John L. Potash. Within the pages of that tome, you’ll learn how a group of opium-trafficking families came to form an American oligarchy and eventually achieved global dominance.
Sure, they may have helped fund the Nazi regime and then saved thousands of the Third Reich during Operation Paperclip to start the CIA and push LSD through MK-Ultra, but in the midst of their war on drugs which was funding by drugs, they got into targeting the left leaning groups that sought to usurp their power.
And then, they went after rock ‘n roll.
Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists (2018): After going after so many of the younger politically radicalized types that made up organizations like the Black Panthers, the ruling class — according to this film, directed and written by Potash — went after the artists who inspired them.
How did LSD get into the public consciousness? Did MK-Ultra agents party at acid tests? Why did George Harrison and John Lennon’s dentist dose them? Why would the FBI give the Rolling Stones drugs and then turn around and bust them? Who killed Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin? Did this strange method of connecting with the youth culture also claim the lives of Tupac and Kurt Cobain?
As we hear from narrator Douglas Barron, the film contends that everyone from Yoko Ono and Timothy Leary to Ken Kesey and Courtney Love were government agents used to hook stars on different drugs and then kill them when they tried to get clean.
It all seems a little too simple, but this documentary reminds me of the times when conspiracy theories were ramshackle narratives that collapsed when you pricked the balloon of them too much. Sure, we’d love to believe that John Lennon wasn’t an egomaniac drug abuser and wife beater. We hope that Tupac is still alive. Maybe through conspiracy, we are able to get back to the parasocial relationships that we have with rock stars.
Or maybe not.
This also willy nilly rips off so many web sites, Nick Broomfield’s documentaries, Benjamin Statler’s Soaked In Bleach, YouTube videos and anything it can get its hands on to build its narrative which skips around so much and frankly skips so many things that you wonder if this is also a compromised conspiracy. Or, you know, if you’re like me, deny everything until finally you can’t deny the idea of reality itself.
I kind of do love the idea that the government created Courtney Love to be a James Shelby Downard-style wires out the butt honey pot exotic dancing in Japan before she could legally drive and getting Cobain hooked on heroin so that his stomach would stop hurting which is the exact opposite of how heroin usually treats its addicts before he heals his stomach and she pays El Duce to shoot him.
CIA Drugs R Us! A Drugs as Weapons… Sequel (2024): Listed as a “comic sequel” to the first movie, this covers much of the same ground with more focus on Lennon, Cobain and Tupac, as well as how MK-Ultra was connected with the Manson Family (never mentions that sex films including Sharon Tate and the Hollywood elites), the government infiltrating the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and finally, gloms on to The Keepers by exploring the Maryland’s Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and how it may be connected to MK-Ultra.
This has the same YouTube of the 2000s quality along with music by a band called ElectroCult Circus which I figure has director and writer Potash as a member. That may also because none of the many bands in this would be OK with their music being taken for it. Then again, there’s a Chris Rock joke taken directly from one of his specials.
This also goes deep into Amanda Claire Marian Charteris, Countess of Wemyss and March, who founded the Foundation to Further Consciousness (now the Beckley Foundation). This group uses psychoactive drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction while enhancing well-being and creativity. She also trepanned herself in 1970 with a dental drill. That means she drilled directly into her brain to expand her consciousness. In the world of this film, this woman is behind so many things and that LSD can have no positive benefits no matter what because it was used by Nazis to kill your favorite rock star.
I’m paraphrasing.
Despite having a three-hour length, I watched and enjoyed all of it. Your mileage — like that of my wife — may vary, as she said that she felt that this lasted for a week and only cared when The Keepers was mentioned. The connection this movie makes, like all of the best conspiracy theories, is tenuous.
I yearn for the days when politics hadn’t yet invaded my safe space of fake moon landings and UPC codes being the Mark of the Beast. Yes, this is beyond left-leaning, but it made me wistful for Art Bell and wildcat lines.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain. You can also read an interview with the creators here and listen to the podcast about this movie here.
Mt. Misery Road is a real place and this movie is inspired by real events. You know how that goes — many movies have bragged of the same thing. There supposedly was an insane asylum that burned down — perhaps caused by one of the women held there — and a white dress wearing ghost that wanders the woods at night. It’s also a treacherous path to take — it’s one of the highest peaks in Long Island. There is also a “gravity hill” there where your car will roll uphill (this isn’t unique, there are several in the United States; one is in Ross Township right outside of Pittsburgh, for example). If you’d like to know more about Mt. Misery Road, this New York Daily News article is pretty informative.
Speaking of movies inspired by supposedly real events, the name Amityville has been used by at least 23 films. In 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family inside the large Dutch Colonial home on 112 Ocean Avenue, which was located in the suburbs of Long Island in a town called — you guessed it — Amityville. Four years later, the Lutz family moved in and left within 28 days due to the phenomena that attacked them while they were there. It became a book, a movie and another PR opportunity for the Warrens before taking over the public consciousness. The very name Amityville leads one to think of that house with the haunted windows today.
Very few of those movies inspired by the Lutz family are worth watching, save Amityville II: The Possession, a completely unhinged Italian exploitation movie wrapped in American big studio clothes. Even the original and remake are only just OK; Amityville 3-D has its moments and then it’s a mixed bag from then on out.
Making matters worse, starting with 1990’s The Amityville Curse, the Amityville brand name has mostly meant direct to video and limited release efforts. An exception is the 2005 remake of the original, which somehow makes the somewhat boring 1979 film even more pedantic. We’ve had so many Amityville movies now and more arrive almost every few hours. What’s next? Our dog is currently working on The Amityville Doghouse about a family of six chihuahuas who wonder why they got their dream house so cheap until a ghost cat arrives.
Now, the legend of Mt. Misery Road — no relation to Clinton Road, which also has a movie that we saw recently — and Amityville have come together in the film Amityville Mt. Misery Road.
This film is a true auteur project from the husband and wife team of Chuck and Karolina Morrongiello. Together, the couple did everything — writing, directing, producing, acting, set decoration, makeup, the music — along with one or two other names, like Elan Menkin, who helped with the edit and sound.
Within the film, Chuck and Karolina play a couple named Charlie and Buzi who are obsessed with the paranormal. The movie starts with an incredibly long sequence where Charlie drives to his house and checks his mail. It might be the longest vehicle drive to a home I’ve seen since the epic van journey of Thor in Rock ‘N Roll Nightmare. Even opening the mailbox and getting to the front door necessitates nearly ten jump cuts and we haven’t even gotten into the front door of Charlie’s palatial Florida home.
The next several moments of the film are spent watching the couple read the internet and learn about Mt. Misery Road in real time. Web page after web page — and even a slide show of monsters like demon dogs and Mothman — appear with both commenting on the proceedings before cuddling in bed and getting ready to fly to Long Island. Buzi has a prophetic nightmare that she will face off with the red eyes of the Mothman, but despite her pleas, they decide to go anyway.
This is a film made up of montages to the songs of Chuck Morrongiello. To be fair, he did play on an album with Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin. Finally, the pair make their way to a bar near the road and are warned off by an old man who seems like he’d rather be playing that One Touch Machine in the corner. Then, Buzi dances for around an hour or ten minutes. Time in this film works like that. And a visit to an expert on Mt. Misery Road just leads to another old man yelling at them, telling them to not go there, no matter what.
Well, Charlie and Buzi go there anyway and walk around the woods, exploring what has to be the remnants of the asylum and finding a cross just hanging off a tree. They get separated and their phones don’t work and Charlie gets attacked before the film ends with Buzi Blair Witch-style wandering the woods while swearing. Then she gets attacked before the movie ends.
I really have no idea how to review what I just watched. It’s like someone made their own movie just for themselves, but then along the way someone said, “You guys should totally sell that!” And then they did. It really does feel like a passion project between the couple and hey, they did really make a movie and get it on streaming services and into actual stores pressed on to actual DVDs. It does take some effort to make a film, even one as astoundingly bad as this one. So I can’t hate on it. Some people like to dress up their dogs. Other like to flip homes. It seems like Morrongiellos like to use their iPhones to make movies about ghosts. Whether or not you feel like encouraging them by spending $9.96 is totally up to you.
I mean, I was totally entertained and pulled Becca in to watch it with me. Whether or not I was entertained for the right reasons is up for debate.
If I had the opportunity to get a review line on the box cover, it would be edited down to say something like, “Not since Manos The Hands of Fate and Thingshave I been so…astounded by a film.” – B&S About Movies.
The IMDB review page for this film is pretty astounding, filled with one star and ten-star reviews and almost nothing in between, save one review that gives it 4/10 and says that it deserves more than ten stars. So there’s that.
Honestly, I can’t believe that this movie exists. I’m not sure if it even should. But if Chuck and Karolina Morrongiello decide to make a sequel, I’ll be first in line to see it.
Want to know more? Visit the official site. You can find this movie at Walmart — for actual proof, just take a look at the photo above, I’m as amazed as you are — and on Tubi.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent directly to us by Chuck Morrongiello. Quite obviously, that has had no impact on our review.
Here are the short films that I watched at this year’s Fantastic Fest.
A Fermenting Woman (2024): Visionary chef and master fermenter Marielle Lau (Sook-Yin Lee) is about to be let go from the restaurant that she has given her life to. However, she has an idea to save things, as she begins to ferment a new dish that has an ingredient that truly feels like part of her. Directed by Priscilla Galvez and written by Maisie Jacobson, this puts you directly into the kitchen and all the time and energy that this dish takes. And perhaps it’s a pun to say that it has her blood and sweat in it, because Marielle uses her menstrual blood in her garden, so she decides that it should be the main ingredient in this fermented food. Marielle has taken a piece of her, perhaps the egg that she will never get to fertilize, and gives it to people who don’t pay attention to a bite of their meal, instead ignoring it as simple sustenance when she has given everything to make it into their mouths. The truest horror is that we create — whether its foods or the words you’re reading now — just so that they can be consumed and forgotten.
ATOM & VOID (2024): Gonçalo Almeida has magic here, a mixture of effects and real spider, as it watches the end of all things and perhaps the birth of a new adventure. The score, sound design and look of this film all work together to create perfection, just a true joy of watching and listening. In fact, I went back several times and saw it again, one of the few advantages of seeing this online and not in a theater. If you get the opportunity to watch it, take it. This is a short that I will think of far beyond most full length movies I see this year.
Be Right Back (2023): Ah, the worst words to say in a horror movie. In this short, Maria is left home alone while her mother goes to buy dinner. However, her mother takes way longer than she should and as the night grows dark, Maria is startled when she hears a knock on the door. Is it her mother? Or is it something else? Have you ever gone shopping when you were young and gotten lost, then looked for your parents only to find someone who you thought were them and were instead strangers? That’s the feeling that this creates and it is not one I ever thought that I would live through ever again.
A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers (2024): As if I couldn’t love this short enough, just check out this paragraph from its creator, Birdy Wei-Ting Hung: “My first encounter with Yang Chia-Yun’s Fēng Kuáng Nǚ Shā Xīng / The Lady Avenger (1982) was an uncanny experience. I was researching Italian giallo film when a vintage newspaper movie poster grabbed my attention. The advert depicted a sensational female vigilante that visually recalled Edwige Fenech in Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colors of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972), only this time it was an Asian woman’s face. Her alluring body was barely covered by a white sheet, and her lustrous black hair rested on her collarbones. Standing in a martial art squat stance, the way she holds a katana (Japanese sword) is reminiscent of Meiko Kaji in Shurayuki-hime / Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973) and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill(Quentin Tarantino, 2003). I had found our lady avenger Wan-Ching, who was played by Hsiao-Feng Lu—the Taiwanese “sexy goddess” of the 1980s, and Taiwanese pulp films.”
This short is a video essay that mixes “two specific female characters in Taiwan Pulp films and Taiwanese New Wave…the female protagonists in Yang’s The Lady Avenger, and in Edward Yang’s Gǔ Lǐng Jiē Shǎo Nián Shā Rén Shì Jiàn / A Brighter Summer Day.”
I love that this film puts these movies against one another, just as a young woman spends a day in the theater savoring a watermelon drink while watching several films beyond the two mentioned, as Deep Red is one of them. A sexual awakening as well as an exploration of what film tells its viewers about the path that being a woman can take, this is one of the most gorgeous shorts I’ve seen in years. I want people to just give Birdy Wei-Ting Hung as much money as she needs to create movies that will inspire us in the same way that films have motivated her.
Bunnyhood (2024): “Mum would never lie to me, would she?” In this short by director Mansi Maheshwari, writers James Davis and Anna Moore, as well as several talented animators, Bobby (Maheshwari) learns the answer as he is rushed to the hospital. The frenetic style of the animation creates the worries of childhood, replicating the fears that aren’t always rooted in the rational or the real. The hospital and surgery come across as horrific places where nothing good can happen and at times, our parents will lie to us to keep us from worrying about the truth. Is that the right way to be a parent? Who can say!
CHECK PLEASE (2024): I am a veteran of the wars of fighting for the check. The director, Shane Chung, is too. He said, “As a kid, I witnessed firsthand the quickness with which friends can turn on each other whenever my parents took me to dinner with their pals. It was all smiles until it came time to pay for the bill – then the fangs came out. “I got it!” “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s my treat!” “You can get me next time!” It got so serious for no reason. Arguing, subterfuge… it was killing with kindness taken to another level. I wondered how far someone could take fighting to pay for the bill. Inspired by my love of goofy slapstick action comedies like Drunken Master and Everything Everywhere All At Once, I thought: what if they literally fought each other? I challenged myself to write a ten-minute long action scene where two Korean-Americans fought each other with chopsticks, grill coverings, and credit cards… and CHECK PLEASE was born.”
Starring Richard Yan and Sukwon Jeong, this is a simple story but is so perfect. It gets across what it means to be a man — paying the bill — as well as the director’s attempts at getting across the feeling of assimilating to a new culture. It’s also filled with great action. I laughed really hard throughout and found joy here.
Compost (2024): Directed by Augusto and Matías Sinay, this film presents an intriguing way at looking at grief. Anastasia (Natalia di Cienzo) has just lost the love of her life, Lisandro (Maximiliano Gallo), after an accident as he builds the greenhouse where she plans on spending most of her time. How can a dream place be as such when it is filled with so much pain? And can she carry through with his last wish, which is to become compost for their plants? Can we become part of the cycle of death and rebirth when emotions are part of our equation, unlike the plants that we help bring to birth each year, only to have to watch them die in the fall?
Considering Cats (2024): A short experimental documentary shot at the Long Island Pet Expo in 2023 by director Matt Newby, this short asks us to “Take a moment to consider the cat.” Seeing as how I live with two, I do this every day. This does a good job of showing the joy that people find in the small creatures that become part of our lives, if only for a short time, in an interesting lo-fi style.
Do Bangladroids Dream of Electric Tagore? (2024): Allem Hossain’s short is described as “desi-futuristic sci-fi.” Interesting. The director says that this genre is “a body of sci-fi work that dares to imagine speculative futures through a South Asian lens.”
In this, a documentarian goes into the New Jersey Exclusion Zone to meet the droids that live there and learn why they are obsessed with a subversive Bengali Renaissance poet. Featuring the poem “Freedom” by Rabindranath Tagore, which is read by Bernard White, this is AI generated but its director asks us to think of “how AI and other technology will impact us but I think we should also be thinking about our moral and ethical responsibilities towards what we create.”
Don’t Talk to Strangers (2023): Imanol Ortiz López has created a short that looks like vintage Kodachrome and is set within a toy store that only looks bright and friendly. Even the IMDB description of this movie is somewhat scary: “Mom always told me not to talk to strangers, but Agustín is not a stranger, because whenever we go to his store he offers me treats.” A young girl is saying that and in this, she’s played by Inés Fernández, who explains how she was abducted by Agustín (Julio Hidalgo). It sounds simple and expected, but in no way does what is revealed end up that way. A really interesting short.
Down Is the New Up (2018): Directed and written by Camille Cabbabe, this is the story of how an ambitious filmmaker and his crew attempt to tell the story of the last hours of a man who plans on killing himself at dawn. To be honest, I found it kind of indulgent and wish that I had spent a bit more time watching it. Maybe it was the language barrier or honestly how many shorts I watched in a few days, but there wasn’t anything here that jumped and grabbed me. I feel I owe the filmmaker an apology and am certainly willing to try and see what was here one more time.
DUCK (2024): The sell copy for this promises that this is “a classic spy thriller turned on its head.” What it is is a deep fake generated film starring almost every actor to blame James Bond and Marilyn Monroe, all voiced by director and writer Rachel Maclean.
As someone who uses AI for my real job and to create music, I have no hate for it. I do, however, dislike this movie. It should be something I love, one that gets into aliens and conspiracies while using pop culture characters. Instead, it feels like robbing the graves of the cemetery at the lowest part of Uncanny Valley. It goes on and on, reminding you of the much better work of the actors who it is raising from the dead to serve as stiff actors for a plot that can be worked out in seconds. I believe AI and deep fake can create the kind of cinema that we want to see, movies that create joy. This just engendered ennui.
Empty Jars (2024): After the last two shorts I watched, this brought back the love I have for film. Director Guillermo Ribbeck Sepúlveda has crafted a fantasy world where a woman (Ana Burgos) deals with the loud guests at her hostel by freeing a ghost from a jar, a spirit that, well, fills her with something else, giving her an experience that she hopes to replicate again and again. Yet, as this movie shares with us, the dead are even less trustworthy than the living. What a gorgeous looking and feeling short. I can’t wait to see what else Sepúlveda can do!
Faces (2024): Look out for Blake Simon. In this film by the director and writer, he starts with Judy (Cailyn Rice) being invited to a fraternity party by Brad (Ethan Daniel Corbett). However, in the ether all around this is a character called The Entity, a creature that has been abducting women the same age as our heroine, such as Bridget Henson. Now, as the frat party hits its height, the struggle for identity and who or what people are plays out. Faces feels like an entire film in its short running time and could easily become a full length feature. Whatever The Entity is, whatever it is looking for and why it does what it does are all unimportant. What is is that Simon seems ready to become a valued new talent in horror and this announces him so well.
Godfart (2023): Directed and written by Michael Langan, this is “The very true story of how the universe was created.” God (Russell Hodgkinson) is looking for breakfast. This short explains it all. This is part of something called the Doxology Universe. As someone who loves breakfast, I want to know more.
How My Grandmother Became A Chair (2020): Director and writer Nicolas Fattouh has created the perfect way of showing what it’s like to slowly lose an aging family member, something that I have gone through several times of the past years. His grandmother is losing her senses, one by one, until she — as the title lets you know early — becomes immobile furniture. There are times when it takes animation and the surreal to make life — which never makes all that much sense — something more easily explainable. This looks so wonderful and moves so perfectly that even though I knew where it was going, it still ended up as an emotional experience.
Huntsville, July 1981 (2024): In Sol Friedman’s short, four characters must deal with the ferocious attacks of a creature that is hiding in the woods. I loved the look of this, which seems like the wildest sketches the weirdest kid in school made and here they are, coming to life.
J’ai le Cafard (Bint Werdan) (2020): “J’ai le cafard” means “I have the cockroach,” yet it also means “I am depressed.” Director and writer Maysaa Almumin is followed everywhere by a dying large cockroach, which is her mental anguish. She connects more with this gigantic roach than anyone else around her until she realizes the impact that it is having on her life. I loved the puppet work and enjoyed seeing how this idea came to life. Can you be friends with an insect? This movie asks that question and I think the answer is yes, but roaches can be just as infuriating as people.
Manivelle: The Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow (2017): Directed by Fadi Baki Fdz, who wrote this with Omar Khouri and Lina Mounzer, this takes a realistic look at an unrealistic story, exploring the life of Manivelle, an automaton from Lebanon whose life seems to mirror the history of the country. His glory years were in the past, when life felt free, and today he is falling to pieces, his body failing him, reaching out in vain to people whose lives he ruined. Manivelle has been an actor, a soldier and now, he’s just a lost robot that claims to run a museum and read books, but he fails at all of that. I absolutely loved how this was shot. It’s perfect.
Yummo Spot (2024): Directed and written by Ashley Brandon, this is about a couple who moves to the woods and tries to start a family. Soon they learn that the Live, Laugh, Love lifestyle may be more difficult than they thought. This had a strange vibe but you may enjoy it more than me.
Two of Hearts (2024):Director and writer Mashie Alam places a boy (Anaiah Lebreton) and a girl (Basia Wyszynski) in a battle over some decisions, like eating a piece of pizza. Are they brother and sister? Are they a couple? Where did they get all of those great clothes? What’s happening? This is one of those times when the way something is filmed outdoes the basics of the script. Does the title refer to a Stacey Q song? Where is this house where they live? Can I visit? This movie has an amazing look and I want all of the answers to these questions and so many more. It’s good to have questions. It’s good to want to know more.
Skeeter (2024): Chris McInroy gets me every time. Actually, he’s made me physically sick a few of those times, no complaints. That’s because his movies are always fun, like this one, where someone has been raised by mosquitoes. If you’ve seen his movies Guts, We Joined a Cultand We Forgot About the Zombies, you know what you’re in for here. Thank you again, Chris, for shocking me and reminding me to never eat popcorn — or any food — during your movies.
31. “THE FINAL CHAPTER”: Last in a series… Get it?
Death Race: Beyond Anarchy is the most 2000s movie I have ever seen and I am astounded that it was made in 2018. It has people with rivet faces, distressed fonts everywhere, costumes that feel like they came from the back room of a Hot Topic in a forgotten box filled with JNCO jeans and Mudvayne shirts, a DMX song on the soundtrack right alongside nu metal, a vague anti-authority anti-jail plot that is never really explored, smoky eyeshadow for everyone, Danny Trejo double Dannying it up with Danny Glover (still too old for this shit 31 years after being too old for this shit in Lethal Weapon), Paul W.S. Anderson still writing movies (honestly, if you were married to Mila Jovovich would you be writing direct to video Death Race movies?), stuttery action with pauses before people attack, a strip club bar at the end of the world and yes, a sequel to the 2008 Death Race when there were already two other ones. You know that I bought the box set at WalMart.
Weyland International runs the Sprawl, a massive prison where Death Race — despite being illegal — is the most important thing in the world, a way of life that enables Frankenstein (Velislav Pavlov, voiced by Nolan North) to run the entire prison with his army of Slipknot fans. Even an army of cops can’t stop Frankenstein, who has his men chainsaw off a cop’s head and yells into the camera on the dead man’s helmet, telling the government and big business to send whoever they want.
A whole new bunch of prisoners are sent to the Sprawl and given silver dollars. That money is taken by Johnny Law (Nicholas Aaron) and his gang, who kill everyone but two ciphers: Connor Gibson (Zach McGowan) and Gipsy Rose (Yennis Cheung). She disappears, he is taken by a gang of women to meet Frankenstein and Buffalo Bob (Glover), who supplies the gasoline to the cars in Death Race. He also meets Jane (Christine Marzano), who will be the romance part of this movie.
Gipsy Rose qualifies for Death Race, as does Connor. Frankenstein reveals that he is Sergeant Connor Gibson, a special operative sent inside to kill him, and that puts everyone inside The Sprawl on him. Yet he will be in the Death Race alongside his navigator Bexie (Cassie Clare) while Frankenstein takes Jane with him for insurance.
They race against a field that includes Thin Lizzy (Neli Angelova), Matilda the Hun (Jasette Amos) — at least someone remembers the actual inspiration for this — Nazi Boy (Velizar Peev) and even a guy who is racing in what looks like a go kart. Johnny Law has a monster police truck and gets shot in the head and his vehicle blows up real good. Everyone does, leaving Frankenstein and Connor, but there are still a few turns before the end.
I know that Danny Trejo plays Goldberg, the same character he was in the last two movies. I have no idea what his deal is other than showing up in a bar, gambling and being around attractive women.
The character Lists (Fred Koehler) also returns.
Director Don Michael Paul is the sequel guy who made Jarhead 2: Field of Fire, Sniper: Legacy, Kindergarten Cop 2, Tremors 5: Bloodlines, Sniper: Ghost Shooter, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, Jarhead: Law of Return, Bulletproof 2 and Tremors: Shrieker Island. Before he made movies, he was in Lovelines, Dangerously Close, Down Twisted and Rolling Vengeance.
That’s right, the guy who starred in a monster truck movie made one.
Two sisters, Celeste (Felice Jankell) and Isa (Erica Midfjäll), tried to change their lives with a self-help record from the 70s that was supposed to stop stress and create a calming sense of self thanks to self-hypnosis. The problem is that it creates a doppelganger of the listener that grows strong enough that it eventually replaces the person who let it into the world. Only one person can save Celeste and Isa: hypnotist Lena Carlsson (Christina Lindberg!), the voice of the album who created it with her father, who worked at the Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research and who believed that magnetism is the only way for people to reach their full potential.
Directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano (Here Comes the Devil, Late Phases), Black Circle is a movie that I have been waiting to watch for some time. I loved the look of this movie, one that tries to mess with your senses from the very beginning and continues playing with time and space as the record overtakes minds.
I could have maybe done without the straight-up X-Men expansion of the story with telepathic psychics Victor (Johan Palm) and Selma (Hanna Asp) who have been sent by The Supreme to help destroy the doppelgangers. What I did love was the idea of the darkness that is coming for Celeste and Isa, one of their own making, because when it seems like it’s so simple to fix your life, it may only be the way to make it much worse.
Also: Christina Lindberg needs to be in more movies. I’m so excited to see her in this, a film deserving of the queen of They Call Her One Eye. My time spent counting the days until I could see this were worth it.
The Synapse blu ray release of Black Circle comes with the soundtrack on compact disc, audio commentary with director Adrian Garcia Bogliano, the teaser trailer, a short entitled Don’t Open Your Eyes, an interview with Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Christina Lindberg, a behind the scenes feature and a stills gallery.
During their youth, Cade and his identical twin brother Cale (Neil Breen, who pretty much did every single thing possible on this movie) were abducted by aliens and transformed. They were both secret agents for some time, but Cale didn’t fit in while Cade remained, missing his brother while he protects America’s troops.
Cale is up to a mission of his own, kidnapping important business people when he isn’t doing pills with his lover Donna. There’s also Cuzzx, a man conducting a cyber attack and Alana, a girl that it seems like Cade is stalking when in truth she’s his girlfriend in a scene that pads time in a way that only Neil Breen can.
Also: Cale has the worst beard perhaps in the history of beards which makes me love him.
Cuzzx has all these people hooked up to VR goggles — yell it with me, programmable virtual reality! — and he kills a homeless man who is friends with Cade, just as Cale and Donna break up and she tracks down Cade and asks where his beard went and also, can he get her some drugs?
Neither of the brothers can pick a girlfriend, because Alana has been in the employ of Cuzzx all along and she shoots him, but somehow he survives. She goes into a virtual world to say goodbye to him and he forgives her. Cade then tells us that we will all live in a VR world some day.
A movie shot over stock footage and greenscreens, Twisted Pair feels like it has to be a stunt but no, this is how Neil Breen makes movies. I haven’t seen the sequel, Cade: The Tortured Crossing, but I don’t think my life will have meaning until I do.
I really love Breen’s movies, if you didn’t pick up on that yet. They become comforting when you get used to the word patterns and the repeating motifs of great power, childhood loss and greatness being achieved in adulthood. According to his site, he can also design and sell your house. I can’t even imagine.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on . As I’ll be exploring the films of Jason Trost this week, this movie has been reposted.
Years after the events of The FP, JTRO (Jason Trost) and KCDC (Art Hsu), former members of the 248 gang, must travel through the Wastes to save the FP all over again in a Beats of Rage tournament. This time, the enemy is AK-47, the leaders of the Wastes, and he may finally be the man who will 187 JTRO.
This is the first of many planned sequels to The FP, despite Trost and none of the film’s investors making any money from that film. He said that it was a challenge “to figure out a way to get people to fund a sequel to a movie that recouped zero dollars.” The inspiration for this one is Escape from L.A. while the next film will be like Rocky Balboa (which makes sense, as the line about girls taking away your legs appears here word for word from Rocky).
Much like The FP, you’ll enjoy this if your early years on this Earth were primarily spent playing side-scrolling beat ’em ups like Double Dragon and watching post-apocalyptic movies.
The final chapter of the Malice series, Malice: Emergence has Alice (Brittany Martz) thinking that she’s about to escape her small town for college. But that creature that lives under her house won’t let her leave nor will a government operation that sneaks into town and captures her, fills her with truth serum and interrogates her to discover what exactly is going on.
Phillip J. Cook somehow made this for me because he must have reached into my brain and saw that I was looking for a film where a tough heroine battles the government — even wondering if she’s the next Ruby Ridge — to defend what amounts to be a mushroom god. Alice goes from “the girl who blows things up” to the girl that literally faces off with Apache helicopters and unleashes tentacles upon them while her friends open fire on the U.S. armed forces who have been coerced into overstepping their authority.
The end of this came with some sadness, as I felt like I grew with the characters across all three collected movies. Here’s hoping there’s more coming from the mind of Cook, who continually surprises me with each new adventure.
You can watch this on Tubi. You can watch the individual chapters here.
At one point in this movie, Linda Moulton Howe discusses how she was inside a crop circle and a space voice spoke to her and sounded like a tiger. This is why I watch the movies of Cybela Clare.
Cybela has brought together her experts again — Linda, Robert Dean, Robert Morningstar, Nick Pope and Richard Dolan — to discuss how aliens and humans can speak via their minds and, yes, crop circles.
So yeah, some say things like “there is no scientific evidence for such explanations and all crop circles are consistent with human causation.” I personally don’t believe that they are a weather-based phenomena and the thought of human beings making them seems quite frankly boring. I certainly place even less stock in the story that Australian wallabies were running in circles after eating opium-laced poppies than I do in aliens.
I don’t want to know things, to be honest. Sure, I want to learn about them and study them, but I don’t want to know the exact answers to whether aliens exist or if crop circles are magnetism or if there are or aren’t bases on the moon. Will I listen to people discuss them? Obviously, yes. But as Lemmy once sang, “The chase is better than the catch.”
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