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.

You can get this from MVD.

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 May 1, 2022. 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.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

After the events of the first Malice, Alice (Brittany Martz) tries to live a normal life but is known in her school as “the girl who blows things up.” Now, she’s haunted by dark dreams of an epic medieval battle, Roman solders and the armored specter of her deceased father. You know, normal teen stuff.

But Alice is a teen. She speaks like one. Acts like one. And this film just feels so completely authentic to me, despite its fantasy setting.

After barely surviving the confrontation with the beast beneath her house — which cost her the life of her father (Mark Hyde), yet she was able to save her mother (Leanna Chamish, Deborah Merritt from the WNUF Halloween Special!) and sister Abbey (Nora Parker) — Alice is concerned that she’s really going mad instead of dealing with nightmares that promise that a great reckoning is due to come to her small town. And oh yeah, she has a stepfather, Jed Spry (Matt Gulbranson), and Catholic school to deal with.

I realize that this is a super low budget effort — like all of Phillip Cook’s movies — but it’s deserving of your time to watch it. How often do you get a movie that deals with fantasy, growing up, ecoterrorism, conspiracy and a tough and capable girl being in charge?

You can watch this on Tubi. You can also watch all of the original episodes here.

“The third planet is sure that they’re being watched
By an eye in the sky that can’t be stopped
When you get to the promised land
You’re gonna shake that eye’s hand”

This time, Cybela Clare has brought together a group of experts — Richard Dolan, Linda Moulton Howe, Robert Morningstar, Nick Pope and Debbie Ziegelmeyer — to explain how Antarctica came to b, how UFOs got there, the secrets of Mars, why the moon is like Antarctica, underwater bases and so much more.

Were Adam and Eve aliens? Are there pyramids under the ice? How does Elon Musk fit in?

I love all of Clare’s alien films because they just barrage you with facts and every once in a while, you stop wondering how and why people would believe such a thing and start believing it for yourself. You don’t need to pay for cable and watch Ancient Aliens to see this. Her movies are out there, changing and blowing minds. This movie reminds me of the days of the strange, unusual and conspiracy-minded before the fun of the unexplained went from Coast to Coast to MAGA and Q-Anon. Finally, weirdness I can just enjoy non-politically and just zone out and oh yeah, I totally believe that we’re all descended from gods from space. I have since Rod Serling told me about it in UFOs: Past, Present, and Future.

You can watch this on Tubi.

From 1968-1991, Pauline Kael reviewed movies for the New Yorker and made film criticism into an art form. As a result of her writing, people began to think more about the movies they saw, transforming entertainment into something that could become even more. She had her enemies and her fans, even today. Like Quentin Tarantino, who said, “Kael was so on the nose at times that she could sometimes change your mind about a film you may have thought was pretty good.”

Directed and written by Rob Garver, this takes the life and reviews of Kael and turns it into a movie worth watching. It’s told mainly in her own words — spoken by Sarah Jessica Parker — which are taken from interviews, private letters and published writing.

Kael had one standard. Movies shouldn’t bore her. I’d like to think that she’d enjoy the movie that came out of her life. It seems incredibly meta for me to attempt to review this, but it made me think of the way that I look at films.

The MVD DVD of this movie has extras that include interviews with Quentin Tarantino and Paul Schrader, deleted scenes and a never before released interview of Alfred Hitchcock by Pauline Kael. You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing a 35mm print of this movie on Friday, Jan. 27 at 7:30 PM at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. For more information, visit Cinematic Void or purchase tickets here. 

Knife + Heart is a true anomaly when it comes to giallo. It’s from France, a country more given to the fantastique film than the giallo — though there are movies like The Night Caller, Without Apparent Motive and The Night Under the Throat. And its victims aren’t gorgeous women, but the actors of the gay porn industry, changing the psychosexual dynamics of the form.

Instead of featuring the sounds of a band like Goblin or a score by the likes of Morricone or Orlandi, Knife + Heart has music by Anthony Gonzalez of M83 who is director Yann Gonzalez’s brother.

A young man is killed by a masked man whose very sex conceals his murder weapon to open the film. Then, we meet Anne (Vanessa Paradis), an adult film director who has recently been abandoned by her girlfriend and editor Lois. The man killed in the opening was the star of several of her films; now she must find an actor to take his place. That leads her to Nans, who despite identifying as a straight man agrees to be in her movie.

The new film — Homocidal — will be her version of the murders, which continue targeting members of her cast. The police either can’t — or won’t — help. But the movie gets finished and as the group celebrates its completion with a picnic, the killer strikes again, just as Anne pretty much assaults Lois in an attempt to get her back.

The true killer is a man whose father caught him making love to another man. He killed his lover and castrated his son, who was also burned in a fire before being brought back from the dead by a blind crow — the fact that this movie isn’t called Call of the Blind Crow speaks to its non-Italian origins — and seeing one of Anne’s movies brought his memories back.

This being a giallo, there’s also a bird expert with a disfigured hand that looks like he has, quite literally, chicken fingers. Plus, the entire end of the movie is explained via voiceover. The fact that so much of this movie is given to style over substance means that it lives up to the movies that inspired it.

While the murders are in your face, the sex is nearly hidden from view. And Anne is an intriguing protagonist — drunken and bitter instead of the normal virginal giallo and slasher ingenues that save the day. She instead brings the killer closer with each scene that she directs.