In a future world, a series of stories tells the narrative of a world just about ready to die. Whether its soldiers like K (Johann Myers) and Z (Géza Röhrig) seeking meat to survive or children going missing, this is a world much worse than our own, were that possible. Welcome to the time of Undergods.

This film gets a lot of mileage out of its bleak cityscapes of Serbia and Estonia, the synths of Wojciech Golczewski and a constantly shifting narrative. It doesn’t really all add up, but it does point to writer and director Chino Moya being a formidable talent.

The stories that are told — a married couple is split by a neighbor who never wants to leave, a businessman screws over a stranger who ruins his life and a woman’s first husband returns to ruin her life even further  — could take place at any time. The fact that they take place in a world that may one day be our own has a certain dark charm to it.

You can watch Undergods on demand from Gravitas Ventures.

After years of no contact, a phone call reconnects Leo (Joey Millin) with his sister Virginia (Madison West). Their estrangement comes from her years of drug abuse and when he finds her, she’s seemingly going through an overdose. However, she tells him that she’s been clean for eight months thanks to a mysterious group that has revealed themselves to be a cult. Worse, they have tied her emotions and feelings to a dark man that she has never met. She begs Leo to help her find him. She agrees that if her story is not true, she will finally go to rehab. Yet in the midst of this emotionally charged time, Leo starts to realize that Virginia may be finally telling the truth.

Threshold was improvised and shot on two iPhones over the course of a 12-day road trip with a crew of just three. It’s the second movie by co-directors Powell Robinson, Patrick R. Young and producer Lauren Bates. It’s not a traditional horror film, but builds to dense and dark ending. And hey — it’s 78 minutes, which is pretty much the perfect length.

You can watch Threshold on Arrow’s online service. Beyond this film, the Arrow online service also offers many of this boutique label’s latest releases, with everything from Asian cinema to westerns, giallo and horror.

Arrow is available in the US, Canada and the UK on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices , Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc) and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. You can start with a 30-day free trial.

You know, for all the disdain that I usually heap upon modern horror, I’m all about finding newer movies that connect with me. Case in point, this cute comedy that explains gentrification as vampirism and puts some young kids up against ancient evil.

Writer and director Oz Rodriguez is probably best known for his digital shorts on SNL. Lorne Michaels produced this movie, which is quite aware of the humor within horror without forgetting that things still need to be scary.

Murnau Properties is buying up the Bronx and the only people that notice — or even care — are Miguel, Bobby and Luis, three kids who’ve learned everything they need to know about vampires from watching Blade.

This movie also posits that gangs are just as much vampirism as blood-sucking, placing the future of the boys’ lives against a world that wants to ignore and not care about anyone living in the Bronx, which is exactly why the vampires put up, well, stakes there.

I’m always up for seeing more Chris Redd and this film also has Method Man as a priest. It’s a fun time that makes you think a little while neer forgetting that it needs to entertain you.

From the minute Sam (Sawyer Spielberg) and Rylie (Malin Barr) get lost in the country and have their battery run down, their fate is sealed. I’m not giving you a spoiler warning. The fact is that you’re going to know exactly what you’re getting into with Honeydew, a film that retells the same backwoods cannibal religious family story you’ve been seeing since Tobe Hooper grabbed some guts from a butcher shop and let them dry out in the Texas heat to diminishing returns nearly every time.

They make their way to a farmhouse where a woman named Karen and a man we think is her son have both gone mental from sordico, a poisonous spore that infects food and can cause all manner of mental derangement. The more Sam eats — he hasn’t been allowed any real food in a while — the more he starts dreaming of characters in old cartoons discussing his stomach problems.

So yeah. I could tell you the story of Honeydew in a few sentences, but it’s another one of those movies that take forever and a day to get to its not all that shocking ending. You’ve seen it all before, but here it is with slick typography, slow-motion sequences and split screens.

Writer/director/editor Devereux Milburn has plenty of talent and I think there could be a pretty great movie from him someday. But this really isn’t it. Your mileage may vary because if we’ve learned anything from the movies that I talk about on this site it’s that today’s elevated horror just doesn’t grab me in the way that it should.

I tried to be reasonable in this review and not go with my gut, which was just to say, “Honey don’t.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally shared this review on January 19, 2021. Now, you can watch Clapboard Jungle on the ARROW streaming app. 

This movie follows Justin McConnell (Lifechanger) over five years in his life and career as an independent filmmaker, as he continually asks himself, “How does an indie filmmaker survive in the current film business?”

Beyond the story of McConnell, this has plenty of quotes and advice from an army of filmmakers, actors and others behind the scenes, including Guillermo del Toro, Mick Garris, Paul Schrader, Lloyd Kaufman, George Romero, Brian Yuzna, Larry Cohen, Tom Holland, John McNaughton, Uwe Boll, Sid Haig, Jenn Wexler, Don Mancini, Frank Henenlotter, Charles Band, Tom Savini, Richard Stanley, Dean Cundey and so many more.

This is more than just a documentary. It feels like an essential watch for anyone thinking about making a film. With so many of the films that we watch, we only see the end results on screen. There is so much more that we will never know and work we can’t imagine, which makes me think more about how I write when I discuss these films. No matter how down and dirty some movies are, they are someone’s labor of love.

You can learn more at the official site. This is available on demand from Gravitas in the U.S. and Indiecan Entertainment in Canada, and will be released on blu ray from Arrow Video for the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they will release it on blu ray.

After visiting her father’s grave, Lilly (Valerie Jane Parker, the 2021 version of Wrong Turn) and her mother get into a car accident that leaves her blind and an orphan. As she struggles with the loss of her sight, she starts to hear voices and just thinks that it’s some form of synesthesia. The truth is that these voices are souls stuck in limbo looking for a way back into our world. And that way? Years later, it becomes Lily’s unborn child.

Voices is the first full-length film by director Nathaniel Nuon, working with writer Daniel Hathcock (they also have a film called Paralyzed in production). They also have some known faces in this film, like Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism), Jordan Ladd (Cabin Fever) and Leslie Easterbrook (Sgt. Callahan from the Police Academy series).

Somewhere in this film is a great idea and a good film, but it struggles to emerge. The central conceit of a blind girl rising past a rough childhood and the voices that helped her deal with the loss of her sight becoming either demonic or cold cases left behind is a fantastic storytelling engine that a lot can be done with. Instead, this movie is never sure what movie it wants to be. Is it a drama with bits of the supernatural? Is it a false memory story? An exploration of growing up with a handicap? Or is it all of these things at the same time and unsure of itself?

I wanted to like this movie more than I did, so I’ll keep an eye out for Paralyzed and hope that the filmmakers will use this film — which trust me, has some worthwhile moments — as a learning experience. Judicious editing of twenty minutes or so would have gone a long way, too.

The Voices is now available online. You can learn more at the official site.

Notzilla is a goofball movie that Mitch Teemley spent decades writing and planning. I mean, the film has a kaiju with a giant zipper over his chest — it should be on his back — so obviously it’s out to have as much fun as possible.

I loved how the soldiers were all obviously toys, but this is the kind of movie that works better as a fake trailer than an actual movie. However, the idea of pouring beer on a kaiju egg to make it hatch appeals to me.

There’s room for making fun of the kaiju genre, but for some reason, I didn’t feel that this movie was laughing with the films it is trying to be, but instead at them. That doesn’t play well around here.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on Jill Gevargizian’s award-winning short of the same name, The Stylist reunites the director with actress Najarra Townsend. She stars as Claire, a hairstylist who becomes obsessed beyond with her clients. One of them, Olivia (Brea Grant), is a bride with has made the horrible mistake of hiring Claire for her big day.

Let me sell this movie in the best way that I can: Becca hates nearly every modern horror movie that we watch together and she liked this because of how dark and strange that it was.

Claire styles hair by day and at night, she kills and takes the scalps of her victims, becoming them for a short time. She becomes obsessed with Olivia’s perfect life as she becomes more of a friend than just a stylist and tries to hide her collection of scalps and stop killing. But can she change who she is as easily as she puts on new bloody masses of hair?

Be warned: my wife also has an incredibly strong stomach when it comes to slashers and there were moments in this film that nearly upset her. The scalping scenes are on par with Maniac for their bloodletting, which is pretty much as high as I can praise a film.

It’s astounding that a modern film can synthesize the slasher with the color theories of the giallo while not playing the story for laughs at all. It allows us to sympathize with a character that we should despise. It also has a female point of view about a woman attempting to navigating her way through the world and the issues she faces as a female by, you know, murdering nearly every woman she gets close to. It’s one of my favorite movies that I’ve watched so far this year and definitely recommend it with that caveat — there is a fair amount of blood. But hey — you need it for an ending this in your face.

The Stylist is streaming exclusively on the ARROW platform in the US, Canada and the UK.

If you’d like to see the short that this was based on, you can watch it on YouTube.

How did it take this long for a Jackie Chan movie to wind up on our site?

Here, he plays Tang, CEO of the covert security company Vanguard, who must protect an accountant and his family are targeted by the world’s deadliest mercenary organization.

I kind of dug how this movie flies all over the world —  London, Zambia, India, an Arabian desert, Dubai — and feels like Jackie leading a G.I. Joe-like team. That said, he still appears in several great stunts sequences without stealing the spotlight too much.

This is the sixth movie Chang has made with Stanley Tong, including Rumble in the Bronx,  Police Story 3: Super Cop,  Police Story 4: First Strike, The Myth and Kung Fu Yoga.

Chan almost drowned during the jet ski sequence, as a rock had him underwater. When he finally surfaced, Tong — who often would do any stunt he asked of an actor before they did it — burst into tears.

This isn’t a perfect Jackie movie — go for Project A, Drunken Master and Armor of God if you want that — but even a lower-tier Jackie Chan movie is better than nearly anything else you’ll see this year.

Vanguard is available on demand, on DVD and on blu ray from LionsGate, who were kind enough to send us a review copy.

Ruben and Carlos (Ernesto Reyes and Jesse Tayeh) are two men who have met in prison. Ruben is there because of an accident, which causes him problems with the cartel he works for and the family he comes from. Within the walls of the jail, the two men find comfort, stability and what seems like love with one another. But is it real? Or is it just a port in a storm?

Director and writer Jon Garcia tells an intriguing story here. While not a movie I would look for on my own, I grew to appreciate the love between the two men despite the very macho world that they both come from. LUZ does not shy away from showing every aspect of their story, with some very well-shot love scenes.

You can see this movie in select theaters on March 19 and on demand and on DVD April 6 from Dark Star Pictures.