This is a spin-off five-minute film from Nicholas Michael Jacobs’ Tales from Six Feet Under, just like the last film he sent us, Genevieve. Actually, it feels exactly the same as that movie without all that much difference. This is all about “David Burr’s last few minutes of life as Genevieve punishes him for breaking into her home.”
The truth is, this movie is five minutes long, with two minutes and twenty seconds of that time being the credits. I’m all for reusing footage, but this just feels like a throwaway when Jacobs does seem to have talent.
Philip “Hawk” Hawkins (Ryan Barton-Grimley, who wrote, produced and directed) was kicked out of the army for killing someone who he thought was a vampire and has been thrown out of his parents’ house, too. He’s working as a security guard in Santa Muerta, California — which would probably be great if it wasn’t for all the gd vampires — when some actual vamps show up. Only one person believes him, his vegetarian pacifist friend Revson “Rev” McCabe (Ari Schneider). Can these two save the world? Well, maybe not. But they might be able to save their neighborhood.
Will Hawk get the love of Theo (Jana Savage)? Will Rev escape unharmed? Will their mysterious eyepatched mentor teach them the ways of vampire butt kickery? How does that goth band fit in? Will mummies show up?
I absolutely loved this quick — 84 minutes! — blast of 80’s infused horror comedy, which moves at a lighting pace and makes you fall for all of its characters. I could foresee several films within this world and hope that this is exactly what the filmmakers intend! Hell, this could be a video game, a comic, action figures, a marital aid line…
This may also win the award for the most volume of blood I’ve seen in a movie in 2020. Or at least the funniest use of way too much blood. Ah, what am I saying? Too much is never enough.
Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers was the midnight movie on the opening and closing nights of the Dances with Film Festival and will soon be available on demand from October Coast. You can learn more on the official site and offical Facebook page.
Etheria is a new series of horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, and thriller episodes from women directors. Shudder shared a series of Etheria shorts earlier this year, so you may have seen those stories. Season one is also available on Amazon.
Having these unconnected tales air as a series instead of cramming them into a portmanteau was a good idea, as while they share a similar thread, they all look and feel so different that having them appear as episodes of a show makes much more sense.
The first story, “Sweet Little Unforgettable Thing,” is all about Maddy, a sweet girl who tries to reinvent herself to win over a new boy she’s met at the roller skate rink. However, that handsome stranger ends up being a killer. Look for Sally Kirkland as Maddy’s grandmother! This was written and directed by Chloe Okuno and originally released in 2014. I wish this story had more time to grow — something that you can say for several episodes — but while it lasts, it’s pretty entertaining.
“Sheila Scorned” is the second episode and it’s written and directed by Mara Tasker. Originally released in 2015, it’s all about Sheila, who screws up a drug deal and gets kidnapped from the club that she dances at. However, the men who take her aren’t ready for just how rough she can be. You can learn more about this short at the official site.
2013’s “Gödel Incomplete” is a romance story that travels through time, uniting Serita Cedric (Elizabeth Debicki, Ayesha from Guardians of the Galaxy 2), a research student working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, with Kurt Godel, who was considered to be amongst the foremost logicians in the history of man. It was written and directed by Martha Goddard, who lends this segment the most sheen and professionalism of all the segments.
2015’s “Shevenge” was directed by Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) from a story by Jessica Sherif and Megan Lee Joy, who appear in this episode as two of the three women (Emme Ryan of General Hospital is the other lead) who dream of either destroying or changing their boyfriends and decide to use the occult to become empowered. The humor really works in this segment and gives it a real difference from the other stories.
“Cowboy Kill Club” is written and directed by Gabrielle Lim and Jean Parsons. It’s about three dancers in Bangkok’s underworld who decide to wipe out a sinister cartel of sex traders. It’s almost too basic and short for anything to really get movie and would have benefitted from more time. This film was originally released as a short in 2015.
Writer/director Mary Russell’s “Carved” also came out in 2015 and is perhaps the best shot of any of these stories for translating well into a longer feature. I’d be interested to see what else Russell does in the future, as this is a solid and assured piece all about the spirit of a murderer infiltrating a Vegas roadtrip. For more information on the creator, you can visit her official website.
“El Gigante” has already been airing on Shudder. This 2014 effort by Gigi Saul Guerrero (who directed the “Día de los Muertos” segment in Barbarous Mexico) and Luke Bramley from a script by Shane McKenzie (who worked with the duo on the series La Quinceañera) is about Armando, whose escape to the United States has brought him right back to Mexico, where a cannibal family puts him into a fight to the death against the rudo known as El Gigante in a wrestling match to the death.
Devyn Dalton, who plays Chango, acted and did stunts for the recent Apes films. She was Cornelia in Rise of the Planet of the Apesand Cornelius in War for the Planet of the Apes. This segment was really well-made and honestly could be an entire movie all by itself.
You can learn more about the Luchagore team that made this — as well as grab a comic or t-shirt of the film — at their official site.
In “Zone 2,” originally a 2015 short by director Anna Elizabeth James and writer Lydia Mulvey, is about a mother and her disabled son trying to survive the end of the world. Again, it’s too short, but a nice showcase. James just completed production on a movie called Deadly Illusions that sounds like the kind of giallo by way of Lifetime films we enjoy around here, helped by the fact that it features Dermot Mulroney and Kristin Davis.
Not to be a broken record, but 2014’s “Witches” feels like a great sketch for a much larger project. It’s entertaining, but six minutes aren’t enough to give it what it deserves. Writer Katie Dodson is good in this as Tamsin and director Michelle Steffes has a good eye for putting together this short piece.
The final episode, “Suddenly One Night (De Noche y de Pronto),” gets the longest screen time at around twenty minutes. This 2012 Spanish short was written and directed by Arantxa Echevarría. During the holidays, Maria is visited by a man who claims to be her upstairs neighbor, a man convinced that his apartment is being torn apart by burglars. This has a great 70’s style and would also be a great springboard for a full-length film.
Most anthologies are a mixed bag, but Etheria season 2 offers plenty to enjoy from a plethora of female voices. Any time that I want to see more — and not less — from a story is a victory and that happens throughout this series. These bite-sized tales will whet your appetite for more and hopefully you’ll look up these filmmakers and follow them as their careers only go upward from here.
You can watch all of Etheria season 2 on Amazon Prime and learn more at The Horror Collective’s official site for the show.
DAY 4. HUNKERED DOWN: One with recluses, shut-ins or people locked inside their homes.
Based on the script for Alone by Matt Naylor, who co-adapted his script with Cho and will see his version of the film release later this month, this movie finds a live streamer named Oh Joon-woo facing the kind of battles that he’d only had online as zombies take over most of South Korea.
After learning that his family has been killed, the loneliness and pointlessness of life alone gets to him and he attempts to kill himself. He’s once stayed inside, away from the rest of humanity and now, he may very well be the last person left alive.
That’s when a laser pointer flashes and he realizes that there’s somebody else left. Kim Yoo-bin has used traps and an axe to stay alive, using her wits when all Oh Joon-woo has done is hide.
If you’ve read Max Brooks’ World War Z, the story “Kondo Tatsumi,” about a Japanese gamer in a similar situation, may strike you as being very much like this story.
The end of the film really recalled Shaun of the Dead, which is not a bad thing. In a world where every zombie story has seemingly been told, this tale of a young man staying locked within his apartment — afraid to come outside as a plague ravages everyone else — is alarmingly all too real.
This year’s Fantastic Fest at the Alamo Drafthouse is quite different than any before, as folks are virtually watching it. But for a dedicated homebody like me, this has been a great experience, getting to see so many of the movies I usually only read about and find later at the same time as others.
All of this fun should be shared. You can get a free Alamo On-Demand account to watch Fantastic Fest 2020 from home.
Kicking things off was this live event, which is still streaming, in which you can watch a hundred of the best on-screen deaths of all time, mainly concentrating on — if the title didn’t clue you in — heads being ripping clean off bodies.
A glorious assault on the sense, this Zack Carlson-hosted clip fest is filled with both big budget and small ticket films. Here’s a quick burst of the ones I was able to figure out, as well as some blank spots that you might help me fill in.
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky: If you’re looking for the all-time head-smashing champion, this is it. More people have seen the clips of this film than the full movie, which is a shame. Just seeing a few moments of its gore-soaked excess was enough to lift my mind out of the post-debate doldrums.
There was an astounding clip of a man begging a woman to kill him, with his head being cut off and then her stabbing him through the head until his brain crawled out and began walking by itself…
The Omen: If you’re going to show a head getting chopped off, you can’t skip this one.
Deep Red: One of my favorite deaths in a film, the death by elevator in this scene stands, um, heads and shoulders above many of the other lift kills that were shown.
That’s all I can figure out. This was a blast and I’m basically posting this in the hopes that others will help me fill in the blanks and let me know where I was wrong!
Riko lives in Waikato, New Zealand, which is as close to the middle of nowhere as it gets. While nearly every day is the same, things change when two aliens land and become his friends. However, an alientologist has been hunting the extraterrestrials and wants to reveal them to the world.
Alien Addiction was written and directed by Shae Sterling, a veteran of more than 125 music videos for artists like Sheila E and Snoop Dogg, as well as a series of documentaries called High Octane. New Zealand still feels like, well, alien territory for most of us, so seeing how interplanetary visitors fit in there is a pretty fun concept.
Thirty three years after Bad Taste, it seems like aliens are coming back to New Zealand. These ones are more interested in friendship than they are with treating our planet as a galactic drive-thru, so that’s good.
The blue aliens are goofy looking in the best of ways and get high off of poop, so that right there should tell you what kind of movie you’re getting into here. You may have some difficulty understanding the Kiwi accents, so consider watching this with close captioning on.
Alien Addiction is available on demand and on DVD from Gravitas Ventures, who were kind enough to send us a review copy.
While attending a comic con to hype up his comic book Monster Force Zero, Calvin “A.I.” Cashill (Adam Singer, Jurassic Dead) and his cosplaying friends have entered a battle against the evil Destroyers of Destruction cosplay team, but ancient aliens are about to send these wanna-be superheroes on the adventure of their dreams.
Two of the stars of this film have big fandoms who will be ready to seek this out. Garrett Wang, who plays himself here, is familiar to science fiction fans as Ensign Harry Kim from Star Trek Voyager.
The character named The Janitor is played by Pat Tanaka, whose wrestling career has taken him all over the world, including stints in the AWA where he and Paul Diamond were Badd Company, taking that team to the WWE as the Orient Express. He’s also wrestled in WCW (he was El Gato), FMW and New Japan where he was called Goku-Do.
With heroes and villains named Gunns Lazer, Kadabra Couture, Final Boss, Quiplash, Hot-Babe, Squatch (yes, a real sasquatch), Wimpy Vader, Furrious and Ammorama, this film definitely has a fun comic book feel that has its heart in the 80’s. You have to love a mad scientist that is guarded by both a Bigfoot and an evil dinosaur, right?
With a feel that’s part Galaxy Quest and even more The Last Starfighter, this is a feel-good superheroic film that is all about entertaining you. I’d love to see the sequel that the ending seems to promise. And this feels perfect for a tie-in comic, video game and lien of action figures, too!
This is the kind of crazy adventures that comic geeks would draw in class while they should have been paying attention to their teacher. That’s high praise.
You can learn more about Monster Force Zero on the film’s official website and official Facebook page. This film is being distributed by Wild Eye, so look for it on your favorite streaming platform.
Tapio Kauma sent us Lääkekoe (Medicated) back in 2018 and now, he’s back with another strange film that translates as The KingMan. I love the sell copy that they sent me about this movie: “Viewers can see chainsaws, axes and lots of firearms in action & explosions with bloody results. However the movie also investigates the effects of toxic masculinity and what bad might result from a twisted idea of manhood.”
The writer/director also plays Raimo, who enjoys getting to kill the monstrous creatures around the cabin in the woods where he and Osku are supposedly relaxing perhaps a bit too much. Whether it’s all the drinking or the killing, he soon starts to see himself as a king, which leads to his friend accidentally killing another of their pals twice.
I also love that these guys stick to short films versus expanding out to a full-length feature. To me, less is always more and they do what so few movies do for me these days. I actually want to see more of their bloody and hilarious work.
You can watch the entire movie on YouTube and learn more on the official Facebook page.
The teen delinquency of the ’50s, the counterculture of the ’60s, and the hangin’ out of the ’70s that we enjoyed in American Graffiti, Easy Rider, and Dazed and Confused collide in this cinematic homage to Robert Altman’s 1975 satirical ensemble comedy-drama Nashville — only, instead of the country music industry of Altman’s film — this tale follows the lives of several struggling thirty-somethings on their way to a post-punk music festival. The featured attraction of the festival, punk star Eve Valentine (Sarah Lawrence of 2009’s Australian comedy Stoned Bros), as with her fans, has her own thirty-something problems: she no longer feels a connection to the art or the fans that brought her success. Gen-X angst, past-their-prime adolescent confusion, the struggles of making a living as an artist, and comedy, ensues.
Streaming one-sheet
The eclectic cast of fifty features a wealth of eccentric characters portrayed by college rock icon J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., Jonah Ray (of the 2017 Netflix reboot of Mystery Science Theater 3000), Frank Agnew (of the Adolescents), Casey Royer (of D.I. from Suburbia), and punk icon Pleasant Gehman (The Runnin’ Kind). The new kids on the music block feature the sounds of Echolust, Band Aparte, and The Electric West.
So, with fifty characters in play via intertwined storylines, in conjunction with the Altman critique, the caveat here is that I’ll Be Around clocks in — with opening titles and end credits — at a whopping 2 hours and 3 minutes. And while self-taught micro-budget purveyor Mike Cuenca isn’t Robert Altman here — at least not yet — he’s certainly on his way to having an O.C and Stiggs or Brewster McCloud moment (my two favorites of his resume). As with Altman: there’s a lot of words and actions afoot, so you really need to watch Cuenca’s scribed intelligence closely, so you don’t miss anything. All the pieces fit and, as with any puzzle, you need all of the pieces to appreciate the bigger picture.
I’ll Be Around is available on all PPV and VOD platforms on September 23 from Indie Rights. You can learn more about the film at its official website.
Music Trivia Footnotes: You’ll remember the Adolescents hail from Fullerton, California, as part of the early ’80s hardcore punk movement in southern California and shared Orange County stages with Agent Orange (River’s Edge) and Social Distortion (Another State of Mind). Their self-titled debut album featured the Posh Boy (label of T.S.O.L, also of Suburbia fame) gold single, “Amoeba,” which came to prominence as result of its inclusion on a volume of KROQ-FM disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer’s (The Mayor of Sunset Strip) Rodney on the ROQ compilations.
Disclaimer: We were provided a screener by the film’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review.
The new version of Valley Girl sat on the shelf for about two years, supposedly due to the bad publicity surrounding Logan Paul, but his role is so minor, I’m certain that’s not the issue. The sad fact is that this is not a good film. Whereas the beauty of the original film is that it could completely be a cash in on a hit song and it has a heart all its own, this movie depends on 80’s songs to give it any identity outside of a pale shadow of Pitch Perfect.
That said, I really like Jessica Rothe, as she made Happy Death Day worthwhile and she does her best here as Julie Richman, our lead (Alicia Silverstone shows up as the older version). Josh Whitehouse has the hardest job, trying to fill the shoes of Nicolas Cage, which isn’t easy or even possible.
At times, this wants to be a shot for shot remake. Then it wants to remove any of the controversies of the first movie, like Suzi and her stepmother fighting for the same guy. It wants you to remember the past, as E.G. Daily plays heel Mickey’s (Paul) mom and Deborah Foreman shows up in a cameo. But as happy as I am to see Judy Greer and Rob Huebel, they are wasted as Jessica’s parents, whose nuanced characters from the original have been jettisoned. There’s also a very Scott Pilgrim nature to Randy in this film, right down to the lesbian bandmate who is his wingman.
You know how you know it’s bad? Cage turned down a cameo. Yes, we’ve finally found the movie that the California Kinski will not be in.
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