Nicholas Michael Jacobs, the director of Night and Urban Fears is back, this time with an anthology film that follows a character named The Visitor through a graveyard as he tells the story of how three people died.
This time, he has a $1,500 budget, which is about $500 more than last time. Let’s get into it.
As you may have guessed from Nicholas’ films, he loves extended sequences where people do menial tasks while swearing and being stalked. This movie opens with another of those and at this point, three movies in, I’m actually excited when these things happen.
He’s also gone a bit meta here, as long stretches of the film have him wondering exactly what movie he should make. Perhaps these are the kinds of discussions that should be thought of before the movie is made. I mean, I’m nineteen minutes in and the movie has mostly been an autobiographical story of Nicholas cleaning his basement and dealing with the unknown while trying to make a movie.
That said — his movies do get better each time. They still aren’t any good, but there’s forward progress.
This movie is up on Amazon Prime today, so if you have any interest in seeing it, go for it. I can only imagine how people that have never seen one of Nicholas’ films before will react.
DISCLAIMER: Nicholas sent this to us himself, so you have to appreciate that he’s a go-getter.
The comedy of NBC-TV’s long-running The Golden Girls meets with the edge of AMC’s Breaking Bad as five friends lose all of their retirement savings in a ponzi scheme—so the “nanas” join forces to open a bakery serving pot-infused desserts. When they learn one of them is secretly battling cancer, their quest for success becomes even more imporant—and attracts the attentions of Kingpin Paint, the local drug dealer.
During the press junkets for the Nana’s Secret Recipe, producer and director and Mehul Shah stated he was searching for a project with strong female characters of a certain age, a fun, zany plot, and larger than life villains. And he certainly found it in this stellar debut script by screenwriter Yolanda Avery, an insightful work that reminds of the female-empowering films Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club. (You can read this interview by The Blacklist on how Shah and Avery came to work together.)
Not only does Avery’s first time screenwriting effort bring on the laughs, it also questions the importance of friendship and sisterhood, the art of using humor to get through difficult times, and the hard questions about the legalization of medicinal marijuana and how to pick up life’s pieces and move on after the loss of a loved one.
The under-the-radar cast of Linda Bradshaw, Cinda Donovan, Nancy L. Gray, Trish Powell, and Charlotte White are simply amazing. Not only are they each fantastic at their craft, it’s heartwarming to see not only unknown actors, but older unknown actors, being giving such a stellar showcase for their talents. If Nana’s Secret Recipe doesn’t prove to be each of their respective calling cards to the industry . . . then screenwriting guru William Goldman’s insight about Hollywood was right: “Nobody knows anything.”
It is my sincere belief we will see each of them on a network or cable comedy or drama—more sooner than later. And Nana’s Secret Recipe is prime fodder for The Hallmark Channel. Simply put: these actresses and this movie deserves the widest exposure possible.
After a successful film festival run, Nana’s Secret Recipe made its free-with-limited-ads stream this March on TubiTv. It’s an amazing indie film and comes highly recommended. Update: As of May, you can stream the film ad-free via Amazon Prime.
You can learn more about the film on its official Facebook page and the website for Kenetik Films. If you hang out with director Mehul Shah on his You Tube page, you can enjoy a couple of informative film festival Q&A’s with the film’s crew and actors. Also be sure to visit the “real” Nana’s, which was shot at Kellie’s Baking Co. in Austin, Texas.
Disclaimer: We didn’t receive a screener copy of Nana’s Secret Recipe from the film’s PA firm or distributor. We discovered this movie all on our own and genuinely enjoyed the film.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
They sold me with this sell copy (which is a good thing for sell copy to do): “Classical music. Thundering opera. Rattlesnakes and precious gems. Mansions and gold mines. Friendship and despair. Treasure beyond imagination that vanishes in the desert wind. In the desert there is no limit to the adventures at hand!”
If you like the band Cage the Elephant, that’s another bonus, as they did some of the music for this movie.
Somewhere in Mexico, two lifelong friends are searching for a ghost ship that is rumored to be beneath the shifting desert sands. Today, drug lords use this land for their own gain, creating their own private army of kids in gliders armed to the teeth with semi-automatic weapons. Now, the guys have to decide whether or not to keep their dreams of finding $6 million dollars worth of gold dust or save some of the children.
This film was written and directed by David Wall. Its leads, Darin Brooks and Chris Romano, starred as best friends on the TV show Blue Mountain State.
Gold Dust is available on demand and on DVD April 7 from High Octane Pictures.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team.
In the late ‘90s, Robert Altman (M.A.S.H, Nashville, Quintet) transitioned into television with an innovative approach to the anthology-narrative format: Gun, which aired on the ABC-TV network. Each unrelated episode—with new plots and characters for each story—followed a .45 semi-automatic pistol on its travels from person to person.
In Wicca Book, writer-director Vahagn Karapetyan’s seventh short film, we have an intelligent amalgamation of the Altman concept plopped into the Sam Raimi universe—unfolding as a Hieronymus Bosch, medieval triptych: a garden of Greek horror centered on an ancient grimoire (convincing-beautifully crafted by artist Maria Alvanou) that passes from owner to owner. However, while there’s a Raimi connection via an ancient text (that Raimi pinched wholesale from 1970’s Equinox; sans the Dave Allen and Jim Danforth creatures), make no mistake: There’s no Bruce Campbell hammy buffoonery: a Rob Zombie-styled, Dario Argento homage snared in Karapetyan’s fisheye lens.
Film, at its core, is a visual medium. It’s an art form based in “showing” and not “telling”; for film is 90% visual and 10% dialog (and the stage is the reverse). Images tell the story though props, an actor’s body language and, most importantly: that your actors are not skilled in the craft of acting—but “being.” This is an art at which Karapetyan and his actors excel: there’s no dialog across his film’s 22-minute run time. While, at first glance, Wicca Book may be a bit longer than a short film should be, in this case, there’s not one superfluous frame on screen: every minute is artistically warranted. It’s masterfully edited.
In addition to a film’s dialog-barren image, music can also induce emotion in those frames. And all of the film disciplines are at their finest in Wicca Book as Karapetyan formulated a solid, celluloid-symbiotic relationship between cinematography Nick Kaltsas, Foley artist Enes Achmet Kechargia, and musician Christoforos Koutsodimos. He proves you do not need any title card preambles or voiceover prologues—or any dialog—to bring on the fear and dread.
And the terror unfolds in the triptych’s first panel: A frantic knock and doorbell ring at the apartment door of a young architectural student (Christos Diamantoudis) reveals the ancient text stuffed in a plastic garbage bag with a note saying, “It’s yours.” And as he turns the pages, it seems the book was written especially for him. And, it seems, the cries of children rise from its pages. He tries to destroy it; the pages won’t tear or burn. Then something presses at the front door; it wants in . . . . And he becomes one of book’s ink-scratched pages.
In the longer, second panel: The now unbound demon comes to the dreams of Mia, a young archeological student (Kika Zachariadou), and inspires her to discover the book while spelunking. Upon opening the book, her name appears in blood on her bathroom mirror and, the book instructs her to “give it away.” Then we learn the truth: Mia was the frantic knock and doorbell ring opening the film; she passed the book onto the architectural student. But it was a trick: By giving the book away, not only will she sacrifice the receiver: she’ll transform into a witch. So, to save them both, she breaks into his apartment, steals the book, and tries to return the book from where it came. As she runs from the apartment, she runs into her neighbor: the book’s instructed third sacrifice is complete. Mia will become a witch, after all.
The Bosch garden rots in the third panel of this supernatural triptych, as Mia returns to the cave (with an inspired POV shovel-in-the-dirt shot) for a final knife-wielding showdown with The Devil. . . .
Wicca Book is a horror film of old, not of the modern film world that wobbles on the crutches of shock-scares and motion-captured, CGI-grafted gore. This is a film that reminds of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck’s feature film debut, 1973’s Messiah of Evil (a movie so good, we reviewed it three times: HERE, HERE, and HERE), L.Q Jones’s Brotherhood of Satan, and Burt I. Gordon’s Necromancy. Wicca Book is a classic, shot-in-camera ‘70s-styled suspense-horror flick, like those Dan Curtis ‘70s U.S TV movies of old (shameless plug: check out our Exploring: Dan Curtis featurette). (Also, please note that there’s neither reference of nor an appearance of Hieronymus Bosch’s medieval triptych in the film: that is my personal interpretation of the film’s narrative structure.)
While attending Aristotle University, Karapetyan, an Armenian director and writer based in Greece, wrote a thesis paper: “How a Traditional Myth Becomes a Horror Film,” so he knows his material. While I haven’t seen Karapetyan’s six previous horror shorts, based on what I’ve seen with Wicca Book, I wait in anticipation for his first international English language feature film, Go Dark, currently in its pre-production stages. I also believe all of the parts are there for Wicca Book to be expanded into a feature film as well.
Referring to my comment regarding the runtime: 30-minute programs are actually 17 to 22-minutes in length. Once you add commercials, you have a half-hour program; so again, the length works in that regard and Wicca Book could become a television series. Another goal is to turn Wicca Book into a web-series, using elements of time travel to explore the book’s birth in 16th century New England and how the book came to be in the cave explored by Mia. The concept—in any form—is exciting and worth following its development.
It may take some time, but Vahagn Karapetyan is on his way to becoming a voice in Euro-horror. And all good things take time. Wicca Book is currently under the wing of Film Freeway, so let’s hope it comes to a U.S film festival sometime soon near you. It’s worth the price of admission. You can learn more about the film at Darkstream Entertainment on Facebook and Vahagn Films on Facebook.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Disclaimer: This movie was sent to us by its PR company and, as you know, that has no bearing on our review.
What a happy, accidental discovery—considering B&S About Movies is in the midst of its “James Bond Month” extravaganza.
Filmed in the popular cinematic location of Verona, Italy, one of the locations for the 2008 James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace, Nightfire is a timely story about the plight of the Ukrainian people and the United States’ involvement in that country’s conflict.
At the Sokov Military Base, located 32 miles from the Ukrainian border of the country of Belarus, the mission of CIA operatives Carter (Lorenzo Pisoni; guest star on U.S TV’s The Good Wife, Law & Order: SVU, and Elementary) and Ross (Greg Hadley; new to the scene and very good here) to retrieve two military chips containing top-secret content goes awry when they compromise their mission objective to rescue Olivetti, an international political prisoner. And Carter comes to discover it’s never about the freedom of a country and its citizens: it’s always about greed. And no one is who they say they are.
The marquee name here is the-you-watch-anything-he’s-in Dylan Baker, as Olivetti. Dating back to his support role in Steve Martin’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles, you’ve come to know Baker as he delivered the goods countless times on U.S television series, such as Law & Order: TOS and the Chicago P.D./Fire franchise, along with his starring roles on Blindspot, The Good Wife, and Homeland—and his role as Dr. Curt Conners in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man franchise. The cast is rounded out by Bradley Stryker (guest roles on TV’s Arrow, Cold Case, and CSI:NY) and Becky Ann Baker (star of HBO’s Girls, as well as The Blacklist and Hunters).
Nightfire is the fifth student-short production by French-born writer-director Brando Benetton and, considering this is a college thesis project shot on a low budget in 14 days—the quality is of an astounding, major studio quality. That quality comes courtesy of the production’s use of Red Epic Dragon cameras and the implementation of non-CGI practical effects. The car chases and real explosions are masterfully executed by the Corridori Brothers—you know their work; nothing too exciting: just films like the The Italian Job, Mission: Impossible III, and Spectre (the team also worked on maestro Dario Argento’s Do You Like Hitchock? and Giallo). Considering the 45-minute runtime, the spy action-thriller adventures of Lorenzo Pisoni’s Agent Carter can easily be picked up by a major U.S television or grittier cable network and expanded into an hour-long drama. If not, there’s definitely a feature film in its experimental, truncated frames.
Benetton is currently working as a Second Assistant Director on a very intriguing feature film—his first feature—currently in post-production. Voodoo MacBeth concerns the young and arrogant Orson Welles staging the first all-black production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1936 Harlem.
You can learn more about Nightfire and the career of Brando Benetton courtesy of a three-minute behind the scenes vignette on the Vimeo page of Great Dane Productions. You can watch Nightfire as an Amazon Prime and Hulu stream beginning May 1. It has since become available on the free-with-ads steam service, Tubi. Benetton has since worked as a first assistant director on the indie drama Voodoo Macbeth and thriller, The Summond (both 2021).
Disclaimer: This movie was sent to us by its PR company and, as you know, that has no bearing on our review.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
Eric and Reese have moved to Wakefield to start a bed and breakfast, just in time for solar flares to kick in. A medium shows up and starts informing them of the history of their property, which was once owned by a killer named Nathan Cross. A shift in energy from the flares causes the veil between the living and dead to lift, so all the death in this quaint little town has come back to haunt everyone.
Director L.A. Lopes played a cashier in the remake of Poltergeist and now she’s making movies of her own. It was written by Lindsay Seim, who was in Insidious: Chapter 2 and St. Agatha before this. Oddly, she doesn’t list writing this film in her IMDB credits.
A Wakefield Project is available on demand and on DVD from High Octane Pictures.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR department.
Set in 1965, this movie is all about Fran and Marcy, two Fine Air stewardesses. Derrick is a British photojournalist who wants to interview them for his documentary.
The statement for the film claims that it “makes a contemporary socio-cultural statement regarding the meme of “the good girl, drawn bad.” Wives of The Skies clarifies the impact of the overarching “men’s gaze” which objectifies women as carnal sex objects men seek, while they look for love… along the way, addressing the primitive issue of Trust vs. Mistrust, Wives of The Skies displays the Japanese art of Kinbaku.”
Yes — the Japanese BDSM art of tight binding.
It was written and directed by Honey Lauren, who was in Vice Academy 5 and 6 before starting to make her own films. She was inspired by the men who order the 1960’s airline uniforms off of eBay, which sent her on the path of making this film.
Wives of the Skies is the winner of 24 awards, including Best Film at the New York Cinematography Awards and Best Original Screenplay at the Indie X Film Festival.
You can see it at these places and dates:
Pictures up Film Festival: April 3rd – 5th in Los Angeles, CA
Yes. At first glance this looks like an Asylum Studios mockbuster inversion of 2018’s Skyscraper. But let’s be honest: Didn’t that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson “summer blockbuster” stupidly steal from The Towering Inferno and Die Hard?
Yep.
And the studio knew it. Just look at these “tribute” posters (below) to both of those disaster-film antecedents. And you know those ridiculous “prosthetic leg” stunts we guffawed at? Well, this Euro-production has its share of the impossible as well. . . .
Along with all-over-the-place accents from its unknown bit-player, international cast. . . .
And the wood in the acting department is adrift.
And don’t be poster duped by Inferno: Skyscraper Escape either. This is another Christmas Icetastrophe (which, ironically, rips off The Rock’s San Andreas) where the image on the poster never occurs in the movie. And, shouldn’t it be a woman hanging off the chopper? (Oops. Plot spoiler!)
Actually, it’s a woman doin’ the chopper hangin’, but okay.
Holy déjà vustendhal syndrome, Batman!
So, did you read our B&S About Movies review for Skyscraper, yet? Then you’re up to speed. But wait . . . this Euro-Towering Inferno comes with a very cool twist: this time, it’s the man who is the whiny bitch-boy damsel-in-distress and the wife is the kickass mountain-climbing structural engineer.
Briana Bronson (Claire Forlani, Precious Cargo) is a career woman gallivanting in Paris while working on an Antwerp-under construction skyscraper project; her soon-to-be-ex-hubby Tom is the stay-at-home dad with two whiny-bickering, smarter-than-the-adults teens (is there any other kind in these movies?) back in Antwerp, Belgium. Of course, the building’s destruction serves as the catalyst to bring them back together—as all biblical Armageddons do.
While hammering out the details of their divorce (Briana’s evil-greedy bosses set her up in an “affair”), they all end up trapped on the 60th floor when a “gas leak” ignites the spire of glass and metal (see Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, China’s Shanghai Tower, and Taiwan’s Taipei 101; but the more accurate across-the-channel The Shard in London is the model here). Since hubby Tom is the “Neve Campbell” (and since this all ties into The Rock and San Andreas, he’s the “Carla Gugino”) of these action proceedings, it’s Briana who goes “The Rock” on everyone’s ass and saves the day.
If you watch American network television, you’ve seen the series work of British actress Claire Forlani. She was Queen Igraine on Starz’s Camelot (2011), portrayed Lauren Hunter on NCIS: Los Angeles and Alicia Brown on Hawaii Five-O for CBS-TV, and she’s currently on NBC-TV’s Departure. But Forlani’s been around since the early ‘90s, with support roles in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, Nicolas Cage’s The Rock, and Brad Pitt’s Meet Joe Black, along with a long list of direct-to-DVD and Euro-produced films. (Australian actor Jamie Bamber from SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica reboot is her husband, Tom.)
The Eurasian theatrical one-sheet.
The director behind this French-Belgium co-production shot in Bulgaria is Eric Summer: don’t worry, I never heard of him either. But he has a pretty impressive resume of French language television series and TV movies. He made his international film debut with the 2016 animated feature Leap! starring Elle Fanning (Maleficent, The Neon Demon).
However, chances are you’ve seen (but may not know it) the work of Phillip J. Roth (I sure have, and do), the writer behind this film originally known as Crystal Inferno during its overseas theatrical run. His direct-to-video/cable career stretches back to the early ‘80s with the sci-fi-actioners Prototype X29A (Terminator rip) and A.P.E.X (love ‘em both; still have the cable-taped VHS), Digital Man (Universal Solider rip), Total Reality (Total Recall rip), Velocity Trap (Demolition Man rip) and Interceptor Force (both with the always-welcomed French-bred action star Oliver Gruner). And while you can say most of his films are rips of popular films, there’s no denying that 2016’s Arrival starring Amy Adams ripped Roth’s own 2001 cable-aired Epoch (right down the floating stone monolith space-spires). Most recently, you’ve seen quite a few of Roth’s sequel productions in the Boogeymen, Death Race, Doom, Jarhead, Lake Placid, TheMessengers, Sniper, Taken, Wrong Turn, and SyFy’s monster-shark franchises.
But even with the Phillip J. Roth pedigree, and my having seen the aforementioned films from his resume during my video store days, I have to admit I didn’t know this movie existed. I discovered it by accident on TubiTV—as result of my searching for a copy of the Frank Harris-directed Skyscraper starring Anna Nicole Smith from 1996, which I linked in the mini-career retrospective included in my Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” reviews for two of his Leo Fong-starring films: Killpointand Low Blow.
And truth be told: If you want to be trapped in a Murphy’s Law skyscraper, you want it to be Roth’s monolith—and not Anna Nicole Smith’s. Sorry, Frank, I love ya, brother, but Roth’s wins the Towering Inferno sweepstakes this time.
Don’t believe me? You can check out both—Inferno: Skyscraper Escape and Skyscraper ‘96—for free on TubiTv and compare. Since this was rolled out internationally market-by-market and not worldwide-premiered, the release dates are all over the place: it premiered in Europe in 2017 (before The Rock’s 2018 version), Asia in 2018, the U.S in 2019, and made its worldwide, free online streaming debut in 2020.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
NOTE: We shared this movie last year when it was called Impossible Mission. It’s being re-released with this new title.
Rosa is a master assassin who is great at poisoning people. Now, she’s set up on a final mission where she is asked to kill a spiritual leader who keeps hacking into cable signals during the news and major soccer matches. However, she might face an even greater threat from those within her own organization.
Soon, Rosa and operative Will Gray have teamed up to sniff and snuff out that leader, but their romance may also get in the way of the mission. This movie has an interesting concept and a great beginning as Rosa slowly works a target to sleep via poison, but when you want it to be filled with action, it really starts to slow down.
This is Jimena Gala first movie and she really does well in it. I’d like to see her in more, as she seemed exceedingly confident despite this being the sole credit on her IMDB page.
You can find this movie on demand and on DVD.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us — two times now — by its PR agency.
Human beings are horrible. That’s the biggest truth I’ve ever revealed on this site. And in The Alpha Test, a suburban family has their new Alpha Home Assistant for just a few days before they’ve driven it off the deep end, killing everyone before the opening credits.
This is why I never want a robot maid.
Writer/director Aaron Mirtes was also behind American Hunt, Clowntergeist and Curse of the Nun. This movie is very influenced by Ex Machina, except that the robot here is so frightening looking that I’d never allow it a block from my house, much less inside it.
The Alpha Test is available March 10 from High Octane Pictures.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.
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