Voyeur(s) is the story of a man who turns his hotel into a laboratory for his own twisted fantasies, watching others play out what once existed only in his mind.
I mean, all I had to do was read this write-up to know this was something I was going to watch: “A motel, its owner, a woman who no longer blinks, bizarre customers, going back and forth from room to room, a woman with pink, black, blonde hair. A dealer, sunken eyes, a murder, an aquarium, dolls, a cop, a model, a TV.”
Trust me, the whole thing makes even less sense, a barrage of images, one of which I can remember is a nude woman holding a gigantic pig head over herself. What’s it all about? I’m probably going to watch it a few more — maybe ten — times to figure that out.
Co-directors and writers Arthur Delaire and Edouard de Luze have made something covered in red tones that feels like something Jess Franco would have either liked or been jealous of because he never got a budget like this, no matter how small it is.
The fact that they claim it’s based on a true story is just the strange tasting frosting on this very curious cake.
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Haruka, Nana,and Takanori haven’t heard from their band member Souta for some time. Souta’s been busy. And weird. And has a mouth full of, well, cockroaches.
The girls walk in to a newspaper-windowed apartment and as Sota offers them tea, one of them steps into green muck and goes full Regan.
Directed and written by Kenichi Ugana, Visitors is filled with small moments of fright and huge moments of gore. Yes, a chainsaw gets involved. Yes, it invokes Evil Dead. Yes, it’s pretty great. It really goes for it with the gore and pairs nicely with another film I saw at Chattanooga, PussyCake, another story of a band being destroyed by possession, bile and gore.
Ugana also made Ganguro Gals Riot (a movie that explores the Ganguro — blackface — fashion subculture), Extraneous Matter Complete Edition (a movie that explores the creatures of tentacle hentai in a more human way) and Wild Virgins (in which a virgin man turns thirty and becomes a witch).
As Danzig sang back in Samhain, “A kick in the head, a gouged out eye, your intestines explode and your eyeballs pop and the taste of your blood will drive me on. You see I get what I want, and I want when you bleed. ‘Cause the things I can cause have the seal of the dead in humanity’s fading glow. All murder, all guts, all fun!”
Visitors lives the fuck up to that.
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It’s a retail employee’s nightmare: two women want the same necklace at closing time and no one is taking no for an answer. Jennifer (Stella Baker) and Cheryl (Grace Rex) see the neon hue in the center of that simple jewel and it becomes about more than just a fashion statement.
Short, sweet, simple and well made by director and writer Beck Kitsis (whose The Three Men You Meet at Night also starred Baker), this will make you stay out of the mall — if it’s even still open around you — and just stick to online shopping, which seems so much safer.
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Quinn (Anatasha Blakely, who also directed and wrote this short) is a daydreamer set adrift after losing her soullmate Max (Jacob Sorling).
Adrienne (Whitney Morgan Cox) is the woman who may have caught his eye.
There’s no way these two are going to get along, right?
This may start with mannered conversation but stay with it. It looks great and both Blakely and Cox have the opportunity to really dig into their roles. The camera stays with them and the conclusion of their words, as they spiral out of control, finds the camera locked on what we can see of the aftermath. You may never boil a pot of tea the same way again.
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Billed as a “film about memory and discovery,” Ball Lightning is about two scavengers — Addie and Sundance — Niamh O’Connor and Julie Helthaler — who harvest the parts of derelict automatons to survive.
As they explore a huge and abandoned estate, a place where junk is everywhere and automatons wander around, Addie begins to experience the life of an auto called Carlo (Ellis Hampton) and decides that she has to find him and discover what connects them.
I’m a big fan of ruined tech and cassette tape programming, so this works for me. There’s a low budget and it isn’t the most professional film you’ve ever seen, but that’s so much of the charm.
Lillian (Brianne Solis) comes back to an abandoned and fog-filled cemetery that has haunted her since childhood in an attempt to come to terms with the recent loss of her sister in this quick but gorgeous short film.
The directors The Barber Brothers (Matthew and Nathan, who also made Go Back and No One Is Coming with Solis) said that they saw this film being about “dealing with grief and the lengths at which it can take someone. The story of the titular Specter is inspired by a traditional theme in paranormal hauntings in which a ghost searches for a loved one that has long passed.”
Naming Glory — which had horror master Freddie Francis as its cinematographer — as well as The Changeling, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the visual style/ editing of 70s horror films as inspirations let me know that I need to be on the lookout for anything they make. The fact that this looked amazing and was imbued with true emotion made it all that much the better.
Jennifer Pan’s parents left Vietnam for Canada where they toiled at Magna International, an auto parts manufacturer in Ontario, working hard at car part manufacturing so that their children would have a much better life than they did.
They were also incredibly strict and had extremely high expectations. Jennifer was already training to be an Olympic-level figure skater and concert pianist by the age of 4. Jennifer was dropped off at school and picked up, monitored even when not home and not allowed to date boys or go to school dances. By the time she was 22, she had never been drunk, never gone on vacation without her family and never even been to a club.
All along, her parents thought that she had good grades. The truth was, other than music, she was a C-average student. To get around that, she continually forged her report cards and she even secretly taught piano and worked in a restaurant to earn money that she told them was a scholarship for her to study in the pharmacology program at the University of Toronto. She even bought textbooks and faked notes from YouTube classes to further allow her parents to think she was in school.
The truth? She was living with her mixed heritage — a big issue with her family — marijuana dealing and Boston Pizza-employee boyfriend. Her parents eventually found out when the deceptions grew too big to explain and it was discovered that she never even graduated high school. She was forced to break up with the guy, who got a new and younger girlfriend, and she went off the deep end, claiming that he had hired a gang of men to assault her and she was mailed one bullet by her lover’s new girlfriend.
After trying to pay a goth kid to kill her parents, she got back with the old boyfriend and they spent $10,000 to hire real hitmen to kill mom and dad, knowing that she’d get $500,000 in the will. That’s what we call business sense. Well, the killers did get her mother, but her father survived and when the case fell apart, she was convicted for 25 years in jail, never permitted to contact her family or lover again.
That story inspired Munkie, in which Stephen Chow directs the tale of Rose (Xana Tang), a young woman rebelling against her tiger parents. And by that, I mean paying to get them killed. Yet in the way that the film is made, you feel for her and understand perhaps what drove her to this point. You still understand that she’s not a good person, but again, she didn’t get to this point by herself.
You can watch the film here:
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Six minutes, two characters and incredibly unsettling, Smile is a simple metaphor for depression told in an incredibly stunning way.
Anna (Konstantina Mantelos, who was in one of my favorite recent horror films, Anything for Jackson) is the only human we see in this movie — we hear Ashley Laurence (Kristy from the Hellraiser films) as the voice of her mother — and we’re with her as she struggles to smile and then deals with Moros (Tyler Williams), who in Greek mythology is the living and personification of impending doom and a demon destroys mortals fated to die.
Director and writer Joanna Tsanis has made several shorts, but this is the first of her work that I’ve seen. She also has the benefit of great cinematography by Jason Han and magical special effects makeup by Carlos Henriques.
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I live in the sticks, the literal south of Southwestern Pennsylvania and I’ve taken under five rideshares in my life. And I’m also a stocky and furrowed-brow-looking guy. But this movie made me realize the sheer terror women face getting a ride — hell, even just trying to exist — every single day.
Every driver that Charlotte “Charlie” Wilson (Mallory Rose Diekmann, who wrote the film) interacts with demands more — where do you live, what do you do, who do you date, why are you afraid — and her space remains invaded from the very opening of this short.
Director Megan Gorman does a great job of compounding that terror in every single successive scene until the worry feels oppressive. But isn’t that the point? Off Limits made me consider how women feel in the world and how lucky I am to never experience these feelings, all within the confines of a low budget short.
Well done and I am sorry.
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Look, I know that we do a streaming show every Saturday night but man, I still don’t get Twitch streamers. Maybe I grew up in the 70s when video games were new and we wanted to fight people for the chance to be up next, but I despise watching anyone else play, much less talk nonsense the entire time. But hey, media changes and grows and gets dumber, so who am I to be an elitist?
Touchmytoaster (Connor Del Rio, who co-wrote the script) is a streamer so popular that people track down his house, ask for his blood and pay him money to even watch him sleep. Somehow, he still has an interesting partner named Meghan (Allison Landi), even if she sleeps in the guest room now that those streamers watch every single snore of her man.
Can fans go too far? Trust me, as someone who has been a pro wrestler — even on the indy and Japan level — for a quarter of a decade, yes, a thousand times yes. None of them have ever come to my house and ask if they can take a dump or get a hug, however.
There’s so much cringe in this in the best way, cringe becoming part of horror, the fact that we have to leave behind our screens to actually interact with humans and then remember exactly why we hide behind screens. Yes, I’m connecting with you, but please leave me alone.
Director and co-writer Gaelan Connell has somehow made a better movie in 14 minutes than the Tubi exclusive First Person Shooterdid about the same idea and they had 90 minutes. And yet both films feature a very awkward bathroom scene.
That said — this has the most frightening use of a toaster ever.
You can get a back half half price badge to watch all of the awesome movies at the Chattanooga Film Festival and see them until 6/29! Get yours right here!
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