This is a well-shot film, directed and written by Evan Enderle. It’s his first short and he’s acted in a bunch of things — a Law and Order apperance, four episodes of the show The Walker — but this proves that he definitely has an affinity for setting up tension and drama.
He also takes two of the biggest no no’s — don’t put kids or animals in your movies — and says screw it and makes something really great. It has a young girl staying overnight at a rural daycare and coming up against something horrifying. It also really demands to be expanded to a full movie, because there’s so much more here to explore.
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Chris McInroy is the director of Bad Guy #2, Death Metal,We Summoned A Demon and the segment “One Time In The Woods” in Scare Package and if you’ve seen that, you have some idea of just how bloody and brilliant this short is going to be.
GUTS is all about Tim, who is in love with a girl in his office, wants a promotion and has to deal with all manner of bullies during his day because, well, his guts are on the outside of his body.
Do not watch if you are grossed out by guts, eating guts, drinking guts, eyeballs ala Fulci, whittling awards killing people, spraying blood, ooze, gristle, gore, more guts and fun. I almost puked at one point and I thought I had a cast iron stomach, so Mr. McInroy, you can consider that a standing ovation.
Hunt this down, find it and fall in love. Or throw up. I mean, either way, you’re living, right?
Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/
“We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings.”
She also once wrote that the inward dimension or the fifth dimension was the source of great art and literature, as well as where genius resides.
So between a poem that lamented the loss of her relationship with Futurist Giovanni Papini and her worry that she’d forever lost any ability to feel sexual yearning again, as well as her thoughts on how the superconscious — “We are but a ramshackle edifice around an external exaltation, a building in which the moralities are a flight of stairs whose bases dissolve in the wake of our ascension” — really have a lot to do with this film, even more than giving it a title.
The Dents, Diane and Daryl, (real life couple Annie Parisse and Paul Sparks) are a married couple who we get the feeling have forgotten why they ever came together but cannot forget that they could honestly leave each other or leave each other dead at any moment. There’s constant tension brimming, all while Diane has her identity stolen, Daryl has dreams that the family is forced to follow, their daughter Danielle (Rachel Resheff) becomes part of a school play, their son Andrew has a pregnant girlfriend named Marlene (Gus Birney) who tries to become part of the family as her mother Monica (Constance Shulman) loudly exclaims that she’s a famous actress who has become forgotten.
When Diane decides to figure out who took her identity and why they’ve taken all of the family’s money, she enlists Marlene’s aid and sets off on a road trip. When they knock on the door of the people behind the crime, they meet two white-haired twins — both named Nina, both played by Judith Roberts — who are not living on the same wavelength as the rest of the world.
Diane has spent years — decades? — making everyone else happy and always finding herself in the role of the bad guy. And yet she keeps working extra hours and selling her clothes and just giving in to every infraction but certainly, it all has to be too much at some time, right?
Director Theodore Schaefer, who co-wrote the story with Patrick Lawler, gives in to surrealism at the end, as the world of the real becomes unreal and may give the two women at the center of the story the opening they need to change the direction of their lives.
The superconscious has the ability to acquire knowledge through psychic methods, then pass that knowledge on to our conscious mind, transcending the ways that we normally perceive the world, allowing us the ability to process more information and more importantly, make more changes to ourselves. It’s where true creativity is found.
This is about 77 minutes of said superconscious.
Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/
I’ve watched multiple films in the last few weeks where people try to go back home again and set things right. This never works out.
What am I to learn?
Directed and written by Paul Owens, LandLocked brings his family into the film, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as well as appearing in their old home movies which have become part of the narrative.
When Mason (Mason Owens) takes on the task of clearing out his father’s home, he discovers those films on an old video camera and begins to grow obsessed with the footage that he starts to watch and learn and document the past.
So yeah, you may be watching a family’s old films and the film feels long even though it has a short running time. But the idea of a camera that can show you any moment in time you ask for is solid, the footage works within the film and you can see what the director was going for. Nostalgia is dangerous (or a profitable place to make a movie) is the message and yes, while you can go home again, you probably shouldn’t.
Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/
Director Kevin Kopacka and co-writer Lili Villányi worked on an episode of the TV show DYLAN a few years ago, which is based on the same character from Cemetery Man. That makes perfect sense, as this film has style to spare.
Dieter (Frederik von Lüttichau) and Margot (Luisa Taraz) have moved to a Gothic castle that would be at home in the films of Corman or Bava*. He has anger issues, she’s in the throes of depression and the estate? Well, it’s slowly making them prisoners. And then they find the whip in the basement, which unlocks old souls and a house that was definitely the site of some whispered illicit behavior.
A story that goes from Eurohorror to a study of relationships to even the nature of male and female inter dynamics within an occult movie that looks like it came from Italy in the 70s, this one has so much going for it. Just look at the font in the poster and at the end of the film. This is a movie that has been polished and honed and worked into the art that it is now. Don’t miss it.
*The director has directly called out Bava’s The Whip and the Body and Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose as influences. The poster is literally taken from the latter film. It also takes a line from Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/
Irina (Greta Bohacek) and her brother Paul (Claude Heinrich) are Firstlings, the young members of a cult based around an upper caste that strives to remain pure and clean, while its opposite lower members are devoted to making soap, herding pigs and living in darkness and filth. All decisions are made by Fust (Sam Louwyck), who has set himself up as a god-like figure and built his own island world based around Greek and Teutonic mythology. In fact, the goddess Hygieia, who embodies health and cleanliness while being the source of the word hygiene, is worshipped by the cultists.
The promise of Fust is that those who labor in the mud will one day rise to the world above and Irina gets that chance, as a scan shows that her organs are completely milky white, which means something to the strange German man whose family built an empire upon soap which has allowed him to be a deity on Earth. She leaves Paul behind, but their individual stories show that they both remain individuals within this groupthink: she is hand-picked to embody the goddess yet still sees the dirt that exists even on the highest of levels while he starts to ferment a revolution.
“The stage is the intermediate realm upon which we may encounter the gods,” is a statement that Fust makes, but perhaps movies are also that place. This film — directed and co-written* by Nikias Chryssos (Der Bunker) — looks rich and gorgeous, deftly setting apart the united yet divided worlds that make up this film’s world. Cinematographer Yoshi Heimrath makes it look even better, as the close of the movie allows multiple colors to intrude into the pure light and sheer dark that we have emerged from.
Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/
There’s a quote at the start of this movie that was so great that I wrote it down: “True love is wild and sad. This is the thrill of two beings in the darkness.”
Director Marat Sarulu, who co-wrote this movie with Emil Jumabaev, also made Move, Songs from the Southern Seas and The Rough River, the Placid Sea. In this film, he explores the relationship between fiction and reality as Nazar discovers the digital artwork of his partner Rumia’s ex-husband Arsen and finds his life changed as he learns that dream and fantasy, as well as reality and imagination, can intermingle and at times seem as one.
Of the film, Sarulu said, “At first, the film unfolds as a theme that can be described as “love amid change.” Here, the social background is removed and transformed into an expressive psychedelic, turning the plot into a complex relationship between reality and fiction. The true author of the story creates within the real flow of life his own secret myth in which he disappears. Dreams, memories and fantasies are intertwined with reality, creating a complex metaphysical pattern.”
Director Boris Troshev has created a world that takes black and white with muted moments of color to take us into worlds that are beyond our own. It’s gorgeous and nearly numbing in the best of ways, a balm for the chaotic world that we exist in. This film is nearly a meditation just as much as it is a movie.
Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/
The Langoliers may be at the bottom of Stephen King adaptions, but if The Timekeepers of Eternity has any say in things, we’ve been misjudging Tom Holland’s 1995 TV miniseries.
Animator Aristotelis Maragkos has printed every frame of that movie and used collage animation to reconstruct, remix and retell the story in an entirely new way, compressing 180 minutes into 64 and taking Bronson Pinchot’s character of Craig Toomey and making him the lead character and not the villain.
This film takes something we’ve seen before and deliriously recreates it as something bold, brave and fresh.
Beyond just a film, now that The Langoliers has moved into the world of paper, it can make comic book-like movements where multiple characters and angles can appear at the same time while the emotions can come out as darker shapes and jagged lines emitted from the actors. Even the ending moves from King, changing the source material in a way that makes this movie its own piece of art nearly separate from where it was sourced.
In the original film, the CGI Langoliers have been selected on so many worst special effects lists, so imagine my joy when they appear to merely be torn chunks of paper that tear through the reality of this story.
Maragkos spent years making this, but trust me, it was beyond worth the effort.
This was originally called Cheerleader Conspiracy which I think is a pretty wonderful title. It even starts with some drama, as Beth Hartford (Tommi Rose) gets named cheer captain of Bridgebay High School, which some see as fishy as her mother Den (Mena Suvari, whose career spans American Beauty to American Pie movies to the TV series American Horror Story and American Woman and then goes off to be the lead in The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson) is the coach.
All of the girls are competing for a scholarship to Rossmore Carmel University and Beth is in the lead until a video of her underage drinking and slambooking her fellow cheer team members — yes, I have seen too many teen films and yes, my terminology is old and analog — and that’s when this movie asks all of us to know what a deepfake is and believes that high school cheerleaders have the skills — or is it their parents? — to make one.
By the time this is over, you’ll wonder who the bad guy is. Is it rival Ashley (Jazzy Kae Williams) and her mother Marisol (Karla Mosley)? The way too nice Olivia (Alexa Sutherland) and her mom Rebecca (Ashley Scott)? Or are our leads horrible people who don’t even realize just how much they’ve made everyone else absolutely detest them?
Spoiler warning — this movie has an astounding ending in which Beth goes to jail for murder and the killer — whose mother screams, I should’ve aborted you the minute I had the chance!” — gets the scholarship and steals Beth’s boyfriend. That’s the kind of weirdness that never happens on Lifetime, where it feels like this movie kind of should be.
I was going to say that this is the kind of movie where people start worrying about deepfakes without knowing that they take a lot of effort to make, but this is based on a true story. Raffaela Spone, a Bucks County, PA cheer mom, was accused of making deepfake videos of her daughter Allie’s cheerleading rivals vaping, drinking and posing nude, then sending them to coaches, along with texts that told the girls “you should kill yourself.”
Raffaela was arrested on six counts of misdemeanor harassment and cyber harassment of a child. According to Cosmopolitan, Bucks County DA Matt Weintraub said to the press, “This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone. Your neighbor down the street, somebody who holds a grudge, we just have no way of knowing. It’s another way for an adult to now prey on children.”
Except that, well, that wasn’t true.
The cops had made a judgment call and experts in deepfake started commenting online and in the media that there was no way that someone with no training could do this. And all those texts and threatening images — and even the videos — had no evidence of ever coming from Raffaela’s phone. A digital-forensics expert who’d made a complete copy of the confiscated phone testified that there was no way that that phone could create and had never sent any of the threats or media that implicated the girls.
A detective even went on to admit — under oath — that he had never even bothered to look at Raffaela’s phone.
And then the officer who first said that it was all a deepfake, Matthew Reiss, got busted for possession of child porn yet his report remains on record. Bucks County DA’s office dropped the deepfake accusation and finally convicted Raffala with three counts of misdemeanor cyber harassment n May of 2022. The media stories I’ve found never point out that all of the police evidence against her doesn’t even exist.
Samantha Connelly (Erica Tazel, Justified) is a single mom and a career woman who feels that she’s missing out on life. Then she meets Giselle Christophe (Natasha Marc), who is everything she isn’t: confident, outspoken and sexually up front. In just a few weeks, Sam has stopped hanging out with her old confidant Kiki (Tanya Chisholm) and is out every night and living it up, just as her firm gives her the opportunity to defend football star Jaden Turk (Blue Kimble) from a scandalous divorce. But then someone with a carnival mask starts showing up outside her door, Giselle starts getting scary and things get all Lifetime but on Tubi, which of course means that the sex gets amped up a bit.
Do you like junk food? Well, this is a salty snack for your eyes and mushy brain. Seriously, this is a movie that starts in a legal office and ends with its main character holding a rifle on two women who want to be her best friend no matter what.
One night, Sam and Kiki go to a bar and that’s where Sam decides to stop being so chaste and hooks up with Clay Davis, who ends up assaulting her outside the bar. Giselle ends up saving her by beating the man unmercifully, leaving him bleeding in an alley. And that’s how friendships in Lifetime movies — and Tubi originals — get their start.
Things get so much better for Sam, as she gets a new man named Miles (Stephen Wesley Green). This causes her to distance herself from Giselle, who may be a wild hang, but is an exhausting full-time friend. Giselle responds by showing up at Sam’s house at odd hours, flirting with Sam’s son Tony (Zuri Soyinka) and even taking a job in Sam’s office as the assistant to her boss Monty (Douglas Dickerman).
The final straw in the friendship between the two women happens at an Eyes Wide Shut nightclub sponsored by Party City. Does Sam end up making out with her athlete client? Do the photos of their steamy dry humping end up being shown in the divorce deposition? Does Miles end up dead potentially at the hands of Giselle? Will Jaden get killed too and it looks like Sam did it? Which bad friend will be the worst one?
The Deadliest Lie was directed by Ruth Du and written by Mitchell Altieri, who made The Hamiltons, the remake of April Fool’s Day and The Nightwatchmen. This movie is exactly as trashy as you would hope that it would be, a film full of people acting badly and props being as cheap as possible, all building to a conclusion to can see coming. But come on, it’s like eating the best Chex Mix ever and having a bowl that keeps getting filled over and over again.
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