Director, writer and actor Christian Serritiello has made a movie that revolves around the making of a movie, one that features 87-year-old American character actor Bruce Glover missing from the first day of shooting and the cast and crew unravelling.

Other than the video of his audition and a phone call, Glover is absent from the movie, as everyone else struggles to deal with the loss, from James (Scott Coffey, who directed Adult World) retreating into his comforting spirit animals, Jeremy (Daniel Brunet) giving into anger, and a director (Bruce A. Woolley) coming apart to the female cast members, Anjelica (Kristen Bush) and Gloria (Dulcie Smart), who deal with things in much more adult ways.

This made me wonder: did Glover just blow off the production and this ended up being the artistic cover? Or is this the actual film? When someone is made this well, I’d lean toward the latter, as the sell material would probably push the former.

This black and white short is just the right length for the story it tells. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and is worth your time.

Highway to Heaven was a TV series that ran on NBC from September 19, 1984 to August 4, 1989. It starred Michael Landon as Jonathan Smith, an angel who walks the Earth, helping souls along with retired cop Mark Gordon, who was played by Victor French, Landon’s co-star from Little House on the Prairie.

Sadly, French died two months before the final episode aired. Landon went on to appear in two films — including a pilot for a new series — before he died in 1991.

This reboot has Angela Stewart (singer Jill Scott) as the angel sent down here to help people in need. In the premiere movie — one assumes there will be more — she takes on the role of a temporary school counselor and gets involved in the lives of junior high school principal Bruce Banks (Barry Watson from 7th Heaven and the Boogeyman reboot) and troubled student Cody (Ben Daon).

This was written by Angelica Chéri, Cathryn Humphris and Michael Landon’s son Christopher.  It was directed by Stacey K. Black, who has directed episodes of Major Crimes, the new version of Walker and Station 19.

If you enjoy faith-based dramas with heart, well, you may not be reading our site.  But if you do, you’ll find something to love here.

Highway to Heaven is available on DVD for the suggested retail price of $14.98.

Director and writer Frank Martinez has put together a Hollywood filled with bad cops, drug dealers, prostitutes and social rejects. Ray Balfi (Turk Matthews) is an ex-con trying to get his cartoon made but deals with rejection after rejection. But what happens when a new movie is made from it without his participation?

Now Ray is out for revenge, the kind of getting even that is punctuated by music video sequences. Seeing as how he has no idea who has taken his work for him — after all, he sent the script to a hundred studios — that means that a whole lot of people have to pay.

Originally known as Fade Out Ray, I’ve seen this movie compared to everyone from Tarantino to the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodovar, which feels like people were just reaching for directors and film styles to compare this to. As for me, I have no such comparisons or limitations that I want to put on Martinez, who really pushed himself to make something unique for a first film.

Dreaming Hollywood is available from Cleopatra Entertainment on all VOD platforms and will also be available on blu ray, along with a soundtrack CD, featuring the music of DMX and Onyx.

Directed and written by Simon Drake and originally called The Angel on the Ceiling, this movie is all about Lisa (Sascha Harman), who has come back to the island she grew up on after the death of her sister Melanie (Kim Lyzba). She soon learns that her sister’s death was no accident and that she may have been involved in something quite dark.

Staying on the island and working as a museum cleaner where she meets a guide named Rich (Fintan Shevlin) who knows a little too much about her sister…like how she somehow both overdosed and hung herself at the same time.

There are two things Lisa is about to find out. The first is that her sister’s death leads to some places and people far beyond what she expects, as the very people who have power on the island have something to do with it. And second, that Rich is a ghost.

There are some surprises in this movie and it’s way more than I expected it to be. For a movie released recently, that’s a major accomplishment.

Lost Angel is now available from Left Films.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

U.K. comedy — with horror overtones — All My Friends Hate Me is chock full of dark, uncomfortable humor as a birthday party for thirtysomething Pete (Tom Stourton) thrown by friends he hasn’t seen since their university days grows increasingly uncomfortable. Pete has changed a bit from the posh pals he used to hang out with back at school, even eschewing a comfortable life for working with refugees, which no one in the group seems to want to hear about. 

Pete arrives to find the house where they are having the party empty, pretending that he had only arrived a short while ago when his friends come back from a pub hours after he actually showed up. With barbs and jabs being slung at a high rate from Pete’s ex-girlfriend Claire (Antonia Clarke), married couple Fig (Georgina Campbell) and George (Joshua McGuire), and intoxicated, gun-wielding Archie (Graham Dickson), along with Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), a stranger the group met at the pub, Pete begins to wonder if his friends actually dislike or perhaps even hate him. Harry gleefully skewers Pete and writes down notes about the birthday boy’s behavior, and when Pete’s fiancée Sonia (Charly Clive) finally arrives at the shindig, Pete’s paranoia and suspicions only grow worse.

Director Andrew Gaynord, working from a script cowritten by Stourton and Tom Palmer, mines the nastiness for all its worth and shows a deft hand at cranking up the thriller vibe highlighted by the tension between Harry and Pete. The ensemble cast does a solid job of inhabiting their characters — none of whom are easy to warm up to — and Stourton nailing his turn as the psychologically flawed Pete, with Demri-Burns adding some delightfully devilish work.

Super presents All My Friends Hate Me in theaters from March 11 and on digital from March 25, 2022.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

This Norway-set Danish dark comedy finds middle-aged Danish man Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) going through an extreme midlife crisis: he has abandoned his wife (Sofie Gråbøl as Anne) and two daughters — who think he is on a business trip — for life in a Norwegian forest. He is clad in furs and hunts with a bow and arrow, but living off the land isn’t working out too well for him, as after he vomits up a meal of a frog, he heads to a nearby gas station and convenience store to try to barter food for an ax. Martin isn’t very good at picking up on clues, either, when an injured man with a bag filled with money (Zaki Youssef as Musa) crosses his path.

Director Thomas Daneskov, who cowrote the screenplay with Morten Pape, goes more for quirky humor than scathing social commentary, but the balance is fine enough to make Wild Men an entertaining watch. Martin is not the kind of protagonist for whom it is easy to root, but Bjerg gives an intriguing performance as this man-child who finds out that the titular lifestyle is more difficult than he imagined — especially when local lawman Øyvind (Bjørn Sundquist) and his rather inept underlings get involved, without the aid of a police dog that always seems to have the day off.

Wild Men screens as part of Glasgow Film Festival, which takes place March 2–13, 2022 in Glasgow, Scotland. For more information, visit https://glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival.

Blue Finch Film Releasing are pleased to present the UK premiere screenings of Wild Men at Glasgow Film Festival, running from 2–13 March 2022.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We watched Knocking at Fantastic Fest on September 25, 2021. It’s now streaming on the Arrow Player. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland 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.

After leaving a tragic accident — the film begins with our heroine embracing her girlfriend who runs into the water and is never seen again — and a stay at the mental hospital, Molly moves into a new apartment where a strange knocking keeps on getting louder and louder. No one else can hear it. And it’s not going away.

Adapted from a novel by Johan Theorin, this movie lives and dies by the intense performance of lead Cecilia Milocco and the so tight you’re face-to-face cinematography of Hannes Krantz. The tension keeps increasing and much like so many “is it supernatural or mental illness” movies, the questions keep increasing as Molly begins taking increasing risks to determine where the knocking and sobbing is coming from.

At just 78 minutes, this is a short film that nearly begs for even more time and it’s rare that I feel that way. The end just arrives after the slowest of builds, but I’ve been obsessed with the moments that exist between waiting for something to happen and the actual second that everything changes.

Knocking is playing Fantastic Fest this week and will soon be available on a wider basis. We’ll update this post when it’s streaming.

Directed and written by Jeff Wallace, making his first full-length movie, Angel By Thursday is about two families connected by tragedy and coincidence. It’s about daughters trying to reconnect with mothers. About men attempting to be strong enough to care for the special needs of their brother and aunt. It’s about the interconnected nature that binds and connects people throughout the world, no matter how far away they start or how close they come together. And it’s about how we each have a very different perception of each person that we meet, as in one life, you can be someone’s hero, someone’s savior, someone’s enemy or just somebody that passes in and out of their life.

I was surprised just how much this movie made me consider my life and the roles of those within it. Perhaps you’ll watch it and get the very same feeling.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This group’s main ritual is called Jilling Off and it’s all about erotic massage for women and nothing at all for the men. With limited resources, Peggy decides that the group’s fortunes lay in a Niagra Fallls health and wellness show. She and her Sensual Seekers are working to create a trade show booth that will get them the funds they need.

I love that the official site for this movie is directly from the cult and totally in character. Written by Rachel Gayle Webster (who edited I Am an Electric Lampshade), Susan Juvet and director Jay Buim, the film works much the same way, a mockumentary about how the cult attempts to save the world via the female orgasm. If you’re easily offended — or stuck home with your parents — this may not be the right choice. Otherwise, it’s an entertaining look at just what it takes to believe in something, no matter how much the rest of the world doesn’t.

Adventures In Success is now available on iTunes and Amazon Prime Video.

William (Ryan Blakely) has been living alone in a trailer deep in the woods when he finds Emily (Jenny Raven) unconscious and gets her back on her feet over several days. They’re a strange mix, as he’s silent and she can’t stop talking. But when she opens the shed behind his house, what she finds will change everything.

Adam Reider, who directed and co-wrote with Jesse Toufexis, doesn’t spell out the story for viewers and allows the movie to unfurl at its own pace, going from in the middle of nowhere drama to surreal madness by the end of the film. He’s also aided by strong sound design by Martin Cadieux-Rouillard.

While the movie mostly has just the two leads, the flashbacks have Art Hindle (Black Christmas, The Brood) appear. The lead up to the shed, why William is so afraid of it being opened and what happens next won’t be spoiled here, but I found the slow build worthwhile.

I also really enjoyed the film’s soundtrack, which has Skye Klein, Katie Sevigny and one of my favorite musicians, King Dude, whose “Lucifer’s the Light of the World” is the perfect song for the moment it appears.

Woodland Grey plays MidWest WeirdFest on Friday, March 4 at 8:00 PM CST. You can get tickets and more information on the MidWest Weird Fest website.