Patton Oswalt once famously yelled of the Star Wars prequels, “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!” This was in a time before movies like Joker took the villains from our favorite old films and made them someone that we could care about and perhaps even come to love.
To wit: the only thing I know about Cruella de Vil from One Hundred and One Dalmations is that she’s fixated on murdering, well, a hundred and one little dalmatians just so she can get a new coat. That really doesn’t sound like someone I want to know more about, but here we are with a movie with a MAC cosmetics tie-in and an anti-heroine that can pretty be Arthur Fleck for the Hot Topic set.
Craig Gillespie comes from advertising into directing and it shows, as he’s great at breaking this movie into set pieces that have very unique looks. His films are hit and miss with me. I was fine with I, Tonya but his Fright Night is an abomination. Here, he’s making a decent movie, albeit one that is two hours and fourteen minutes, which seems about twice as long as this movie needs ot be. Imagine if I had the attention span of a child! Oh wait, I do!
Did you ever wonder how Cruella met her henchmen Jasper and Horace? Were you lying awake at night wondering who her mother was and just why she hated dalmatians so much?
Probably you were, if you watched this. This film was enjoyed in our home because there was a dog named Wink who was a chihuahua and we all know how much those tiny yet feisty beasts are beloved in the B&S About Movies HQ.
I guess if you have kids and you want to introduce them to popular music, this is a decent movie to do so. I’m still failing to see any reason for why it exists, but I could say that about so many of the sequels and remakes and reimaginings that I find myself watching.
We just moved into a new house on October of last year. It’s a rough experience, as you go from the expected to the unknown and every step of the way, you feel like you’re on your own, as everyone takes advantage of you.
That’s the situation David Van Owen (Ford Austin, who is amazing in this) finds himself in when he buys a new home and can barely afford a contractor to fix the septic line. Handling it himself, he finds a box buried in his backyard with $3 million dollars and a corpse.
Except that corpse (Tom Fitzpatrick, The Bride in Black from Insidious 2 and 3) isn’t quite dead.
Writer/director/composer Michael P. Blevins has put together a pretty tight film which is basically about David slowly going insane as the home overwhelms him. He has great support from Richard Riehle (a familiar character actor face from movies like Office Space and Casino), Rachel Alig, Ken Hudson Campbell and Clint Jung.
My favorite part of this movie is the corpse, who looks suitably deranged and there’s an incredible scene where David faces off with the body, demanding that it come back to life because he’s certain that it’s not dead. It’s right on the center lane of horrifying and hilarious, which is not the easiest balance.
Digging to Death is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.
Small Town Monsters’ latest documentary, On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey cryptid documentarian Seth Breedlove leading his team — which includes Bigfoot researchers like Steve Kulls and Paul Bartholomew — deep into the Adirondacks on the hunt for Sasquatch.
Beyond the story of trying to find Bigfoot, this movie also investigates why researchers spend their lives searching for a creature that many believe doesn’t exist. There’s also a trip to Whitehall, NY, where several police officers reported seeing a Bigfoot on a rural road, as well as some experiences in Lake George and Western Massachusetts.
Unlike many of the Sasquatch docs that are all over basic cable, Breedlove seems to come to this as a skeptic and his experts are never screaming sensationalists. This is real journalism in the pursuit of cryptids.
On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey is now available to purchase or rent on a number of platforms from 1091 Pictures, including iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu and FandangoNOW. You can learn more at the official Small Town Monsters site.
As a child in the pews of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, I always wondered, if the First Commandment is “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me,” why are we spending so much time and energy praying to the Virgin Mary instead of God?
James Herbert, in between thinking about hyper intelligent rats destroying humanity, must have had similar thoughts when he wrote the book Shrine in 1983. The book combines so many of my favorite subjects — religious ecstasy, demonic possession, faith healing, fanatical Catholicism and hysteria — and seems like the perfect tale to make into a movie.
So imagine my delight when it really did become a movie and Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert were the producers. My mania got even more intense when they picked the very William Castle release date of Good Friday to open the movie, which pretty much disappeared so quickly that I had to pray to St. Anthony to try and find it. At the time, I blamed the pandemic and the fact that there really aren’t enough theaters yet to support a movie’s release.
Then I finally watched The Unholy at home and, well…
This is legitimately the worst movie I’ve seen in some time, which is a miracle in and out of itself seeing as how many Bruno Mattei and Jess Franco movies I watch. Director Evan Spiliotopoulos has a career mainly in writing and most of those films are animated sequels, such as The Lion King 1 1/2, Tarzan II and The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning. I have no real idea how he made the move from screenwriting to directing a film that came out from a major company like Sony, because this is a movie rife with issues.
I don’t expect everyone to be Mario Bava and obsessed over color palette, but the tones of this movie shift to the point that it becomes hyper-distracting. I don’t just mean that each location has its own color choice. I mean that there are times that the film looks like its from the late 90s/00s world of crushed black and that silver and blue colortone over everything. At other times, such as inside the church or the tent service that closes the films, the black tones are so clumped up that you start to lose parts of the pictoral integrity. This also makes the movie look like its shot on multiple stocks of film, like Natural Born Killers without a plan. So there are moments when The Unholy has the look of an artier horror movie and others where it looks like it was made for Lifetime. I mean, this had a $10 million dollar budget, so you think that’d be something people would look into.
There’s even an opening of a woman’s spirit being placed inside a doll when she dies so that the reveal of what happens in the movie is completely spoiled, like I am doing now. My reasons are to keep anyone from enduring such a pointless film, while the filmmakers should have been to surprise you later in the movie, seeing as how the central conceit is whether or not Alice Pagett (Cricket Brown) is on the side of the angels, fallen or unfallen.
Disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who deserves better) is in town to get a web story about a possessed cow. He’s only getting paid $150 for driving across the country, which makes me wonder if he’s ever heard of Upwork, which he could use to to find way better work, or even retail, which would pay better. Instead, while in this town, he breaks open the evil doll to create a fake story, the doll’s spirit goes into the deaf mute Alice, who suddenly starts speaking, hearing and healing everyone in town.
Much like the Amazing Randi vs. faithhealers debate, Gerry wonders if this is all a placebo effect. The Catholic Church seems more than willing to instantly make this a miracle. For all the scorn you can toss the church’s way, they’re bigger skeptics than nearly anyone. Maybe it’s all Bishop Gyles (Cary Elwes, who also deserves better) wanting to erase the sins of the past few decades.
Meanwhile, Alice’s uncle Father William Hagan (William Sadler, who…yeah, but way more than everyone else) starts to not believe that this is all divine, even after his emphysema is healed. Also, Katie Aselton from The League is in this and, yes, she really should have followed the lead of Jordana Brewster and escaped.
The Unholy has some of the worst effects I’ve seen since the early days of CGI, moments of demonic shadows and static that look unfinished at best and hilariously inept at worst. It’s hard to get into a film when you’re nearly seeing the effects fall apart. They looked great in the trailer, but that’s because, you know, you can cut the trailer to take off the bad edges. When they’re up there on screen for an extended period, they’re just plain horrendous.
The movie ends with the most ridiculous montage of religious imagery, stuff that looks like a slideshow someone made in iMovie. We also get St. Matthew 7:15 up there, telling us “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s. clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
I’ll answer this movie with my own quote from the Bible. Let’s use Pslam 101:3. “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless. I hate the work of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me.”
A man covering up a crime assumes a nosy neighbor may have seen what he did, leading him to ruin their life. But how much did they see? That’s the story of Massimiliano Cerchi’s (Mayday, The House of Evil, Insane) The Penthouse.
Peter (David Schifter) and Amanda (Vanessa Ore) purchase the condo of their dreams, a gorgeous place that is right over the ocean. They become neighbors with the boaters who dock in the shadow of their high-rise, looking at them as their neighbors.
As they watch the comings and goings of a boater named Charles (Michael Paré), they’ll soon wish they hadn’t seen what looks like him murdering his girlfriend Tess (Krista Grotte Saxon). That’s after Charles has gotten into a fight with Peter, framed him for breaking and entering and what could be the absolute worst thing, taken his dog.
Sure, it’s Rear Window, but Paré is as intense as always, and that’s the kind of movie I love to watch.
Under his other name Alvaro Passeri, Cerchi did the miniatures for Atlantis Interceptors and Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072, as well as special effects for The Wild Beasts, even serving as the rock sculptor on Caligula, the assistant art director on Tentacles, the assistant production designer for Alien 2: On Earth and the director of Plankton.
The Penthouse is available on demand and on DVD from Lionsgate.
Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers series are among his most famous works and in this film, the Van Gogh Museum took a new and revealing look at the five publicly-owned versions of these paintings rarely — if ever — seen all in the same place. In fact, all five paintings are now considered to be in such a delicate state that there will never be a show with all five alongside one another ever again.
Each of these paintings is different and each of them has its own unique story to tell. This documentary gives us all an incredible virtual way to view the paintings while learning about them and van Gogh.
Director David Bickerstaff has also created virtual exhibitions for Degas, Canaletto, Bosch, Monet and many more. While many of us can’t travel to the world’s museums, films like this give us a real way to see art in the only way that we can.
You can learn more about Sunflowers and see where it’s playing, as well as download or purchase other films in the series at the official site.
The Dark Hobby follows conservationists and scientists who will stop at nothing to protect what’s underwater, which as always comes down to the battle between commerce and conservation. Aquarium trade extraction is an industry worth billions that has devastated reef species and habitats globally.
In early 2021, a Hawaii Circuit court upheld the Supreme Court ruling that the aquarium trade must end. The relentless ten-year legal battle unravels and weaves through this film, showing that while so many animals are protected, those underwater are regularly abused.
“In Hawaii, the reefs, turtles, whales and dolphins are all protected, but everyone forgot the fish” is the tagline for this movie and it really speaks to what this is all about. Director Paula Fouce really captures the subject well and kept my mind quite open to the things I may have never known before, such as how cyanide is used to knock out fish and bring them to pet stores.
The Dark Hobby is available on iTunes, AppleTV, YouTube, GooglePlay, Vudu and Vimeo
Alex Noyer made the documentary 808, which was all about the Roland TR-808, the drum machine that has been at the root of so much hip hop and pop music. He also wrote and directed a short called Conductor, which was about a music engineer who helps a young musician create music for a once-in-lifetime competition.
Inspired by that film, Noyer has created Sound of Violence, which is an incredibly unique take on the slasher. It’s the tale of Alexis Reeves (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who was deaf until witnessing the murder of her family when she was ten years old. This devastating event awakened her synesthetic abilities and a musical ability that is fueled by the literal sound of violence.
While she works on her career as a teacher and enjoys a loving relationship with Marie (Lili Simmons), she keeps everyone unaware of the dark secrets behind her musical gifts. Yet when faced with the prospect of losing her hearing again, she’ll do anything to stop that from happening.
Alexis can see colors inside music thanks to the neurological condition synesthesia, which she first discovered when she murdered her brutal father as a child. Now, she continues enjoying those swirls of color due to her musical collages of fighting children, mayhem and pain. Yet once you get addicted to a song or to creating them, you can’t stop. You need a bigger high. And Alexis is headed down a path that may doom anyone close to her.
Sure, it may go over the top when Alexis discovers how to create all manner of complex torture devices that tie into her ability to compose music while tearing human beings to shreds. Yet in a time when most streaming slashers seem content to toss some synth music and 80s clothes on while replaying the same bad cliches of the end of the genre’s best years and proclaiming themselves as bold throwbacks.
This is a high concept movie with acid trip visuals and no small shortage of gore all united to create one of the most unique slashers the form has seen in decades. It’s not perfect, but it feels like a dramatic step forward and I can’t wait to see what Noyer creates next.
Sound of Violence will debut on cable and digital VOD May 21 from Gravitas Ventures.
Delilah Doom — whose entrance music is “Let’s Go To The Mall” by Robin Sparkles– is the Queen of Aerobic Style and a lover of jazzercise.
Shelly Martinez was Salinas in TNA and Ariel in the WWE version ECW, as well as a contestant on The Search for the Next Elvira and the official Hollywood event correspondent and hostess for the horror news website MoreHorror.com.
“The Bully Buster” Keta Meggett came to wrestling from the world of acting and has used it to increase her self-esteem.
Katarina Leigh Waters was known as the occult character Winter in TNA and Katie Lea Burchill in WWE. She also appeared in a series of DVDs from Scorpion Releasing, introducing several movies as part of Katarina’s Nightmare Theater.
All four women are part of Jeremy Norrie’s (Don’t Call Me Bigfoot, Why We Fight) The Other Side of the RIng, which tells their stores about being a woman in the world of wrestling. I think if you’re a superfan of groups like RISE and Shimmer, you’ll get a lot out of this movie. You’re not going to learn anything groundbreaking, but it’s interesting to see where the women came from and how hard they’re worked for their position.
An aspiring actor (Mika Boorem, who was in Blue Crush and also directed and co-wrote this movie with Benjamin Boorem, Cshediiz Coleman and Benjamin Lockman) has accidentally stolen the identity of a Veronica Lake (Paige Howard, Adventureland) and made her way to Guatemala to be part of a blockbuster film.
While there, a cartel leader named El Jade (Tom Arnold!) thinks she’s the leader of another gang, which leads to her father Ben (Benjamin Boorem, her real-life father)having to rescue her, then work with a Mayan priest to somehow get the film made.
This is a cute film and you can tell both Boorems were looking for a project to get Mika experience in directing. It’s a pretty big first effort and definitely a nice little caper film.
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