Since they met at the Special Olympics, Sam Suchmann and Mattie Zufelt have been best friends. Mich like the readers of thsi site, they’re obsessed with movies and decided that it was time to make their own, filled with sex, violence and gore. And they totally succeeded.
This is it pretty much the feel-good movie of all time.
Sam and Mattie went on to storyboard, script, produce, cast and star in their dream project, which they called Spring Break Zombie Massacre.
This is the story of how it all happened.
Produced and directed by Sam’s brother Jesse and Robert Carnevale, this movie intersperses the narrative of the film the guys made with the real stories that inspired it and moments of them actually making it.
Perhaps the best part of the film is the fact that Sam and Mattie may not have made a movie that was a financial success, it was exactly what they wanted to do.
This is a story filled with people smashing the expectations of disability, of communities being formed to help them and the joy of making a movie where Satan continually pisses all over people. It’s also one of the happiest movies I’ve watched in some time, so if you need a pick-me-up, I recommend it with no reservations.
Sam & Mattie Make a Zombie Movie is now availble digitally on demand everywhere you can get movies.
Vampires, possessions, horrible hotels, exorcisms, devil worship and hauntings. Nearly every basic cable network has some show that takes you into the real story behind the paranormal, but none of them have Linnea Quigley on board.
Yes, that’s right, the scream queen is the producer and host of this show, which has twelve episodes that cover the undead, demonic possession, devil worship, witchcraft, the Devil’s Gate Dam, the queen Mary, Verdugo Hills Cemetery, black-eyed kids, celebrity deaths, the curse of St. Francis, a clown motel, hauntings, the Cecil Hotel, the Fouke Monster, Bigfoot and UFOs.
Directed by Jeff Sheldon and Victor Huesca, the series starts strong but really fails to break new ground and often resorts to merely filming PowerPoint presentations, rendering dynamic personalities like Aleister Crowley to bullet points and clip art. Also, that very same episode endlessly recycles footage from the Church of Satan documentary Satanis. At first, I thought, “Well, footage of Lavey speaking in that era isn’t easy to come by,” but then I realized that they just took around several minutes of that movie, such as the interviews with neighbors of the Church’s Black House at 6114 California Street.
If you love the paranormal, you probably won’t learn anything new. But hey, if you’re a fan of Linnea — and honestly who isn’t — this gives you the opportunity to support her producing and hosting efforts.
Linnea Quigley’s Paranormal Truth is streaming on nearly all on demand platforms.
As a diverse group of people enjoy a gallery opening , an ex-Marine suffering from PTSG takes all of them hostage, forcing them to confront everything from past sins, cultural biases and the fact that not everyone is going to make it out alive.
Writer, producer and director Lila Matta also made 2014’s Life Gets in the Way.
This movie tells the story of the four minutes that it takes for the gunman to walk into the gallery and the police to arrive, broken up by the flashbacks of how everyone got here. It’s an interesting way to tell the story of such a small — but significant — moment in all of these characters’ lives.
Dade Elza, who plays the Marine, is decent in this. He’ll be part of the upcoming Scooby-Doo series Mystery Incorporated as Fred. If you’re a fan of Parks and Recreation, keep an eye out for Jim O’Heir as a cop at the end. He was the clumsy Garry/Jerry on that show.
Andrew (Eugene Simon, Game of Thrones) is looking for the truth about his family history, giving a secret government agency his DNA in order to discover his ancestry. He soon discovers that his grandparents participated in a super solider-like program and that he’s inherited powers locked within his DNA.
Then he finds out that he’s not alone.
Now part of a group of other super powered individuals, Andrew is placed in a series of increasingly stranger situations designed to push his emotions and powers while also using him to control the emotions of others.
This movie feels like it wants to be a darker take on The X-Men, but doesn’t hit the target that it’s aiming for. Instead of using the comics and movie — as well as several other films like The Matrix — as inspiration and going its own path, this feels rudderless.
It’s a shame because it looks gorgeous and well beyond its budget.
Martin Grof has only made one other movie, 2019’s Excursion, a thriller about “a 1980’s devoted Czechoslovakian communist party member visiting his future self in London to make sure Socialism still prospers.” That sounds like something I should check out after this. Actually, I’d keep an eye of Grof, because there’s something there. Hopefully, his third effort finds it.
You know, it’d be one thing to deride this attempt at making a Fargo-esque crime film that utterly wastes the talents of some really good actors, including Allison Janney, Mila Kunis, Awkwafina, Wanda Sykes, Juliette Lewis, Matthew Modine and Ellen Barkin.
Tate Taylor has also made better films, like The Help, Ma and Girl On a Train.
But this really doesn’t go anywhere when it starts with its premise of Janey’s character being left behind by life and going for the lure of being on television. It feels done before and done better. It says absolutely nothing new.
The real reason for my vitriol is that this is an American-International Pictures movie.
That’s right. AIP. The logo that makes my heart sing every time I see it.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer relaunched the studio as a label for films they will acquire for digital and limited theatrical releases without ever understanding that AIP is the studio that didn’t bring dreck like this to viewers. Instead, it was the studio that gave us the ARKOFF formula — Action (exciting, entertaining drama), Revolution (novel or controversial themes and ideas), Killing (a modicum of violence), Oratory (notable dialogue and speeches), Fantasy (acted-out fantasies common to the audience) and Fornication (sex appeal for young adults).
Editor’s Note: As of August 2021, you can now watch The Inheritance as a free-with-ads stream on Tubi.As of Winter 2022, it’s appearing on several, U.S.-based Smart TV channelsas a free-with-ads stream.
The most enjoyable aspect of today’s indie-streaming films (they’d be direct-to-video back in the analog days of VHS and DVD) and indie distributor shingles like Uncork’d Entertainment is that U.S. audiences are treated with European films — this one from the Ukraine (in English) — that we would otherwise not see on U.S. theater screens and most likely miss on the shelves of our local, back-in-the-day Blockbuster Video.
As with most indie streamers, the budget on this haunted house horror is tight: $500,000. Unlike most indie streamers, the creative team behind it is not of the usual, inexperienced, first-timer variety not adept with the Canon Reds — or shooting on iPhones. As a producer, Chad Barager brought us The Woods (2013), Dark Harvest (2016), and Bitter Harvest (2017); here, Barager makes his feature film writing and directing debut. His co-director and writer, Kevin Speckmaier, has worked as an assistant director on TV’s syndicated Highlander (loved it), USA Network’s The Dead Zone (again, plus Anthony Micheal Hall is great in it), and numerous Lifetime and Hallmark movies (a couple of those cherished B&S About Movies X-Mas flicks). The Inheritance also serves as his feature film debut in the writing and directing chairs.
Latvian-born Natalia Ryumina is a multilingual British actress (including Latvian, Russian, and Ukrainian), who we’ve haven’t seen much on U.S. streaming shores, but amid her 20-so film and decade of credits, you may have seen her best known film, Soldiers of the Damned (2015). American (Indiana) born Nick Whittman made his business bones as a stuntman and transitioned as an actor with the National Geographic/FX series Mars (2016 – 2019); The Inheritance is his leading man debut. (Do you have Apple TV? You can watch Mars for free on that platform.)
So, with that front-of-and-behind-the-camera-pedigree, it’s not a surprise that The Inheritance walked away with a “Best Actress Award” for Natalia Ryumina at the 2020 Paris Art and Movie Awards: for an actor is only as good as the script, the film, and the other actors around them. It’s a tale about Sasha and Peter as they head off to Europe to collect on Sasha’s inheritance: a regal mansion. She soon comes to discover dark family secrets of the paranormal variety in her Ukraine family manor’s walls.
And that’s all I have to say about that, Forrest. This is that one time I am not plot-spoiling the beats. Just watch his film. I loved it and just can’t spoil this one, not this time.
The Inheritance premiered at the Catalina Film Festival on September 18, 2020. You can watch The Inheritance On-Demand and DVD in North America on April 13, 2021 from Uncork’d Entertainment. Producer Firepower Entertainment also gave us the five-episode mini-series Chernobyl (2019) staring the always welcomed Jared Harris and the always great Stellan Skarsgard.
Disclaimer: We were provided a screener by the production company’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.
We’ve been receiving a lot of great streamers from South America, as of late. The animated apocalypse of Lava and retro-apoc’in of Scavenger, both from Argentina, really impressed us with their up-against-the-budget class and style. Now we have this Chilean import, shot in Terman de Chillan , that we are grateful Uncork’d Entertainment imported without dubbing, leaving the Spanish intact (with English subtitles).
While The X-Files and The Blair Witch influences are obvious — as well as H.P Lovecraft (see Nicolas Cage’s Color Out of Space) — in this sci-fi horror tale, this latest offering from director Patricio Valladares (the 2011 actioner Toro Loco and the 2012 horror Hidden in the Woods; 2016’s Vlad’s Legacy and 2017’s Robert Englund-starring Nightworld) is not the least bit trope-ridden.
Sure, you’ll reflect on Alien, with its xenomorph impregnation, but since this is B&S About Movies, and this Chilean effort is a low-budgeter, we’re leaning to the sloppier-gooey Inseminoid as our comparison. And there’s a little bit of Cronenberg’s “body horror” flicks injected as well. Valladares efficiently pulls his tale together as a semi-film-cum-SOV camcorder “found footage” narrative that presents an alien abduction portmanteau of three alien-abduction tales. The creator behind Embryo is Barry Keating, a writer who gave us a pretty cool Euro-shot, Monty Markham sci-fi’er, The Rift(2016).
Campers in the Chilean countryside woods of Snowdevil Mountain, known for its extra-terrestrial mysteries, run afoul of otherworldly beings; one of the beings abducts and impregnate Kevin’s girlfriend, Evelyn. As her “child” rapidly grows inside her, the need to satiate her lust for flesh and blood grows, in kind. When she attacks a doctor, Kevin takes Evelyn on the run — and tries to unravel the “found footage” mystery, with a cop investigating the disappearances and rapes on their trail — as they try to find someone to remove “the thing” that’s taking over her body and mind. Tentacles and alien semen caressing human bodies, and flashbacks from 2020, to 2008, to 2012, ensues — with Patricio Valladares accomplishing a lot on very little.
You’ll be able to stream Embryo as a VOD or purchase as a DVD and Blu-ray in North American via Uncork’d Entertainment on April 6, 2021.
Disclaimer: We were sent a screener by the distributor’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.
I think I can also speak for Sam that, when we were in college (remember those days, Sam), the last thing on our minds was going into the woods to look for aliens or hairy rugs of the Bigfoot variety. High School was a bitch for us both and college was a weekly proctological exam. So what in the hell is with the ne’er-do-well kids with all the free time to curiosity seek in the woods? Yeah, we know: their thesis paper, etc., bla, bla, and yada, yada. Which is why Sam and I leaned towards the artistic: both visual and written. No cramming on law journals or dissecting or field trips. It was art tables and typewriters and radio studios for us. For nature outside: bad. VCR movie-womb room (with turntables and vinyl): good. And thanks to those VCR binges, we know better: going to the woods in a cabin with friends for an isolated vacation, well, you just end up possessed. Or infected. Or dead. Or worse.
So here we are. And it’s real.
We dig Bruce Wemple, who gave us a pretty cool pair of wooded-mystery steamers with Monstrous (a Bigfoot) and The Retreat (an Indian-myth Wendigo). And he’s giving us a double-dose in Dawn of the Beast. So, it’s sort of a sequel-trilogy. It’s like those ongoing Kaiju movies of old, with one film building onto another, with a creature from one film tag-teaming in the next, as the films keep getting bigger and better as they progress.
In the streaming-21st century — with the Canon Reds and other digital devices — it’s the slasher ’80s all over again. In either era: You’re a new-to-game filmmaker who wants to tell stories. You don’t have the budget to “go big” like the big studios, with fancy sets and props. So, you head off into the woods: the sets are cheap and bountiful. And Wemple uses those wooden environs to his advantage with a skill-set that always gives us an engaging story.
So, those students with their Bigfoot obsession head off into the Northeastern wood, known for its “strange creature sightings,” natch. And the “strange creatures” are double the terror: our Mystery Machine gang not only runs afoul of Bigfoot, but the spiritual Indian creature, a Wendigo. The ancient creature, wooden battle royale, with the kids caught in the middle, ensues (oops, lazy writing, again!).
As you can tell from the film stills, Bruce Wemple has really upped his game: the makeups and effects are against-the-budget stellar. Wendigos, Bigfoots, and Raimi demon possession. Oh, my! Auntie Em! Toto!
Good stuff, once again, Mr. Wemple. Keep ’em comin’!
While we didn’t officially review either for the site, be sure to also stream Wemple’s two previous, upper New York State-based indie-features, After Hours (2016) and LakeArtifact (2019). The welcomed and dependable Anna Shields, who starred in those two films, as well as Monstrous, stars — and pens Dawn of the Beast. Her co-star, Grant Schumacher, also returns from Lake Artifact, Monstrous, and The Retreat. Needless to say, they’re excellent, as always.
Uncork’d Entertainment will release Dawn of the Beast to digital platforms and DVD on April 6, 2021.
Disclaimer: We were sent a screener by the distributor’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.
Every review keeps bringing up the same issue with this film: the human interaction scenes are boring.
Guess what? We watched about eighty kaiju movies in the last few weeks and can honestly tell you that every single one of those movies can claim just about the same thing, so the venerable Toho got smart and added aliens and ape humans from the future to those scenes, as well as miniature singing women who worship Mothra so that even the non-giant monster moments of their films are real strange.
To those of you not able to name the four different eras of Godzilla films — Showa, Heisei, Millennium and Reiwa — let me tell you, the human moments in this are in no way as bad as All Monsters Attack.
That said, you can literally remove Godzilla and every single human from this movie and you still pretty much could have the same story. This isn’t Godzilla vs. Kong as much as it’s another movie that we could call Kong: Inside the Hollow Earth. Actually, those moments, where Kong and a crew of good and bad scientists goes inside a gravity well to wind up in a Skartaris or Shangri-La or Savage Land inside our planet are some of the best parts of the movie, topped only by Godzilla somehow being able to blast nuclear fire from Hong Kong to the middle of Earth’s core without destroying the entire planet.
So, if we remove those moments of humanity, we really should also just forget the lame conspiracy theory plot with Milly Bobby Brown, Brian Tyree Henry and Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople that exists merely to give us exposition, show off some conspiracy theory under the world trains and explain who the big bad really is.
Yes, unlike every human bad guy who has ever gone up against a giant monster, it turns out that owning a big company like Apex Cybernetics and using scientific expeditions to make money never really pays off.
Director Adam Wingard made You’re Next and The Guest. If I hadn’t looked up that he directed this, I would have never known. It’s a writer’s room-made film, with the last creative team making rewrites so that everyone is in character. And it’s another part of the shared universe post-Marvel Cinematic Universe aesthetic, where every movie leads to the next, unlike the Toho films where fans were the ones to create a patchwork No-Prize narrative that barely connects them.
That said, you can just enjoy the huge set pieces here, like Kong and Godzilla battling on the deck of an aircraft carrier and the final battle in Hong Kong. It looks like paintings come to life, the kind of battle between giant monsters that I could only dream of as a child satisfied with foam suits and zipped-in actors.
Ishirô Honda, who directed the original King Kong vs. Godzilla and made a movie that satirized Japanese TV along the way, once said “The reason I showed the monster battle through the prism of a ratings war was to depict the reality of the times. When you think of King Kong just plain fighting Godzilla, it is stupid. But how you stage it, the times in which it takes place, that is the thought process of the filmmaker.”
So is this film dumb? Well, it was sold at some Carl’s Jr. restaurants with Godzilla hamburgers and Kong chicken sandwiches, the exact kind of commercialism that the Toho movie made fun of with Kong yaki noodles. But it is a big tentpole Hollywood movie in the weird second year of there not being a lot of places ready to show it.
But hey, it does have monsters named Titanus Warbats and Kong gets a radioactive axe, so I can’t be all huffy and say that I didn’t enjoy it. I still have an entire shelf full of much better kaiju films — ask me, I’ll recommend like twenty to you — to enjoy whenever I want, but today’s children need a movie like this to get them excited the same way I was back in 1976, going crazy for Kong in theaters and Godzilla on UHF monster host shows.
“Ivan Sen is someone I’ve worked with before, and I absolutely love him. I think he’s a great filmmaker. Mystery Road, the film which came before the TV series of the same name that he directed, was great. I’ve been watching his work for a number of years.” — Hugo Weaving, in the 2020 pages of Collider, about his reasons for starring in Loveland
Ryan Kwanten (Jason Stackhouse in HBO’s True Blood; Dead Silence) and Hugo Weaving (Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger, The Lord of the Rings, Agent Smith in The Matrix franchise) star in this sci-fi romantic-thriller set in a near-future Asian megacity. Jack (Kwanten) is a mercenary-for-hire and sometimes assassin living a lonely existence his with robotic lovers in between sanctions. Upon discovering true, human love with April, a Karaoke geisha (a new to international audiences Jillian Nguyen, in her leading-lady debut), that love is quickly lost as Jack discovers he’s infected with a mysterious illness by his employers that causes his body to deteriorate — and he’s being pursued by robotic operatives. His only ally — or is he — is Dr. Bergman (Weaving) with the answers to the origins of his illness . . . and other mysteries.
The overseas one-sheet.
This beautifully shot, international film set in Hong Kong and Macau, China, as well as Queensland and Brisbane, Australia, which comes from the mind of writer and director Ivan Sen, drips with film noir atmosphere. The film plays as a sci-if version of D.O.A., the 1950, classic American film noir directed by Rudolph Maté and starring Edmond O’Brien, while run through a Jean-Luc Godard neo-noir Alphavillefilter — more so than the usual “Blade Runner” comparisons that many streamers will namedrop in their subsequent IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes reviews.
The new U.S. streaming one-sheet.
A neo-noir swirl of Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.
A veteran of three dramatic shorts, Ivan Sen released his feature film debut, Beneath the Clouds (2002), as well as the features Dreamland (2009), Toomelah (2011), Mystery Road (2013), and Goldstone (2016). Loveland is his sixth feature — and first internationally-distributed film. Mystery Road, also starring Hugo Weaving, was nominated for and won several awards for the Australian Film Critics Association Awards, Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards, and Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards. During the film’s overseas run, it received accolades from Cannes, as well as the Toronto and Berlin International Film Festivals.
If you’d like to learn more about Hugo Weaving’s involvement and his decision to work on Loveland — as well as his other works — you can join him with Christian Radish of Collider for a September 2020 review.
Loveland — scheduled for release across Australia in October 2021 — will be released in the U.S. and North America by TriCoast Worldwide Releasing in the coming months. A trailer was officially released to the press in August 2021 by the Australian shingle, Dark Matter Distribution. As of November, you can now follow the film’s latest developments on its official Facebook page.
This film has since been retitled as Expired for its 2022 distribution — as issued by Lionsgate Entertainment — which has released a new, updated trailer in January.
Other films under the TriCoast shingle we’ve reviewed include:
Disclaimer: We discovered this film on social media, were intrigued, and sought out the film. That has no bearing on our review. This review was updated and reposted on November 17, 2021, as the film officially rolled out, worldwide.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.