I’m a Yutaka Takeuchi fan. You may know him for his work in several episodes of HBO’s True Blood and Netflix’s contribution to all things Marvel with The Defenders. He was also in Jason Cuadrado’s feature film debut portmanteau Tales from the Dead, and USS Indianapolis, a direct-to-DVD affair with Nicolas Cage (do read our “Nic Cage Bitch” featurette). So it’s great to see Takeuchi in a starring role carrying a feature film: as a swing-shift taxi driver — driving down a neo-noir spiral.

The femme fatale triggering the spiral is Lexy Hammonds, a relatively new actress to the game with over a dozen roles in indie shorts, features, and cable series (2016’s Crazy Love). Also look for Sarah Dumont, as Morgan, from Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse in the cast. The remainder of the unknown and local, shot around San Jose, California-cast are each effective in their roles. There’s none of that indie-streamer thespian boondoggling to be found in the frames: frames shot for $160,000 — but look much more expensive.

Cara (Hammonds), a mysterious woman with a retro arcade games fetish, jumps into Dave’s (Takeuchi) taxi — and pays out his meter for the night. Dave soon discovers the “random” errands, aka adventures, Cara takes him on — getting drinks, playing arcade games, duffel bag pick ups, and breaking into a theater, have a deeper meaning. And the “deep” turns of that “meaning” is Lenny (Johnny Gilligan from the series Blackthorne): a crime syndicate hit-man on Cara’s trail. And Lenny’s a little, shall we say, “tweaked.”

Drive All Night isn’t your typical film noir, as it emphasizes the “neo.” Sure, you’ll reflect on Michael Mann’s neo-noir Collateral (2004) starring Tom Cruise’s ne’er-do-well assassin — but that was, as is the case with Mann (Thief), an action thriller. No, this feature film writing and directing debut from Peter Hsieh leans more towards Nicolas Winding Refn’s (The Neon Demon, Only God Forgives) Drive (2011), which itself is closer to Walter Hill’s (The Warriors, Streets of Fire) existential, Easy Rider-esque stunt driver-cum-criminal romp The Driver (1978).

And that’s what’s absorbed (as least moi) from the frames: a surreal cross between Mann’s Thief (one of my all-time favorites) and The Driver (another all-timer) — with one of the eyes of Mann, and another eye from Hill, plugged into Winding Refn’s brain. The neo-noir spiral here, while certainly inspired by it, isn’t the cut-and-dry mystery, twisty black and white of the Double Indemnity variety (another all-timer): Drive All Night is much more surreal in its layered, dream-like non-reality. And since Lenny, our mob enforcer is having his own surreal breakdown — and since I just watched Takashi Miike’s Gozu this week (another all-time fave) — I see a little bit of that film’s reality-stressed yakuza in the frames (only not as WTF’d as a Miike Joint: and what film ever is or will be).

This is a great flick!

You’ll be able to watch Drive All Night on all the usual streaming platforms as of March 20, 2021.

Disclaimer: We were sent a screener by the distributor’s public relations 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 Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.

The art of film is to not just toss images on the screen — as so many aspiring indie filmmakers do. The craft of film is to embed your soul on the screen; to allow the audience to connect with your heart. Clark, the young filmmaker of Summer Daydream, comes to learn that lesson: he may not have ended up making the film that he wanted, but he made his film exactly the way it needed to be done. And Mitch Hudson and Stephen Dean, two local Lynchburg, Virginia, filmmakers opted to share their own youthful, filmmaking ambitions with their joint feature film debut — and made their film exactly the way it needed to be done.

As with any young boy, Clark’s greatly influenced by his father; a dad who infused Clark with the love of film courtesy of the purchase of a digital camera. And as any kid with a camera, Clark spends his summers making horror movies with his friends. Upon the loss of his father, and the financial strains that come with such a loss, it’s compounded by his mother recent job loss — that will uproot the family. To save his family’s home, he recruits his two best friends and a couple of first time amateur actors to enter a film contest with a $15,000 cash prize.

Mitch Hudson and Stephen Dean composed an insightful, calculated script; one free of the expected plot tropes. Sure, I could rat-a-tat-tat the story and plot spoil everything. What I will tell you is that I expected “dad” to reappear with helpful advice; he did not. I expected for Clark to discover his first summer crush; he didn’t. And that’s only two of the story’s “change up” examples; two that display the extra though put into the script that’s rises Summer Daydream above the horizons of a neat-little-bow feel-good Hallmark movie or other family-oriented tales. Mitch Hudson and Stephen Dean’s feature film debut is a film that’s impossible to give a bad review. Everything about their film is sheer perfection; from script, to its cast of solid teen and adult actors, to directing, to its cinematography: everything works. I challenge another critic — if they’re foolish enough to try — to find a flaw in it.

As I watched the valiant attempt by Clark and his friends to save his family’s home, as well as the retaining the memories of his father held within the walls of that home, my own heart drifted back to my own summers of youth as I watched the teen-oriented movies of the ’70s that aired weekly via ABC-TV’s Afterschool Special, CBS-TV’s Schoolbreak Special, and NBC-TV’s Special Treat. If you’ve read my reviews for the cream of the crop of those youth-oriented TV movies, such as The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon, Blind Sunday, Hewitt’s Just Different, New York City Too Far from Tampa Blues, and Portrait of a Teenage Shoplifter then you know how I feel about those films. And that’s the same feeling — of simpler, non-Internet stressed happier times — I had watching Summer Daydream.

I love this movie. It’s a movie that elicits nothing but respect.

Completed in 2018, Summer Daydream, then known as Technicolour Daydream (copyright issues over the use of “Technicolor,” even with the British-version of the word), traveled the usual festival rounds that all indie filmmakers journey. And the journey was a fruitful one, as Mitch Hudson and Stephen Dean’s feature film debut earned fifteen wins and ten nominations, such as winning the “Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature Film” at the 2019 Southern City Film Festival, “Best Screenplay in a Feature Film” at the 2019 World Music and Independent Film Festival, the “Saints Award for Best Feature” at the 2018 Saints and Sinners Film Festival, and “Best Feature” at the 2018 Southern States Indie Film Fest. Courtesy of Summer Hill Entertainment, U.S. and Canadian audiences finally got to enjoy this touching coming-of-age-story on DVD, Blu-ray, and across all major streaming services in the winter of 2020.

Summer Daydream now makes its March 2021 free-with-ads streaming debut on Tubi. You can learn more about the film on their official Facebook page. Other Summer Hill Entertainment releases we’ve recently enjoyed include Baby Frankenstein, Cicada, and Exorcism at 60,000 Feet.

Disclaimer: We did not receive a screener or a review request from the director or the distributor. We discovered this film on our own and truly enjoyed the movie.

About the Author: You can read the music, film reviews and short stories of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

It’s great to see DVD supplementarian Naomi Holwill releasing her works from their DVD addendums as standalone films to online streaming platforms. We previously enjoyed her genre insights with Fascism on a Thread: The Strange Story of Nazisploitation Cinema (2020), which was included on the DVD and Blu-ray restoration for The Beast in Heat. Now Holwill offers us her documentary supplement — the first documentary to do so — on the all-too-short career of seventies sex symbol Me Me Lai, one of the very first British-Asian pin-ups, which is included on the DVD restoration of Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 cannibal exploitation genre-inspirer Man From Deep River, aka Sacrifice!, aka Deep River Savages.

Sure, Lai made her feature film debut in the British sex comedy Passion Potion (1971), as well as working alongside Mike Raven in Ted Hooker’s lone writing and director credit Crucible of Terror (1971) and appearing in another Brit sex-comedy the Au Pair Girls, aka The Young Playmates (1972). But it was her work with Umberto Lenzi in Man from Deep River (1972) and Eaten Alive! (1980) and Ruggero Deodato in Jungle Holocaust (1977) that forever forged Lai in our gooey, horror-loving hearts as the Queen of Italian cannibal films. Then, after her final film, The Element of the Crime (1984) — her others were Blake Edwards’s Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) and Undercover Lover (1979) — Lai vanished from the business.

Then along came some contraption called “the Internet,” to which Lai’s daughter uploaded a wealth of photos from her mother’s modeling, TV, and cinematic glory days. And it was those social media posts that inspired and enabled film historian Calum Waddell to locate Me Me Lai for this document, not only on her career, but on an offensive genre that shouldn’t have existed*, but made our youthful, teen-Midnight Movie days of the ’80s all the more sweeter . . . and gooier.

The highlight of the documentary is that we hear it all from the source herself and not just a bunch of talking head genre experts. And where else can you hear someone who has worked with both and can tell us the pros and cons of working with the zombie-cannibal maestros of Lenzi and Deodato? Are we at all shocked to learn that Lenzi was the raving lunatic and Deodato was the more chill of the two? And is there too much Eli Roth in the frames — who, depending on opinion, is to horror docs what Metallica’s Lars Ulrich is to metal documentaries? Well, it depends on what you think of Roth and how you receive his films, such as Hostel and his own cannibal exploitation homage, The Green Inferno. As for myself: I bow to Roth’s passion and how he serves as the prefect fodder for Naomi Holwill and Calum Waddell’s passions: to give ’70s genre films their rightful preservation in cinematic history.

You can also enjoy Me Me Lai’s insights as part of Naomi Holwill’s High Rising Productions partner Calum Waddell’s Eaten Alive! The Rise and Fall of the Italian Cannibal Film (2015), which is featured on the Grindhouse Releasing Blu-ray for Cannibal Ferox in the U.S. and the U.K. Blu-ray for Zombi Holocaust by 88 Films. Our much adored Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Sergio Martino also offer their genre insights in that documentary.

I don’t know about you, but I cross my fingers in the hope that From Rollerball to Rome (2020) — Holwill’s document to Norman Jewison’s influential post-apoc film — becomes an independent online stream. I also hope for an eventual DVD/Blu-ray box set restoration of the films of Mark “Trash” Gregory** — including a subsequent Rising High Productions documentary on our beloved post-apoc warrior. And while you’re at it, Naomi, can we have a documentary supplement on Michael “Parsifal” Sopkiw? Of course, the team at Grindhouse Releasing and 88 Films needs to get off their collective duffs and give us a Micheal Sopkiw** four-pack DVD/Blu-ray restoration blowout.

You can enjoy Me Me Lai Bites Back on Tubi. Watch it. Great stuff.

* We dedicated an entire week to cannibal films with our “Mangiati Vivi” featurette. In the coming months, we’re hosting an “SOV Week” and “Video Nasties Week” that will catch us up on the Italian zombie and cannibal flicks we didn’t get to in our “Mangiati Vivi Week.” Bookmark us! As of October 2021, we since wrapped up those two weeks and reviewed Primitives, aka Savage Terror, along with the Jess Franco-trio of White Cannibal Queen, Cannibal Terror, and Devil Hunter.

** Hey, we love Mike and Mark around the B&S About Movies cubicles, as you can tell by our review of 2019: After the Fall of New York, which includes an overview of Michael’s films. And don’t get us started on Mark Gregory, as we dedicated an entire week of reviews to honor his career with our “Who Is Mark Gregory and why is there an entire week all about him?” featurette.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories based on his screenplays, as well as music reviews, on Medium.

“Marty’s Cooper’s camera captures the corners of life which are often forgotten about.”
— quote from the film

And now: Martha Cooper will not be forgotten . . . thanks to Selina Miles.

Filmmaker Selina Miles — as did her idol and inspiration — began her career as a photojournalist and film documentarian chronicling the works of graffiti writers in her native Brisbane, Australia. Those endeavors lead to an opportunity for Miles to work as an editor for the spray paint brand Ironlak, then as a music video director, for bands such as the Australian hip-hop group The Hilltop Hoods. In 2013 Miles directed Limitless, a successful, short hyper-lapse video released on You Tube. In 2016 she began self-producing a short-series, Portrait of an Artist, a portrait of artist Guido van Helten. Those works led to the creation of The Wanderers, a documentary series on Australian street artists, which premiered on the ABC iView platform in 2017.

And those efforts have culminated in this: Miles’s feature film debut.

“A documentary is a painting. Not a photograph.”
— Selina Miles, Radio Juxtapoz podcast

Released in time for Women’s History Month, Martha: A Picture Story is a telling portrait of Martha Cooper, a trailblazing female graffiti artist and subculture street photographer.

A noted American photojournalist, Martha Cooper became the first female staff photographer for the New York Post during the 1970s, but broke out on the international stage with her chronicles of the New York City graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s. The film begins with Martha and her camera, snapping shots on a solo motorcycle trip through east Asia in 1963 at the age of 20 and up through her work in providing a voice to unknown street artists and bringing them their own brand of artistic acclaim.

What I enjoyed about this film is that it’s more than just a cold, mechanical biographer-subject relationship studio product. Miles’s admiration and respect — and the friendship between Miles and Cooper — shines through. A telling moment of the film is when Miles digs up lost footage from the ’80s that Cooper forgot about and has never seen. It’s a very touching moment; a joyous moment as you realize you’re watching history being preserved — as it’s being preserved — in real time.

There’s a reason why Martha: A Picture Story earned seven award nominations and won four: it’s very power stuff from a newly discovered filmmaker to watch. After watching Martha: A Picture Story, as well as her previous works (linked above), I look forward, not only to Selina Miles’s next docs-chronicle, but to see what fictional-narrative film she might have up her paint-splattered sleeves.

Martha: A Picture Story, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and has screened at festivals around the world to critical acclaim, will be available across all VOD platforms in North America on March 16th — along with a special Blu-ray release to follow in May. The film is bought to you by Utopia Media, a film distribution company co-founded by filmmaker/musician Robert Schwartzman (of the band Rooney). We reviewed his own feature film directing effort, The Argument, last September. We also reviewed Utopia’s release of Liam Firmager’s stellar portrait of Detroit singer-songwriter Suzi Quatro in Suzi Q. You can learn more about the launch of Utopia with this February 19, 2019, article at Deadline.com.

You can learn more about Selina Miles and the making of Martha: A Picture Story courtesy of the Radio Juxtapoz podcast (You Tube audio). You can also visit her official website.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.