Pocketman and Cargoboy — from 2018’s Pocketman and Cargoboy — and Section 62 are back to face the threat of the 155 IQ man, Sir Longbottom.
This has been described as a kung fu adventure, but I wouldn’t go expecting Tony Jaa.
Beyond the name Longbottom, this movie has some similarities to the world of Harry Potter, as its young teens learning how to protect the world in a hidden school. It also has plenty of Spy Kids influence.
The weird thing is, this seems like a kids movie and then characters get beaten and bloodied and even killed. It gets pretty dark pretty quickly when it starts so light hearted.
That said, director and writer Clay Moffatt has worked hard for the budget he has. My only major pet peeve is that for a movie with such a short running time, this has about eleven minutes of credits.
The Rise of Sir Longbottom is now available on demand.
Upon discovering the streaming one-sheets for this experimental art-horror film on Tubi, I assumed I stumbled into a new Asian extreme horror film. Just look at the images for yourself: The first films the VHS centers of my celluloid cortex loaded was the J-Horror static of Takashi Miike’s Audition and Gozu, Bigas Luna’s narrative corkscrews of Anguish and Reborn, Fruit Chan’s testament to man’s sexual obsession with youth and beauty in Dumplings, and Alejandro Jodoroswky’s unholy trio of El Topo, Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre. But, as I learned Blood Freaks was an arthouse-import from Mexico, I soon understood the one-of-kind voice behind the film is a student of the supernatural phantasmagoria of José Mojica Marins with his Coffin Joe romps At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse.
As Blood Freaks (aka La Puta Es Ciega, aka The Whore is Blind)—a homage to those forbidden, lurid clamshell and plastic-trayed Big-Box VHS/SOV bottom-of-the-barrel delights from our ‘80s youth—unspooled, I began to realize that writer and director Omar Jacobo is one of us: a freaky denizen who, when turning 18, delighted at being allowed to fan through the adult film section’s gigantic binders; who gleefully frolicked amid the horror-section shelves for the Fangoria-inept and the Famous Monsters-obscure. As one of the copy taglines for the film reads: “sleaze, gore, and more,” which is exactly what we wanted. We wanted mind-bending. We wanted backstreet scuzzy. We wanted our characters to be eclectic-crossed-with-freaky and a soupçon of crazy.
In the apartments of a low-rent Mexican walk-up, its misfit tenants are just that: They’re Andy Warhol perverse; they’re David Lynch oneiric; they’re John Waters hyperbolic. They’d fit right into the plotting of Flesh for Frankenstein, The Elephant Man, and Pink Flamingos: for I have no doubt that Omar Jacobo is a student of those films, and of the French New Wave impressionism of Claude Chabrol with La Femme infidel, Jean-Luc Godard with Breathless, and Francois Truffaut with The 400 Blows.
However, somewhere along the way, Jacobo’s celluloid schooling in the art of French-inspired subjectivity, ambiguity, and existentialism careened off the rails, drunkenly swaggering down a seedy, Mexican backstreet with a ratty, washed-out VHS rental of Bloodsucking Freaks in his hands—not realizing it wasn’t a product of the SOV ‘80s, but a low-rent and long-forgotten, inept drive-in homage to France’s Grand Guignol theater; a scuz-fest that sloshed the fecund streets of New York City’s grindhouse circuit in 1976, only for its asinine jawbone to be dislodged from the La Brea Celluloid Tar Pits onto home video store shelves for multiple-additional, muddy washouts from its perpetual rental-play. What was damaged to-the-point-of-blue-screen-of-death tape wasn’t artistic license: it was consumer-rabid wear-and-tear mistaken as artistic license.
Blood Freaks is a Dante’s Inferno of a retro-horror fantasy with a narrative structure created through an inventive use of music, camera work, and occasional still-image jump-cutting to imply movement through the dark underside of Mexico. It’s there that we meet the lives of the physically grotesque and spiritually sordid, violent tenants of a dingy apartment building: a blind, schoolgirl-clad lesbian prostitute who entices Janes/girlfriends (and if an unwanted John happens to attack her; well, just watch out for what she’s packing in the shaft of her cane) for her once overweight, cooking-obsessed Madam-girlfriend, and that Madam’s lesbian-dominatrix sister—and the “girlfriends” end up being her (temporary) submissives. Together, with the dominatrix’s male-dwarf partner (not forgetting Ralphus, the demented dwarf from Bloodsucking Freaks, and Jodorowsky’s dwarfs in his unholy trio), the sisters run a bathroom-based taxidermy and black market organ lab supplied with their girlfriend-subs. Their milkman-neighbor also has his kink: he’s a pornographer that tapes the sister’s sex-slave exploits to sell on the black market. Additional monies are made with the skins of the Janes: the dwarf treats the epidermal hides for use on his mannequin sculptures. Oh, as for the obsession with cooking: the ingredient-drugged foods are fed to the Janes who end up in the makeshift taxidermy-cum-art studio. Eventually, the sisters tire of their milkman-porn partner—and make him the bathlab’s newest specimen; he returns as an out-for-revenge zombie.
As the credits rolled on Blood Freaks—a surreal delight of incoherent symbolism, philosophy and weirdness just like Jodorowsky and Marins used to make—the feature film debut of writer-director Omar Jacobo shot on an $80,000 shoestring, I sighed; filled with the same adulation the first time I watched the opening 16-mm celluloid salvos of Robert Rodriquez with El Mariachi and Kevin Smith with Clerks. For Jacobo’s debut is a film of erudition: while a more commercial horror consumer, at first, may see “inept” filmmaking afoot with Jacobo’s arthouse-centric style, he is not part of the new, iPhone-shot digital ignorance proliferating the digital corners of Amazon Prime and Tubi, a net-realm where any John, Dick, or Jane—packing a handheld-device and a modicum of an idea—are (not) making movies.
At first glance, it’s easy to slag Jacobo’s homage to ’80s SOV horror (that analog genre of VHS-taped films, such as John Howard’s Spine and Christopher Lewis’s Blood Cult, which we hold in high regard amid the B&S About Movies cubicle farm) as an unfocused and incoherent, amateur film school project. (I worked as an actor on film school projects: I know incoherent amateurism: Jacobo is far from it.) Unlike many of those ‘80s Big Box SOV purveyors of old (we love you, Don Dohler, but still) and more so with the iPhone digitalmongers of the new, Jacobo comes to his chosen profession with a clear skillset. He, while in an admittedly unconventional way, understands the concepts of framing, shot composition, and editing. And he also understands (as does Jake Thomas with his absolutely stunning, just released film, Shedding) that dialog is the death of narrative; that images and an actor’s non-verbal language can carry a film. Jacobo also understands (as does Matthew Diebler and Jacob Gillman with their also recently-released and equally amazing The Invisible Mother) that film is a visual medium and that the devil—quite literally with Blood Freaks—is in the ambiguity-open-to-your-interpretation details: an enigma of pet chickens picking among the skins of peeled potatoes on the floor and five-minute dream-steria shots of a sordid, lesbian Madam making drug-filled meatballs and soups, a dwarf taxidermist who enjoys sculpting mannequins, and a dominatrix who specializes in baking jelly-centered drugged cookies.
Yeah, I love this movie, just in case if you’re wondering.
Then again, I ballyhooed from the rooftops for Michael Reich’s equally VHS-centric She’s Allergic to Cats, David Fowler’s modern psych-giallo Welcome to the Circle, and David Robert Mitchell’s ambiguity stunner Under the Silver Lake (well, Sam ballyhooed that one for the site) to deaf ear and blind eye; for I’m the guy who likes-everyone-hates the low-rent scuzziness of duBeat-e-o by Alan Sacks and Marc Sheffler. So what do I know? I’m just some guy writing film reviews in a cubicle farm somewhere in the backwaters of Allegheny County, where the vast majority of the world—as Sam, my boss, always points out—hates most of the films we love. And while that world flocks to Wonder Woman 1984 and fawns over Patty Jenkins, we, the B&S minions, flock to films like Blood Freaks and filmmakers like Omar Jacobo—who has the common sense to not use a timeline-skewed Cro-Mags shirt in his movie two years before the album it promotes was released.
And life couldn’t be any more sweeter for it: Blood Freaks is the type of film that makes me glad to wake up and write film reviews. You know, for the chicks. And for the fun. But mostly for the chicks.
You can learn more about Blood Freaks and Madre Foca! Producciones on Facebook. You can also visit distributor Rising Sun Media on Facebook and stream their catalog of Mexican-bred, full-length indie films on their Vimeo channel. After making a low-key, U.S.-streaming debut on Vimeo Online in May 2020, Blood Freaks is now widely available as of January 2021 as a free-with-ads stream on Tubi. The trailer is on You Tube.
Be sure to surf by B&S About Movies, daily—from Sunday, January 17 to Saturday, January 23—as we’ll feature the classics of Mexican action and horror cinema all this week.
Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request or screener from the film’s director, producer, or P.R firm. We discovered this film all on our own and truly enjoyed the movie.
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 publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.
“The Christian community has kind of left the art world on the back burner. My vision would be them treating the art world, the film world, with the same sense of urgency as they’re treating, for instance, an overseas mission. . . . This is an emergency for our culture, to be able to influence our film, our arts, the American pop culture in this way [through Christianity].” — Director T Jara Morgan, in an interview with Life Site News
Ah, those ’90s-halcyon Miramax and Fox Searchlight days of driving to an outside-of-the-big-city six-plex with a screen or two dedicated foreign films. Films that you had to see that week — that Friday, in fact — before the manager, seeing the low box office, banished the celluloid from the silver screen, for the film never to be known beyond a few film dorks: like moi.
In the case of this feature film debut by writer-director T Jara Morgan, his Argentinian-shot, music-driven comedic adventure has bounced around the worldwide festival and indie circuit since 2012. And finally, thanks to the fine folks at Indie Rights Films (who always seem to be rescuing just the right films from celluloid obscurity to digital recognition), A Band of Rogues finally makes its well-deserved U.S. streaming and hard-media bow.
Hey, but wait second . . . all of these actors, as well as director T Jara Morgan, hail from Atlanta, Georgia, in the good ‘ol U.S.A. Uh, okay, so . . . then we’re reliving the ’90s-halcyon Miramax and Fox Searchlight days of driving to an outside-of-the-big-city six-plex with a screen or two dedicated to indie films. Films that you had to see that week — that Friday — before the film vanished from the silver screen.
In other words: Different film genre, but the same ol’ hard-road-to-mainstream-distribution travels for the non-Tinseltown film.
And the jailer man and sailor Sam, were searching everyone.
As a film academic and critic, I watch a lot of (new) films — and I end up not reviewing more that I review. Sadly, while I realize the writers and directors behind each and every film I watch have depleted their internal organs and inner essence into their digital images, there are just some films that I can’t get behind; there is no common good served by eviscerating the vision of a filmmaker: I ain’t Roger Ebert nor Rex Reed. I’m R.D Francis and R.D don’t play that.
But then . . . along comes A Band of Rogues: an obscure film on the run that deserves to be seen. Reviewing T Jara Morgan’s IMDb page, while he is still producing various video products for television and other outlets, he hasn’t made another feature in the ensuing nine years of the first festival appearance of A Band of Rogues. And that’s a shame. For a director to transition from two short films, to creating a film with an all-original soundtrack of songs (crafted by brother-producer Matthew D. Morgan and actor Luke Micheal Williams) tailored specifically to the character’s personalities and plotting of the film and — with a László Kovácian eye — expertly capture the Argentinean countryside to convey an analogy of the South American expanse to one’s spiritual freedom, is a film that deserves to be experienced.
As with his Christian message-based shorts that are worthy of investing your fifteen minutes, A Band of Rogues is a bit more quiet of a film; a not-so-heavy-handed, faith-based tale regarding the fate of one’s decisions, the importance of the guidance of friendship, and discovering your moral compass that a mass audience — both religious and non — can enjoy. No matter your belief system, man requires faith to survive. Faith has nothing to do with God. It has to do with man. Faith is what keeps us, keeping on. We all have to believe in an endgame to have purpose in our lives. And you can never have enough films pushing that message.
“Live a good life. For you. For me. For both of us.” — Gabriel Consisco
It’s always five o’clock somewhere, even in Argentina.
Our “rogues” are a trio of American indie musicians touring their latest album in Argentina — when they’re arrested for drug possession (pot, coke, prescription drugs) and property damage at their hotel. Unable to make financial restitution, and to escape deportation to the U.S. where they’d be locked up for their prior drug records, they accept sentencing to a rehab center for six weeks before their court date. But since these “Ugly Americans” can’t assimilate nor contribute to the rehab’s society, they’ll be kicked out and sent to prison by the end of their first week. So the band decides, with the help of Gabriel, a sympathetic, English-speaking native Argentinean (standout Italian-Argentine actor Leonardo Santaiti of the Divergent series), to shanghai an old kitchen-delivery truck and make a (causal) run for the Chilean border.
The most fascinating aspect of A Band of Rogues is, that unlike most indie films about an indie rock band’s adventures, the film’s music isn’t just plopped into the film willy-nilly: our wayward musician’s personal stories unfold as chapters analogous to one of the tracks on their album — a Beatlesesque acoustic album rife with ukuleles, mandolins, and upright basses, just like the indie ’90s used to make.
Dude, I really enjoyed this movie — and its music. It made me laugh. It made me smile. It made me contemplate. It made me remember my radio and band roadie days. A Band of Rogues is filmmaking at its finest brought to us from an exemplary contingent of filmmakers, actors and musicians who deserve bigger and better things in their respective careers. Remain encouraged, ye mighty band of analog and celluloid rogues. Keep that Tinseltown faith alive, my brothers, for we all walk a common road in our love of telling stories.
Courtesy of the You Tube page of Rocky Farm Studios, we discovered two of Morgan’s shorts: Volition(2008) and The Life of a Ditchdigger (2006). His third short is All the World is Crying Out (2007). You can learn more about T Jara Morgan’s work at his official website. You can keep up with the latest on A Band of Rogues courtesy of Indie Rights Films and at the film’s official Facebook page and website. You can stream the film on Amazon Prime or as a newly-debuted free with-ads stream on TubiTV, and enjoy the original soundtrack on Apple Tunes and Amazon Music.
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.
Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request for this film. We discovered the trailer on social media, were intrigued by the film, and requested a screener. We truly enjoyed the film.
Sichan Siv and Gilbert Tuhabonye escaped the killing fields of Cambodia and the massacre of Burundi’s children. Now, this film uses animation and the words of Sichan, Gilbert and twelve other survivors to make us confront a very haunting fact: the holocaust of World War II was not the end of the world’s genocide.
Directed by Paul Allen Hunton and funded by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, this is no easy watch. But it shouldn’t be.
Siv escaped Cambodia’s killing fields, leaving the country with only his scarf, an empty rice bag and two dollars to his name. He would go on to serve The White House as Deputy Assistant to President George H.W. Bush and at the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary. In 2001, he was appointed by President George W. Bush as an ambassador to the United Nations, serving until 2006. Gilbert is now a retired professional runner, a philanthropist, an author and a community leader in Austin, Texas.
The world can change, for some people, but we must figure out how to change the world for the better. The COVID-19 outbreak has brought us together at the same time as it has made us myopic about our own needs. The world is a smaller place now and we must understand that these stories are still happening.
Narratives of Modern Genocide is available on demand from Passion River Films. To learn more, visit the official site.
In 2420, after aliens and powerful space wizards enslave humans, rebels organize a rebellion* in this effects-heavy film that comes from six directors — Andrew Jaksch, Lukas Kendall, Toby Rawal, Scott Robson, Sanjay F. Sharma and Luis Tinoco — and five writers — Josh Guttman, Jaksch, Kendall, Sharma and Tinoco.
That’s because this is really a collection of shorts with a wraparound story that puts them into one narrative that has Doug Jones (Hellboy, The Shape of Water) as an alien overlord.
From a street cop looking for his daughter** to a hunt for a crystal***, a trip to a planet gone awry****, a human bonding with an alien***** and a story that cross-cuts between a space battle and a child in the hospital******, each of these stories tell us more about this new world. Or that would be the goal, but these are all previously produced shorts that weren’t originally made to go together. That said, some of these — particularly Sky Fighter and Caronte, have some really great special effects going for them.
*This was in the sales copy and never really happens. It would have been interesting to see more of how these stories all worked.
**2017’s The Boogeys.
***2019’s The Dark Following.
****2018’s Thalamos.
*****2019’s Sky Fighter.
******2017’s Caronte.
Battle in Space: The Armada Attacks will be available on demand and on DVD January 12 from Uncork’d Entertainment.
The Comeback Trail, which made its world premiere at the 43rd Mill Valley Film Festival on October 12, 2020, was initially scheduled to be theatrically released in the United States on November 13, 2020. However, due to the affects of COVID on theaters, Cloudburst Entertainment has — instead of going the streaming-premiere route of the recently COVID-derailed Run and Tom Hanks’s Greyhound — pushed the release date to sometime in 2021. Then there’s the case of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet: Warner Bros. decided to eschew a VOD-only release and tough-out COVID with a theatrical release, only to see diminished box office returns.
We glossed over the The Comeback Trail with a recent “Drive-In Friday” tribute to Harry “Tampa” Hurwitz, the writer and director of the shot-in-1974-released-in-1982 original*, so let’s take a deeper look into this remake from the pen n’ lens of George Gallo of Bad Boys fame.
The original film concerned the low-budget, down-on-their-luck exploits of two independent film producers, E. Eddie Eastman (Hurwitz’s longtime producing partner and actor, Robert Statts) and Enrico Kodac (the always welcomed Chuck McCann, who the B&S About Movies crowd knows from Hamburger: The Motion Picture** and Sid and Marty Krofts’s CBS-TV kids series Far Out Space Nuts), in a somewhat semi-autobiographical Hurwitz tale about an against-the-odds poverty row film production starring washed-up cowboy star Duke Montana (Buster Crabbe*˟, in his final feature film).
During their celluloid adventures (played as broad slapstick, with a side of sexploitation spicing the reels), Eastman and Kodac (yuk-yuk) meets “Professor” Irwin Corey (The Mad Bomber in 1976’s Car Wash), the “King of the One-Liners,” Henny Youngman (Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie and History of the World: Part 1), publisher Hugh Hefner, and New York TV and radio icon Joe Franklin as themselves; the keen eyes of B&S About Movies’ readers will also notice our beloved Sy Richardson (Shattered Illusions, 5th of July, and Petey Wheatstraw) in the cast.
Now Petey Wheatstraw, courtesy of Blaxploitation purveyor Rudy Ray Moore, is worth mentioning since The Comeback Trail (the 2021 version) is another “Hollywood story about Hollywood,” in this case Dolemite Is My Name, which chronicled Moore’s career. And speaking of washed up actors: you’ll also see a touch of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood in the frames of this Gallo remake. Me? I also see a bit of Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel Get Shorty, which Barry Sonnenfeld turned into a 1995 film. Sharper B&S surfers will remember Allan Arkush and Joe Dante’s 1976 romp Hollywood Boulevard and Mel Brooke’s The Producers from 1967 in the frames of the 1982 Hurwitz original.
“You’ve got 72 hours. After that . . . I choke you to death.” — Reggie Fontaine
This time out — sans Hurwitz’s slapstick and sexploitation propensities — we met uncle Max Barber (Robert De Niro) and his ne’er do well nephew Walter Creason (Zach Braff), two incompetent movie producers who had their latest “epic” about gun-toting Nuns derailed by the Catholic Church. And local mobster Reggie Fontaine (Morgan Freeman) — in a bit that reminds of Alan Sacks’s duBeat-e-o — wants a return on his $350,000 investment in the film. So, after watching a news report in which big time producer James “Jimmy” Moore (Emile Hirsch) nets a large insurance settlement after the on-set death of action-star Frank Pierce (Patrick Muldoon of American Satan), Max’s dopey nephew concocts a scam: hire the alcoholic, retirement-home bound western actor Duke Montana (Tommy Lee Jones), insurance him to the hilt, set up an on-set “accident” to kill him — and pay off Fontaine with the insurance windfall. Only one problem: Montana proves to be as tough-as-nails in real life as he was on camera all those years ago.
If you haven’t figured it out, this ’70s retro-romp is rife with black comedy and insider showbiz satire, and old pros De Niro and Jones are more than up to the challenge. And kudos to George Gallo for seeing the major studio potential in an old Harry Hurwitz film.
And again, Mr. Gallo, we dare you to do a remake of Safari 3000.
We dare you.
But please, don’t CGI the baboons.
* You can learn more about the 1982 Hurwitz original with these digitized reviews at Shock Cinema (from 2017; along with film stills) and The New York Times (from 1982).
*˟ Be sure to check out our review of Buster Crabbe’s contributions to the Star Wars cycle of films with his roles as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, courtesy of our Exploring: Before Star Wars featurette.
Disclaimer:We weren’t provided with a screener nor received a review request from the film’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review.
Update: June 18, 2021: The reviews are rolling in as The Comeback Trail is now officially released in the U.K. on the Sky Cinema streaming platform. U.S. audiences can enjoy the film in theaters and on streaming platforms starting July 23, 2021. Check with your favorite platforms for more information. Please attend your local theater safe and smart and support you local economy. And don’t forget to thank those theater workers for working.
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 based on his novellas and screenplays, as well and music reviews, on Medium.
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