The first feature film from director and writer Kyle Edward Ball — he’s also made a proof of concept for this movie named Heck and the video for Craig Moreau’s “It Aint Nuthin'” — Skinamarink finds its origins in Bitesized Nightmares, a YouTube channel started by Ball that visualized nightmares contributed by commenters.

Shot in the Edmonton, Alberta home that Ball grew up in for $15,000, this has all the buzz of a major debut. And that fine, as it has a definite feel for the weirdness that is within the darkness and long hallways and how terrifying it is to be a child. But then it just goes on and on, with arty shots of Lego blocks and upside down rooms and people with no faces played over cartoon soundtracks and hiss and static.

There’s no narrative here and the idea that keeps getting pushed — “Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.” — would not be easy to find unless you knew it going in.

It’s the kind of film that would wow your film school professor at ten minutes but at 100 minutes, this is the kind of movie that has one frightening thing: looking to see how much time is left throughout the film and feeling like more time keeps getting added and you must push yourself like some kind of marathon runner just to endure its endless repetitive layer images and noise-filled audio.

This is a movie filled with jump cuts for people above jump cuts but who can proclaim it as cinema.

This is a movie for people to feel good about themselves for liking it and being ahead of people who “just don’t get it” (see We’re All Going to the World’s Fair).

This is a movie where people will tweet about how it changed them and they can’t shake its darkness but it’s all just words like fever dream, slow burn and takes chances which are just Film Twitter words that really are sound and fury signifying nothing.

Just imagine: You put a whole bunch of quiet scenes together, then turn on the lights and get loud. Of course everyone screams.

Much like the worst of elevated horror, it all goes back to bad parenting. I mean, those Legos aren’t going to clean themselves up. “Somewhere in Dreamland” is a cartoon from the past which is very hit the nail on the head in this. And I really dislike the fake grain and pops added to this, like something out of that fake grindhouse trend a few years ago.

The real terror within this movie is just like how Host won’t stop replicating as inferior Zoom horror movies, I’ll be sent so many movies next year that just stare at an old toy for an hour while someone plays an xylophone in the background and makes coffee, but shot on an old PXL2000 camera and a Casio soundtrack. Get ready for so many press releases that start with “Influenced by Skinamarink.”

I think that Ball has something in him as this movie sets up some interesting things and then never delivers on them. It’s just waiting for the next scare, almost like a deconstructed horror film that’s above simple scares yet uses them repeatedly. He said about this movie, “Shooting a movie in the house you grew up in about two characters that are more or less you and your sister, I didn’t have to try to make it more personal—it just sort of happened. And then an added benefit was my mom had saved a bunch of childhood toys that we used in the movie, so it got even more personal.”

I’d like to see that movie, because I have no idea if any of that came into the film, so this feels more made for the artist than the audience. And then the audience wants to feel like an artist and champion it and feel superior. But it’s truly a slog, a long death march where I felt like I had to finish it and make it through and when the end credits came up, it really did feel like 572 days long.

I mean, if this was made with a camcorder and a $300 budget in 1984 and released on Tempe Video, I’d probably feel differently about it. I’d also defend this if it were directed by Bruno Mattei and stole most of its soundtrack from Phantasm.

I feel like this was my Jacob’s Ladder and I’m still stuck watching it.

What do I know?

Whenever I eat haute cuisine, I’m always starving afterward and have to stop at a gas station and get several hot dogs off the roller.

You can learn more on the official site for the movie.

Director and writer Steve Balderson has created quite a story here. Aging artist Oliver (Xander Berkeley) wakes up next to his wife Evelyn (Sarah Clarke), who has died in her sleep, and refuses tot live a life without her. He keeps her body in the bathtub, filled with ice, trying to keep her looking as she did in life. At the same time, her spirit continues speaking with him for just five days before passing to whatever comes after our world. Oh yes — he’s also been given the greatest art commission of his life by his agent Alex (Mink Stole, wow!) and must continue to create art while going through the greatest change of his life.

A film of magical realism that plays with time, sound, light and color to attempt to share an emotion and mental space that is unshareable, Alchemy of the Spirit was a rough watch — I mean this in a good way — as I try to navigate the loss of my father. Life is unlike it ever was and while the common and rote moments of it never stop, the joys of it seem muted somehow, the colors much more simplistic. I hope this can change soon and that I can take these moments of art and use them to grow and change. You’ll always miss someone. But can you honor them by creating in their missing space?

Alchemy of the Spirit is now available on Prime Video and will soon launch on a number of Cable and digital platforms across North America.

Oliver (Max Harwood) is dealing with the sudden death of his mother and when he’s released from a psychiatric facility, he’s told he has one week to make a friend or go back. All he knows is watching Alf on TV and going to his mother’s gravesite to tell her the details of the creature from Melmac and his interactions with the Tanner family.

Yet when he learns of the death of a young boy around his age named Mitch (Hero Fiennes Tiffin). He decides to dig him up, as well as Susanne (Susan Wokoma), a young girl named Mel (Zenobia Williams), Frank (Ben Miller) and even a dog. He brings them home and sets them up on the couch and it makes him happy.

To his surprise, the next morning they’ve all come back to life and become his family.

Somehow, director Martin Owen (The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud) has taken a story that could have been totally presented as a serial killer origin and turned it into a family comedy with Oliver getting the sitcom mother, father, sister and brother he always wished he had. They teach him life lessons, show him how to talk to girls and how to be happy. Sure, they should be buried but everyone seems fine with their lives.

It has a dark concept — a lost young man in a world that doesn’t understand him that has to make his own world out of corpses — yet somehow it becomes innocent, candy-colored fun. Who would have thought?

Reed (London May, yes, the drummer/bassist in Danzig’s band Samhain) lives in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, getting bombed on his homemade mead and hanging out with his only friend, Marlon the  turtle. He has a lot of land and just wants left alone, so when he kicks Pete (Cesar Cipriano), Kiera (Mya Hudson) and George (Philip Rossi) off his property, it’s on brand. And then they stumble into a Satanic ritual and things go south — of Heaven — for everyone.

Only Kiera survives and the high priestess Claire (Hannah Pierce) and her followers give chase all the way to Reed’s place. As they start to attack his trailer, he has to get out of this night alive and hopefully protect this stranger he barely knows.

Directed by Eric Boccio and written by Christian Ackerman and Chuck Foster from a story by Boccio and May, Night of the Bastard is a violent and fun throwback to the Satanic shockers of the 70s, opening with a ritual by hippies, one that isn’t completed and must wait until now to be recast. May’s character is just caught up in it — or so it seems — and his survival skills come in handy when dealing with an army of hooded devil lovers.

As you know, I love movies like The Devil’s Rain!, so this film was pretty much made for me. It has some nice practical effects, a bad ass hero and an intoxicating villain who sadly has some pretty dumb coven members. What can you do? Finding the right people these days is so difficult for everyone.

Bonus points for the last shot and the triumphant return of Marlon.

Night of the Bastard is laying now in select theaters as well as on demand. Want to know more? Check out the official site.

Before Patrick Read Johnson did special effects on V, 2010: The Year We Made Contact and Warlock,  wrote Dragonheart and directed Spaced Invaders, Baby’s Day Out, Angus and The Genesis Code, he was a kid in Wadsworth, Illinois who made his own movies and dreamed of a Hollywood he was sure he would neer get to. Thanks to his mother setting up a trip to Hollywood to meet Douglas Trumbull, he was one of the first people outside of Industrial Light and Magic effects experts to see Star Wars.

His real life experience is what 5-25-77 is all about, obviously a passion project about the past and the power of film that took eighteen years to make.

John Francis Daley plays the younger version of the actor, a kid who only cares about school as much as he does getting to read the announcements with his friend Bill (Steven Coulter) and make backyard films like Requiem for the Planet of the Apes. When his mother (Colleen Camp!) sends him on a trip to meet American Cinematographer editor (and almost every writer) Herb Lightman (Austin Pendleton). He also falls in love with Linda (Emmi Chen), which makes him consider leaving behind his dream of making movies and may keep him behind in Illinois.

This is an incredibly visually inventive movie that perfectly sums up the creative desire to do more and mean more than where you come from. It’s quite inspiring and speaks to a time before we got multiple Star Wars properties every year, when films seemed more special and perhaps even life changing.

Despite the time it took to make, it was worth it. The performances by Daley, Camp, Chen and others elevate this film and make it all at once bittersweet and inspiring. This is one of the best films I saw in 2022 and you owe it to yourself to get it.

The MVD blu ray of 5-25-77  has audio commentary from Johnson, moderated by Seth Gaven, founder of the A.V. Squad and editor of the film Spaced Invaders, a Q&A from the 2013 Fantasia Film Festival with Johnson, trailers and photo galleries. You can get it from MVD.

Released in South Korea as Alien+Human Part 1, this is one wild movie, weaving together three different timelines come together, all based around aliens putting their criminals into human bodies and trapping them on Earth where they are tracked, extracted and contained by Thunder (the voice of Kim Dae-myung) and Guard (Kim Woo-bin), two robots armed with a weapon called the Crystal Knife which leds them see and travel through time. As a result of a battle in 1380, Guard has promised to raise Yian (Choi Yu-ri), the daughter of the human host of one of the aliens who is killed in combat, as his own daughter. Now, they seek the Collector, the alien mastermind trying to help all of these convict aliens to escape Earth.

Meanwhile, in 1391, Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol) is a bounty hunter magician who — along with other martial artists like a masked shaman and a husband and wife magician duo — are on the hunt for the Divine Blade, which is — you guessed it — from space.

Director and writer Choi Dong-hoon does something pretty amazing here in that he takes two wildly different stories — science fiction and historic Korean fantasy —  and jams them into one film that really feels like fifty films in the space of a little over two hours.

So spoiler warning: This movie is going to make your head spin and the story is too big for just one film, as this is just the first part. Don’t let that hold you back. I haven’t seen this much imagination in one film for some time, a movie that mixes nearly every genre into one cocktail and somehow comes out tasting way better than you’d been led to think it would. Does it always make sense? Nope. Does it look awesome? Yes.

You can get this from Well Go USA at stores everywhere. I mean, I even saw it at Walmart!

Scare Package was a fun reminder of the days of renting stacks of horror videos and seeing how many you can watch in one weekend. The sequel begins with the funeral of Rad Chad Buckley (Jeremy King), killed by a demon in the first film, but his videotaped last will and testament ends up bringing all of the funeral guests into a series of games and traps to remind them of the power of video horror.

Except for creator and main director Aaron B. Koontz, Anthony Cousins was the only segment director to return from the original. That said, there’s some fun stuff here:

Alexandra Barreto directed and wrote “Welcome to the 90s,” which takes place on New Year’s Eve 1989, as a masked killer named Tony (Joshua Miller, who also did special effects for this) keeps trying to kill a sorority filled with thingly disguised versions of final girls who keep being saved by Buffy (Steph Barkley) just as the fun girls would soon take over as horror stars.

“The Night He Came Back Again! Part VI: The Night She Came Back” continues the slasher remix from the first film but adds a very Strode twist to the entire affair. I dug this, even if it’s much of the same humor from the first installment. This was directed by Anthony Cousins and written by Cousins, Ryan Schaddelee and Anthony Karsko.

Jed Shepherd’s “Special Edition” stars all of the women from the movie Host and is all about the ability to pause Three Men and a Baby to see the exact cursed moment within that movie.

“We’re So Dead” by Koontz somehow mixes the heart of Stephen King’s teen heroes with the gore of a Stuart Gordon movie.

While this doesn’t work as well for me as the original, there are moments that made me laugh. Any cast that includes Dustin Rhodes, Graham Skipper and Kelli Maroney, as well as a soundtrack that includes Dragon Sound’s “Friends Forever” and Stan Bush’s “Thunder In Your Heart” can’t be all bad, though. It helps get you past the sub-Saw moments and at times forced humor. There are times when horror fans get too overly reverential and referential if you know what I mean.

Directed and written by Noah Marks, this is the story of Madam Evergreen (Kathy Richter), who after losing the Presidential election gets two agents — Ralph (Charlie Ferrara) and Tucker (Harrison Marx) — to activate a Chinese virus so that the elderly politician Leeroy Bishop (Richard Masley) can win the election and stop the virus. Oh yeah — they’re also immortal and have been kidnapped by Vict President Hoosier (Mark Gross) who wants to win the election himself.

Yeah. I think we’ve all lived through enough badness politically on all sides that I can say that completely apolitically I didn’t enjoy this. It just goes on and on and it’s quite hard to poke fun at either side of the aisle when their daily errors are so laughable that they almost seem like a bad comedy sketch in real life.

I saw a review on IMDB that said, “There’s no way the censorship apparatus will permit this to become popular. Currently above six stars, guarantee it falls precipitously.”

You know, sometimes things can just suck outside of politics. They can just suck on their own.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Yes, Christmas is over, but better late than never.

Bill (Todd Lubitsch), his wife Lisa (Janice Angela Burt) and children Eli (Joshua Rose) and Rachel (Ruby Setnik) are just trying to celebrate Christmas Eve when a man (Greg Sestero) breaks in and takes advantage of Rachel wanting to make movies by showing four of his own VHS films.

“Travel Buggies” is about doomed vloggers going camping and doing a summoning ritual, which as you can imagine, is a very bad idea. “The Christmas Gift” has a father sending himself in a box to his kids so they can do their own unboxing video, but hiring a Santa (Vernon Wells!) who has different ideas of a holiday present. “Untitled” has a man trying to deliver a package before his head explodes. “The Christmas Spirit” is about a couple moving into a new home and learning that it’s haunted. They try and hire someone to come over the holidays to exorcise their home, but only Paranormal Perry (Dave Sheridan) is available.

The quality of these tales varies, but the acting by Wells and Sheridan puts this above and beyond the expectations of a streaming horror anthology, much less a holiday-themed film.

Robert Livings and Randy Nundlall Jr. co-directed and wrote this and there are moments that really work, like the man flying all over the box and the tortures he endures from Santa and Mrs. Claus, as well as the tension and humor working together in the exorcism story.

You can watch this on YouTube from Terror Films.

When Meagan Mullen (Katarina Hughes) moves far away from friends and family into a new house, she does what so many do: She keeps in touch with them via her vlog. And yes, that same video diary allows us to see what happens around her and to her as she begins to experience the supernatural.

This movie was originally shot in 2012, but released this year, which may explain why it’s a found footage film. Actually, found footage has gone nowhere, as so many streaming movies still rely on its shaky camerawork and “did you see that?” scares.

The good news is that The Death of April moves toward more of a true crime mockumentary, interviewing her family and those around her while continuing to explore the slowly growing weirder footage that she shot herself.

As for who April is, well, it takes Megan’s friend Heather (Chelsea Clark) and an Ouija board to learn that she once lived in the same place and was murdered. I kind of wish the film showed more of how Megan’s personality changed, as her videos don’t show that while the interviews with people who knew her sure do. That said, for a found footage film, this finds an interesting way to tell its story and doesn’t get boring, which is so much more than I can say for most movies in this genre.

The Death of April is available on demand and on Tubi from Terror Films.