I have made no secret of my devotion — obsession? — with the Found Footage Festival, the life mission of Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher to take VHS tapes and remix them to reach us across the decades. So much of my conversational moments daily are made up of things I learned from these guys, like Jack Rebney yelling “Accountremants?!,” Champion Cathan Fable Little Star, “You can’t pay your rent with trophies,” “Fucking nature,” “Ice your bitch down” and so many other things I randomly say I first heard from the video collection of Joe and Nick.

As the twosome tour the U.S., they used to get stuck doing morning shows. At some point, they went from small pranks to a big one: they became Chop and Steele, two exercise masters who smashed baskets and threw sticks at one another. Anyone watching them would know it was a joke. The real laugh — or lack of humor — was when a big media company sued them for a litany of charges, putting their lives and fortunes at risk.

Directed by Berndt Mader and Ben Steinbauer with writing by Alex MacKenzie, this film explores how the Found Footage guys got here, how their relationship works and how a court case and COVID-19 almost ruined it for all of us. Sure, it’s cool to hear from David Cross, Bobcat Goldthwait, Reggie Watts and Howie Mandell what these guys mean to them. But the true stars are always Joe and Nick and, of course, the found footage of them in the moment and especially as they are being examined in court. The humorless legal questions literally seem like Brazil as Joe tries to explain what Frisbee Fuckers mean and the line “these fuckers only work from 4 AM to 10 AM” can cause so many headaches for Nick.

In a soulless world that just wants to crush you and forget that laughter exists, these guys get you through it. Their VCR Party show gave us something to look forward to during lockdown. And they’re still out there, fighting the silly fight, not letting things like being adults or offending people by urinating all over NBC’s stage get in the way of a good laugh.

This movie is everything I wanted it to be and yes, I did tear up at the end.

I watched Chop and Steele at Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

You can learn more at the official Chop and Steele website.

Mickey Reece makes a movie a year and every time, it’s something different. Like the exorcism movie Agnes or Climate of the Hunter, a movie that plays with horror and age. This time, he’s made a comedy — kind of, as always the genre isn’t always absolute — about Troyal Brux (Reece), a country singer on the rise who pretty much seems like Garth Brooks, seeing as how this was made in 1994. In fact, it was Garth until the Oklahoma film commission took away the tax rebates they promised; when the name was changed, those rebates came back. Brooks is from Tulsa and his real first name is Troyal, so you understand.

In the middle of his rise to fame, Troyal gets a written invite from George Jones (Ben Hall). Jones is on the opposite side of life as Troyal and he wants to spend one night out in the world before he gets frozen the very next day.

This is the night they spent together.

Reece has already made Alien, a film about Elvis, but this one is about the gulf between country of old and modern country. The outlaw world of Jones and the commercial world of Troyal. Is Jones trying to make fun of the new family man who is trying to be a star? Or does he see something of himself at the start of his career, when he could see into people and write songs that connected to people?

I grew up in a town with one radio station, all country, so Jones’ songs — “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “You and Me and Time,” “She Thinks I Still Care” — mean so much more to me than anything country has had to say for itself in decades (and don’t tell me that Sturgill Simpson and today’s presented alternatives are any more authentic country than Garth was). The songs that played on WFEM — well, with the exception of “The Bird” — were raw expressions of life gone off the rails. The life of Jones parallels Brooks in that they both had marriages to fellow performers — Jones famously with Tammy Wynette, who sang “Stand By Your Man,” and Brooks to Trisha Yearwood — but while it took Jones until 1999 to get sober and stop blowing off concerts — “No Show Jones” — Brooks has been a steady superstar. Well, except for that whole Chris Gaines thing, which this movie hints at.

I loved that this movie has asides about Tasha Yar and Denise Crosby coming back to be on later seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as fantasies — or maybe not? — of Jones killing people for organized crime figures or destabilizing anti-government officials. I’m of the feeling that the best stories don’t have to be true if they’re entertaining.

Sure, this is a movie of basically two men in a room talking. Yet it’s that conversation and where it goes that make for an incredible tale, ending with perhaps the strangest baby reveal and musical number I’ve seen in a movie. That pushed this way over the victory line for me.

I watched Country Gold at Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

PILI has been playing on TV in Taiwan since the 1984 and it looks wild to Western eyes, an example of Taiwanese art of bùdàixì glove puppetry. Unlike traditional puppetry, PILI uses computer-generated imagery during its action sequences. Also, in case you didn’t pick up on it from the movies on the site this week, Taiwan does some absolutely berserk wuxia films.

Demigod: The Legend Begins is the origin story for one of its most popular characters, Su Huan-jen. Not yet a powerful warrior but just a student, he seeks to escape the obligations and debt that he owes to the local librarian. Using his acupuncture skills, Huan-jen barely gets by. But when he has the chance to heal the Lord of Globe Castle, he gets to see the rich man’s sacred library as well as get involved in a war between humanity and the celestial kingdoms beyond mortal men. And when Su Huan-jen is framed for the lord’s murder, his own life is on the line in the midst of all this spiritual warfare.

Director Chris Huang Wen Chang and writers Huang Liang-hsun and He Yuan-yu have created a movie that looks astounding but has a story that makes you forget that you’re just watching puppets in action. They become living characters and draw you in. There’s nothing else I’ve seen like this and I can’t wait to hunt down more of this.

You can watch Demigod: The Legend Begins with a Fantastic Fest virtual badge here.

Filmed on video in a Staten Island basement, hosted by lounge singer Frank Masi and his wife Tillie from 1979 to the early 1990s, Stairway to Stardom existed in a world that could only be before the internet. I first saw clips of the show thanks to The Found Footage Festival and they broke my brain.

AGFA has brought together some of the most amazing moments of this show, whether that means unfunny stand ups, R&B singers who can’t dance on beat or just, well, whatever people thought was their talent.

This has no host or talking heads explaining its significance. It doesn’t need it. Instead, it’s everything wonderful of the now lost world of public access, a place where anyone could be a star, but it took a lot more work to get there.

The fact that this exists and that someone out there may get to experience it for the first time makes me so happy. Allow the joy that is this show to wash over you. You’ll have “Hairdresser” in your head before it’s over.

The Stairway to Stardom Mixtape is playing at Fantastic Fest. You can get a virtual badge here.

You can download complete episodes of the show on the Internet Archive or watch clips on YouTube.

I went all in on The Third Saturday in October V, loving the way that it had the look and feel of 90s direct to video slasher sequels, so I was beyond excited for the first installment which referenced slashers like Death Screams and Another Son of Sam, I got pretty excited.

Sadly, the final effort doesn’t match the other film. This feels like an approximation of the late 70s and early 80s slasher boom, where The Third Saturday in October V nearly could have arrived in our time via a rip in the time/space paradox and seemed like it really was a product of its era. It was kind of hard reading other reviewers saying how much this seemed like My Bloody Valentine and it felt like a game of, “Tell me that you haven’t really paid attention to slashers other than aping what everyone else writes about them without telling me.”

It’s too bright, too trying to be strange instead of being odd naturally — the endless meow dialogue is grating at best — and the football title feels forced whereas it naturally fits into the other film.

That’s not to say that there’s not some real talent here. Director, writer and editor Jay Burleson gets a lot out of his budget. Darius Willis and K.J. Baker are really good as the parents of victims who just want to put serial killer Harding into the ground once and for all. And there’s a great atmospheric graveyard scene that’s quite evocative of the early scenes of Halloween. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the characters of John Paul (Casey Aud), Denver (Kate Edmonds), Pam (Venna Black), Bobbi Jo (Libby Blake), Uncle Deeter (Richard Garner) and Ned (Dre Bravo) are never funny, constantly drag the film down and just seem like they’ve come out of Tromaville — never a good thing — and take the film from satiric to sophomoric.

It also doesn’t help that Denver’s headphones — the Walkman 2 which popularized the device didn’t come out in the U.S. until 1981, so this feels anachronistic — dancing scene just ended up reminding me of a much better throwback in The House of the Devil.

Creating slasher victims is hard — how much should we care about them? Do we just want them to die? This film never even ponders that, even if at heart it’s either a tribute or a pastiche of the past. That said, Allison Shrum’s Heather is a fine final girl and I enjoyed Lew Temple (31, The Devil’s Rejects) as her father.

I really wish I had liked this more and even after a second viewing, worrying if I’d overhyped myself, I still struggled to finish it. One of the things that took me out of the film was seeing Harding have his mask on near the end with no scene explaining where it came from or why he had a mask, which is always the big moment in any slasher. And yes, I get that we rarely get much character development in these movies, but why is Jakkariah Harding so feared? I can accept The Shape being unkillable, but I also learned that he had the darkest eyes, the devil’s eyes. This film asks us to fill in the knowledge we have of slashers without rewarding us with touching on those moments and treating them in new and unique ways.

The slasher genre is ripe for being made light of but this film sadly doesn’t have much new to add to the conversation, which is a shame, as I can and will extol the virtues of its sequel/companion movie.

The Third Saturday In October V is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

Directed by Jim Demonakos (founder of Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con) and Kevin Konrad Hanna, this engaging documentary is about the world of Mike Mignola and the world he’s created around Hellboy.

Comic book and movie geeks — umm, speaking for myself, that’s the same audience — will enjoy hearing from Doug Jones, Guillermo del Toro, Patton Oswalt, Ron Perlman, Neil Gaiman, Mike Richardson, Art Adams and so many more about how the comic and movies came to life, but the true joy is in discovering how Adams bonded with Mignola and his brothers, how much of Hellboy is Mignola’s father (and himself) and how Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar was inspired to make Hellboy so personal.

There are also moments where the creator discusses how many times he felt defeated and how his family and later wife would help him overcome his fears. Even if you know nothing of the comics, the parts of this movie where Perlman breaks down remembering bonding with his father over movies (and getting the same opportunity to make something so personal as Hellboy), the way that Mignola and Del Toro overcame their artistic differences and how Mignola’s daughter ended up writing his favorite story (and how it keeps returning to his work), as well as how Mignola created a shared universe where others could have the same creative freedom that he found will emotionally reach you regardless of your level of comic or genre movie knowledge.

For those of us who know and love characters like Lobster Johnson and Ben Daimio, this is everything.

Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

Roscoe (Phillip Andre Botello) is in a weird place in life. He’s a janitor for a scuzzy love motel ad his girlfriend has brought another man home for strange rituals. But he does have a stash of powerful hallucinogenic worms, visions from a floating worm that is speaking directly to him and perhaps a new friendship with Benny (Trevor Dawkins), a moped enthusiast who is trying to manifest a homunculus baby from a sex doll.

Basically, a Hallmark movie for the kids.

Director and writer Alex Phillips said that this movie is “a meditation on psychosis. The only accurate way to convey insanity is to disregard the literal truth. All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is a dream that is impossible to break from autobiography. It’s about expressionistic maggots born in real wounds – maggots growing into big worms, too fantastical and deranged to be real, despite feeling heavy, wet and alive.”

I found it right up my alley — a gore-filled take on loneliness, connection and love that will make fans of movies like Society stand up and cheer through their tears and normal folk retch in their popcorn. That’s a standing ovation in my world.

“Worms are life, worms are love.” If you’re the kind of person that looks at a worm and wonders not just if you can cut it in half and create two lives but also eat one of them and trip balls, well, this movie was either made for — or by — you.

If you’re attending Fantastic Fest in person, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms will play at the following times:

Tue, Sep 27th, 2:30 PM @ Theater 9

You can also get a virtual badge here.

This film will debut on Screambox on November 8.

Get ready to watch something strange.

Filmmaker Oscar Harding grew up near farmer Charles Carson. Carson would give the family his homemade video tapes, which seem like he was hosting a TV program but he was all by himself. Or he was surrounded by cows giving birth. Or puppeteering his stuffed cats. Or wheeling his dead mother around so she could see the farm one more time before she went into the ground.

Carson was…well, the jury is out. Was he an outside artist? An early adopter of posting videos online before there was the internet? Or maybe someone with some deep mental issues?

Beyond getting to see the actual videos, the film also speaks to Karen Kilgariff (My Favorite Murder), Derrick Beckles (TV Carnage), Everything Is Terrible and Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher from The Found Footage Festival to learn why the videos are artistically important while also, yes, just odd.

“There we are, that’s life on a farm.” Carson says this several times and it makes me think about how he came from a world that is a constant circle of life and also so removed from the city that he may as well be an alien. He would keep giving these tapes, stories about life on the farm to his friends and neighbors. Were they entertained? Shocked? Upset?

Yet this movie never laughs at the man. It points out that he may have had issues, but he also saw death in a different way than we do. Perhaps by looking at it with a sense of humor, he was ahead of us, people who might look down on him and think him uneducated. I see him as a man with no guile, one with a sense of humor that could be surreal but he may have never encountered that art himself. He was, in a sense, a unique island of a man whose video output lived beyond him, made its way to people who could keep it alive and now, miles and decades away from a man long dead, we can appreciate what he left behind, even if it’s a video of him holding up a huge piece of afterbirth.

If you’re attending Fantastic Fest in person, Life On the Farm will play at the following times:

Thu, Sep 29th, 11:30 AM @ Theater 2
Thu, Sep 29th, 11:30 AM @ Theater 6

You can also get a virtual badge here. You can learn more about this movie on its official Facebook page.

Severin Films, who released the original Birdemic, wants to move past Birdemic 2: The Resurrection and introduce a new and better take on the birds. Or so they said, but after a decade, not much has changed.

Gerontologist Evan (Ryan Lord) and marine biologist Kim (Julia Culbert) have learned from her collecting ocean water samples that the water has become too acidic due to global warming. That means that the birds, always those CGI birds, are mad. But first, there’s romance.

Director and writer James Nguyen did it all himself this time and man, it’s certainly a movie. There’s nearly an hour about climate change where every conversation and even the artwork references it. If you think the media isn’t spending enough time on this issue, this movie is out to make up for it.

It also has a lot to say about how good Vertigo is.

There’s also a lot about how Mr. Green, an Elon Musk-esque billionaire is our only hope.

And then twenty minutes in, this movie remembers that it needs bird attacks and gives you bird attacks.

To get there, there’s a long karaoke slow dance scene, a space elevator and lots of making out.

I think this movie has a brand name now that guarantees that lots of people are going to want to watch it.  I can’t believe that there was one of these movies much less three. There are long stretches without dialogue or even music. There’s no real story until it’s almost over. And by this point, either James Nguyen is in on the joke or so far into himself that he doesn’t realize what he’s making or probably both.

In case you want to know where your money went when you bought all of those Al Adamson and Dennis Steckler box sets, you can see it on the screen here.

If you’re attending Fantastic Fest in person, Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle will play at the following times:

Thu, Sep 29th, 2:45 PM @ Theater 1
Thu, Sep 29th, 2:45 PM @ Theater 2

You can also get a virtual badge here. You can learn more about this movie on its official Facebook page.

The SSSP kaiju defense taskforce, led by Kimio Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is dealing with tons of monsters that have made their way to Earth. Luckily, they are soon joined by Ultraman, perhaps the greatest enemy of giant monsters ever.

I spent much of my childhood making Ultraman’s beam hand motion and watching and rewatching every single episode of the show. Every time I met a Japanese person as a kid, I wanted to know more about Ultraman and imagine my surprise when I learned how many more shows there were that — in the pre-internet times — we never got here.

I got that same childhood wonder and joy from this movie, which was made by the same team that created Shin Godzilla — there will also be a Shin Evangelion Theatrical Edition and Shin Kamen Rider — director Shinji Higuchi and writer, editor and motion capture performer Hideaki Anno.

Shinji Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh) is killed in the line of duty as Ultraman battles Neronga. The robot feels badly so he takes the man’s place and soon learns that he feels plenty of love for the human race, despite the fact that some of them don’t trust him. There are a lot of interplanetary political machinations in this story yet it never gets slow or boring. If anything, it feels like an entire season of Ultraman jammed into one movie.

There’s Zarab, the evil Ultraman, as well as Mefilias, the world-destroying Zetton, Gomess (a modified Godzilla from Shin Godzilla, just like how the original was a Godzilla suit when he was on Ultra Q), a Mammoth Flower, Larugeus, the Ultra Q monster Peguila, Kaigel, Pagos and Gabora (who along with Neronga were all made up of the Toho Baragon suit on the original Ultraman and Ultra Q), as well as cameo appearances from vehicles — often in the background or as models on desks — of Gohten from The War In Space, Alpha and Black Shark from Lattitude Zero; the Mole, FAB 1, Fireflash and the five Thunderbirds from Thunderbirds; and the Enterprise from Star Trek.

Info for this article and this image came from the amazing https://wikizilla.org/wiki/Shin_Ultraman

This is also the first Ultraman movie to be made by Toho. Does that mean we’ll ever see Godzilla versus Ultraman for real? One can hope.

The best part of this movie? It’s so episodic that there’s a new monster or crisis nearly every thirty minutes. Man, this is great. If you love kaiju, Ultraman or just want to have some fun at the theater, make sure you see this when it comes out in American theaters this fall.

You can watch Shin Ultraman with a Fantastic Fest virtual badge here.