Tag Archives: 2022

Chattanooga Film Festival: The Ones You Didn’t Burn (2022)

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I’ve said it before, I’ll certainly say it again, but if your parent — who you have been estranged from — calls you repeatedly with strange messages and then they die and you need to set their affairs in order, just stay away. You don’t need the money, the aggravation or the supernatural onslaught.

Nathan (Nathan Wallace) and Mirra (Jenna Sander) are in no way close. The only thing that connects them would be the same parents and now that their father is dead, that connection is in the past. In town to handle the old farm — where everyone in town worked, so there’s already some resentment — they soon both live out the Thoreau quote that begins this movie: “I believe men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.”

Nathan starts having vivid nightmares of a woman rising from the sea and soon starts feeling the same dread that his father felt; the family had long ago stolen the land and then used the people around it for decades to help them make their livelihood. This causes him to spiral back into addiction with the help of old enabling friend Greg (Samuel Dunning) — nice Bolt Thrower shirt by the way — while his sister grows close with the very people who once toiled in her father’s fields, Alice (director Eliese Finnerty) and her sister Scarlett (Estelle Girard Parks).

This is Finnerty’s first full-length film and it moves quickly — it has a 70-plus minute running time, which I love — and the closing visuals are gorgeous. It made me think that while we truly own nothing, everything that we try to put on a mark on was owned by someone before us and worse, probably taken by force from them. Everything is cursed, when you think about it, but some worse than others.

Many years ago, an ancestor made it to the final degree of brotherhood and was taken to an island for his last rite and initiation. When he came home, he didn’t look the same, his eyes didn’t have any life and he just sat in a chair facing the window, miserable and depressed in a chair, telling everyone he was waiting to die. I thought about that story as I watched this and if I had any opportunity to claim his heritage, trust me, movies have taught me to run long, hard and fast. And never, ever steal anything from a woman.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Chattanooga Film Festival: Chicken House (2022)

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Director and writer Cate Jones — she also made She’s the Eldest — comes from Lawton, Oklahoma, known — as her IMDB bio helpfully reminds us — for high crime, meth and an Army base. She left town as soon as she graduated and now makes movies. She’s also Cat, the new roommate in a house of actresses who turns everything way upside down, inside out and shakes it all about.

Shot in nine days on a $17,000 budget — a fact that is not apparent — this film has three actress roommates — if not friends — at its core: Charlie (Ashley Mandanas) is struggling with her sexual identity, Beth (Jessi Kyle) is obsessed with religion and April (Kassie Gann) is non-stop recording auditions for ads about vaginal wellness. They’re all conflicted in how they feel about themselves, never mind one another, so even Cat arrives and refuses to even discuss the limits on how hard of drugs can come into the house — and then reveals that a poltergeist is also living there — things start getting wonderfully messy.

There are also Mormon missionaries, questions of existence and, yes, the reveal of the ghost within the room who ends up — spoiler warning — perhaps being the best roommate of them all. Big points for casting Mickey Reese, the director of Agnes (and at least a movie a year, every year and sometimes two, like in 2019 when he made Climate of the Hunter and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune).

The film plays out like an interrogation of what happened in the home — in color — mixed with remembrances and scenes — in black and white — and the narrative works so well. Yes, we all have issues, actors and filmmakers more than most, but sometimes the strangest — and most supernatural — events unite us. Even if it’s an ill-advised exorcism. I mean, what’s some holy water between friends?

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Chattanooga Film Festival: The Leech (2022)

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Father David (Graham Skipper, the director of Sequence Break) is a devout priest who has never missed a Mass, never eaten meat on a Good Friday and never misses the opportunity to speak on God’s love, including when he invites Terry (Jeremy Gardner, the director of After Midnight and the man who told his mother not to watch this movie) and Lexi (Taylor Zaudtke, Gardner’s real-life wife) to stay during the holidays.

It starts as a simple act of kindness and nothing can go wrong, right? But throw in a game of never have I ever, then have a good man — in his head if perhaps not as much in his heart — get tempted and things are ready to go off the rails.

Director and writer Eric Pennycoff also made Sadistic Intentions, which starred Gardner and Zaudtke, and he puts together a movie with a small cast, a smart script and a mix of madness and black humor as the priest finds himself in a place — and perhaps a position — that he had never prepared for.

I also loved Rigo Garay, who plays RIgo the organ player, perhaps the only character brave enough to tell Father David that he hasn’t had a parishioner attend Mass in weeks and that he’s just been giving sermons to an empty church. But if that’s true, who are the prophetic — and perhaps Satanic — voices who come to confession? And what’s with the young padre’s frequent confessions of his own to that horrifying painting?

There’s an incredible moment near the end where an off-the-deep-end Father David throws on his vestment and rants on the altar while arguing with a red-lit Terry — or a vision of him — before learning that — and this is the biggest spoiler warning I can give — that the real Terry has beaten his wife and snorted David’s mother’s ashes.

I mean, this is a movie that has a priest with his head wrapped up straight out of Threads losing his mind and a last shot that will make you think long after the Christmas carol scored credits run out.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Chattanooga Film Festival: Bitch Ass (2022)

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When a movie starts with Tony Todd asking if you know your hood horror, then name drops Blacula, Bones, Tales from the Hood, The People Under the Stairs and Candyman, it has a lot to live up to.

Luckily, Bitch Ass more than succeeds.

Director Bill Posely, who started his career as an actor before writing episodes of Cobra Kai and directing several shorts and the TV movie Culty, has co-written (with Jonathan Colomb) a pretty intriguing idea for a movie: four young wannabe gang members must rob a house to get their colors. That house, however, is no normal house. It belongs to the hood legend Bitch Ass (Tunde Laleye) and they must all play games for their lives.

One of the gangsters, Q (Teon Kelly), truly wants to be a doctor but his grades aren’t enough for a scholarship, so he hopes that he can make enough money from the gang life to escape the hood and take his hard-working mother Marisa (Me’Lisa Sellers) with him.

However, his mother has a secret. She once ran with the gang, specifically its leader Spade (Sheaun McKinney), and she knows exactly how Bitch Ass become a scarred and angry killer of urban youth. He was once the bullied Cecil (Jarvis Denman Jr.), burned by his grandmother for the slightest bad behavior at home and routinely abused at school and on the streets before being shredded with a razor blade.

Now, on 666 Night, Q and his fellow initiates — Cricket (Belle Guillory), Tuck (Kelsey Caesar) and Moo (A-F-R-O) — enter the home, they soon must match wits with the first black masked slasher, playing him in games similar to Connect Four, Operation and Battleship. It’s a ridiculous idea done beyond well, which makes this movie work. In fact, I’d go so far to say that this movie wouldn’t just fit on to the shelves of your dearly departed mom and pop video store. I dare say that it’d be checked out every time you looked for it.

Even the title cards in between each sequence look like they come from a board game and the editing of the film slices and cuts the screen like a comic book and at times a quickly spinning Rubik’s Cube. It’s kinetic and makes the movie fly while allowing it to rise above its low budget.

It’s not perfect, but it has a ramshackle direct to video charm that makes it a worthy successor to the urban horror that has come before. I just can’t wait until the sequel, because this movie needs to be expanded and its unique slasher methods further explored.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s now playing as part of the Chattanooga Film Fest. Virtual tickets are available at www.chattfilmfest.org/

Ip Man: The Awakening (2022)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

The latest film to feature the cinematic version of real-life Wing Chun master Ip Man is Chinese feature Ip Man: The Awakening, which finds the titular character, played here by Miu Tse, arriving in Colonial-era Hong Kong as a young man.  He runs into old friend Bufeng (Chen Guan Ying), whose sister Chan (Zhao Yu Xuan) and mother Ip Man has just saved from a robbery on a streetcar. Bufeng advises Ip Man to keep his head down in Hong Kong, but when the pair sees women being kidnapped for a human trafficking ring, Ip Man gets involved to try and free them.

Naturally, this leads to all kinds of trouble for the friends, and if you guessed that Chan would play a part in being captured by the villains — whose ringleader is a British character — you are obviously no newcomer to action films. The result is a rather predictable plot heightened by some fun, well-choreographed fight scenes, some of which feature Wing Chun being pitted against the British martial arts mash-up known as Baritsu.

There are plot holes aplenty — at a lean 80-minute run time, it seems that another 10 minutes explaining how some characters who seemed to be dead at one point are miraculously fine again, without showing how or why. If you are willing to overlook instances like this, codirectors Li Xi Jie and Zhang Zhu Lin deliver a perfectly serviceable martial arts action outing headlined by Tse, who acquits himself well in the lead role.

Ip Man: The Awakening, from Well Go USA, debuts on Digital, Blu-Ray, and DVD on June 21, 2022.

SHUDDER EXCLUSIVE: Revealer (2022)

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By all rights, Angie (Caito Aase) and Sally (Shaina Schrooten) should never be friends. Angie dances as Precious at the peep show booth of The Revealers Bookstore, Sally is a religious zealot that yell at her nearly every day and their lives couldn’t be more different. But maybe they aren’t. Maybe they have more in common than they think. It only takes the end of all there is for them to realize that.

Using one location — which was demanded by the COVID-19 outbreak — to its best advantage, the film separates the two leads via the peep show booth as they work together to try and escape the store, then attempt to see what’s left of the world. I mean, the horns of the angels have been blasting non-stop, so one imagines that Chicago is an inferno by this point.

Directed by Luke Boyce (The Pooka and the upcoming adaption of the comic book Revival) and written by Michael Moreci and Tim Seeley (who created the aforementioned Revival with artist Mike Norton, colorist Mark Englert and cover artist Jenny Frison as well as Hack/Slash, which is about horror movie survivor Cassie Hack and her mission to destroy slashers; it’s even better than it sounds and is required reading), Revealer is a dark movie with a light heart, awash in neon color, dirt and blood. It’s not a big movie but that’s because it stays small in the face of the biggest thing that ever will be. And it’s a blast.

Revealer is streaming exclusively on Shudder.

The Long Rider (2022)

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Filipe Leite — who shot most of this footage — leaves behind his adoptive home of Canada to travel from Calgary all the way to Brazil riding his two horses Frenchie and Bruiser. He’s following a trail inspired by Aimé Tschiffely’s 1925 equestrian journey that will take him eight years to travel as he adds up 15,000 plus miles across twelve countries.

The travels were supposed to be shorter before the trail inspires Fellipe to go even further. Along the way, he deals with bad weather, corrupt border patrols and horrific weather conditions, all so that he can make the journey to his destination and then head back home, alone on the trail.

Filipe is a world-renowned Long Rider, an award-winning journalist and a best-selling author of Long Ride Home and Long Ride to the End of the World. He’s also the youngest person in the world to cross the Americas on horseback, an accomplishment celebrated by two statues of Fellipe being displayed in his native Brazil.

The Long Rider was directed by Sean Cisterna, who also made Blood Creek, War of the Dead and Kiss and Cry. This is an interesting idea for a film and quite the story. Trust me, I don’t think I could do what Fellipe has done.

A Town Full of Ghosts (2022)

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Mark (Andrew C. Fisher) has always dreamed of buying Blackwood Falls, an old west ghosttown and fixing it up to make it a tourist destination. It’s definitely a fixer upper with no running water or electricity, but that’s no problem, right? Well, his investor (Mike Dell) leaves town in a hurry and his wife Jenna (Mandy Lee Rubio) feels about Blackwood Falls like Lisa Douglas does Green Acres.

I’d say all is well and good, but when a videographer becomes to shoot a promotional video, his girlfriend Lisa (Lauren Lox) goes from demanding that they leave to disappearing without a single trace.

Director and writer Isaac Rodriguez also made Last Radio Call which made good use of found footage. He based this movie on a story he saw online about an influencer who sold everything and moved to a ghost town. I actually enjoyed his former film way more than this one. It takes a long time for anything to happen and while the last fifteen minutes are filled with scares — Jenna tries to escape the town and becomes lost in a wooden maze while being pursued like they’re at the Overlook — it’s work to get there.

A Town Full of Ghosts is now available on digital platforms.

Bad Bones (2022)

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Directed and written by Scott Eggleston (who directed the TV series Midnyte and two shorts, Invader and Collection Day) before this. He’s also the creator of the YouTube channel The Frugal Filmmaker.

Russ (Chris Levine) and his wife Jennifer (Maddison Bullock) have just moved into a house that’s a definite fixer-upper, so they probably had to deal with a lot of back and forth with their lender, probably not having a traditional mortgage but instead an FHA 203(k) loan, which covers a home that needs repairs up to the tear-down as long as the foundation remains in place. I don’t know, maybe they got a HomeStyle loan, which is Fannie Mae conventional loan that limits the renovation amount to 50% of the as-completed value (the difference is that the 203(k) has no maximum as long as the After Repair Value is under the FHA maximum loan amount.

I’m telling you all of these mortgage and loan facts because in case you ever wondered why no one leaves a home that they know is haunted, in 2022 it’s very simple. Once you buy a home, you’re pledging your future to that property. This is really true with any loans that cover a home that needs construction or renovation. After all, if you abandon the home — you can’t tell prospective buyers about the ghosts — you’re about to lose everything. I mean, yes, you also might die or be possessed, but money is tight.

Russ is also a paranormal researcher, so you’d think he’d have some kind of demonic home inspection, but perhaps he was just too excited about the property. There’s one major reason why: Jennifer has a terminal illness and he thinks the house can cure her.

Who cares if the last owners just disappeared?

Seeing as how this comes from someone who calls himself The Frugal Filmmaker, you already know that the budget is less than a tank of gas, but then again, that tanks of gas could pay for Heaven’s Gate by the end of this year.

Instead of big budget CGI, there are two great performances by the leads, as they have to carry so much of this movie. It does have some pages from an alchemist’s notebook and if I’ve learned anything, it’s to never read notes from scientists or magicians that you find in a new house. While this movie doesn’t have anyone from a reel to reel tape, you shouldn’t play that either. Just be fine with not knowing and not dealing with demons.

There are some fun twists in this and it does a lot that works despite its budget instead of worrying about what won’t work with the budget. After all, ideas don’t cost anything and this movie has a really intriguing premise. It also spends plenty of time letting us get to know the leads and care about them before the horrific moments happen.

You can watch the entire movie on YouTube and learn more about Bad Bones on the official Facebook page and official web site.

TUBI ORIGINAL: First Person Shooter (2022)

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Spencer Bradford (Jacob Blair), the creative head of a video game development company — who is more protagonist than hero, because he’s a complete jerk — just wants to get their new game through the crunch. Yet when a Redditor who claims that Spencer stole his game begins to hack into the lives of everyone that works at the company.

Yes, a slasher about social media and video games.

Director Steven R. Monroe also made Teardrop, Unborn and Harland Manor, all of which are Tubi exclusives. He’s probably best known for the I Spit on Your Grave remake. Writer George Olson’s experience is limited to a short and a web series, Surreal Estate.

There’s a scene where a new employee waxes on and on about what a life-changing experience it is to work on the game while his boss literally urinates in front of him, the boss’ bartender girlfriend destroying numerous dudes at a bar with her caustic customer service, an office where real weapons hang on the walls and get passed around in conference rooms, a sex scene followed by the male character being completely crushed by the women afterward and an explosion in a parking lot that looks worse than anything in any first person shooter I’ve played going back to GoldenEye. Oh yeah — and a little button on the ending with dudes in Christmas sweaters beyond excited to play the game and finding out that it’s…well, you’ll see.

This was filmed in Winnipeg and when I realized how Canadian it all was, it answered so many of my questions.

You can watch this on Tubi.