Formed in the summer of 1989 by singer Mina (born Keith before coming out as transgender in 2011 and transitioning) Caputo, bassist Alan Robert and guitarist Joey Z, Life of Agony grew from a hardcore band that traveled the east coast to build a following to charting at No. 27 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart with their song “Weeds” before Caputo left the band.

Life of Agony re-formed with Caputo singing in 2014 (although drummer Sal Abruscato was replaced by Veronica Bellino for 2019’s Sounds of Scars) and this film shows the journey that the band has taken, with Caputo statin, “We’ve never avoided tough conversations and we don’t pretend to have all the answers. But this film is a roadmap with many great lessons. It shows a ton of vulnerability…moments of falling downward, and those times where we rise strong.”

“A lifetime’s worth of struggle and triumph led to the making of this film,” added guitarist Joey Zampella. “This release is something we’ll be forever proud of.”

I remember talking to fans of the band when Caputo transitions and how they were surprised, but metal fans can be more accepting than most audiences. The film doesn’t hide from this moment in their history, nor in how Caputo’s family is still trying to change with the transformation.

The entire band shares how they’ve used the band to escape domestic violence, substance abuse and depression over nearly thirty years of playing.

Director Leigh Brooks also made Terrorvision: Wired Up and Scary, which showed him and an intern on the 20th anniversary tour of that band.

You may or may not be interested in this band, but their very human story, as well as the ways that adulthood has allowed them to better connect with their families and approach painful situations with open hearts is quite interesting and well-made. I didn’t expect to remain as invested as I was throughout and am please to report that the running time of this movie flew by. It’s a powerful film.

The Sound of Scars is available on Cable VOD and Digital HD from Raven Banner Entertainment and Cinedigm. You can learn more about the band on their official website and about the movie at its site.

You know, Radio Silence, who directed and produced this movie (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are the directors and Chad Villella produced), made the rather wonderful Ready Or Not, so I was pretty excited about seeing where they would take this film. And then I remembered that they also made the frustrating Southbound, a movie that for all its good moments feels like it just doesn’t fully connect for me. And then I recalled just how much I’ve disliked every Scream movie because they make a very fundamental error: As they dissect the slasher rules, they never seem to do anything but fall into the very same errors and on the rails rules that they decry. It’s one thing to point out the silliness of this genre, but if you’re not going to do something new and — even worse — if you’re going to point out something is dumb and then just do it all again despite proclaiming that you’re above this silliness, you appear even dumber.

Well, fool me five times now and I feel incredibly dumb for watching this.

Written by James Vanderbilt (who also scripted The Meg and Ready Or Not) and Guy Busick (Stan Against Evil), it feels like this movie exists simply as fan service for those that enjoyed the past films without breaking new ground. And I can hear fingers pounding back on keyboards to tell me that slashers don’t and that I expect too much from them, but when your entire franchise is predicated on changing up the game and you just repay the game save for a mention of elevated horror, you deserve to be found wanting.

Twenty-five years after the original Woodsboro murders committed by Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, another Ghostface appears and starts killing a group of teenagers connected to the original killings, with Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) as the first attack.

She survives, which brings her estranged sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) back home. Sam has a secret, as after she is attacked by Ghostface, she reveals to her sister that she has been having hallucinations of Billy Loomis, who is her biological father. When she blurted this fact to her mother, her father overheard and this caused their divorce.

To find out who the new Ghostface is — it could be Sam’s boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid, son of Dennis and Meg Ryan), Wes (the son of Sheriff Judy Hicks, played by Dylan Minnette and named for series director Wes Craven because nothing in these movies can be non-obvious, including a house having an Elm Street address), Amber Freeman (Mikey Madison, Sadie Atkins in Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood), twins Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad’s girlfriend Liv McKenzie (Sonia Ben Ammar).

The main narrative of the film is how Hollywood remakes or reboots beloved franchises and how Stab 8 has ruined the series, so it must be restarted in real life, which brings Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) back once again. Other than the reveal that Prescott is married to Mark Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey), one wonders why they feel the need to come back for another run through this movie. Unlike other slashers, Sidney and Gale are the ones that get as beat up, stabbed and abused as Jason does, yet they keep coming — almost inhumanly — back for more.

How much of the movie is fan service or a throwback or a callback or a homage or just outright making an incredibly similar film? I can’t figure it out myself, other than to say that I spent weeks debating even writing this because I really know that these movies are not for me, but perhaps I’ll feel like I’ve exorcized the time I wasted on it by pounding on these keys.

The really weird thing is that the movie makes a big deal out of the mother of Sam and Tara and then just ignores it. Then again, Bettinelli-Olpin said, “She was definitely in the script. But it just never made the cut. It felt like we were kind of opening the movie up too much and making it not as much about the sisters…It’s hard to say, but it sounds like there’s an interesting story there.” Or, you know, it’s a plot hole.

I don’t know. I shouldn’t read Twitter when movies come out, because folks celebrated this like the Second Coming. And it’s just OK. I mean, it spoils the major twists all by itself, almost second guessing its twist by making it be the truth instead of a fake out. And I don’t know if it’s the digital ARRI Alexa Mini cameras, but this felt more like a direct to streaming film than a major theatrical feature, at least in look and feel.

And look, I don’t want to spoil anything, but Ghostface’s plan is ridiculous, nearly depending on a character not having an extra inhaler or being able to get one from an all-night pharmacy. It’s so much demands exact planning over months, if not years, that hinging the final blow on something that could go either way feels completely nonsensical.

But yeah. This movie is the very definition of not for me. There’s a ridiculous amount of Easter eggs for fans of the series, though, to the point that it distracted me instead of being fun, but if you find these movies your cup of tea, well, you were probably tweeting them out in the theater one assumes.

They’re already planning a sequel, so you can plan for me to write just about the same things, like how everyone claimed that the new leads breathed new life into the series while I wondered how cardboard cut-outs could breathe, and I should really just get back to writing about Golan, Globus, Mattei and D’Amato.

The first full-length movie from director and writer Hamza Zaman, who also plays Yogi, The Institute is about Marie (Victorya Brandart) and Dan Sullivan (Ignacyo Matynia), who find the remote clinic of Dr. Arthur Lands, who they hope can finally help them to have a child. His methods are bizarre, but are they sinister?

Of course they are.

Why else would be watching this movie?

Actually, the baby making on display in this movie is basically tripping out in a roomful of strangers while lights flash and a radiation machine does its scientific magic, which seems quite out of the blue, but I was there for it.

What I really love is that the official site for this movie is really for the Lands Institute, located in the gentle hills of the Ipswich mountains. Far far away, behind the mountains, far from the teeming diseased cities we lay our plans, says the site, which stays in character.

The Institute is available on demand and on DVD and blu ray from Gravitas Ventures.

When conventional medicine is struggling to keep up with the stress of modern life. That’s why Stronger By Stress expores, as biohackers explain the holistic ways that they have trained themselves within in an attempt to defeat stress and increase their performance.

So what is biohacking? According to the filmmakers, this do-it-yourself biology is a growing social movement in which individuals, communities and small organizations study biology and life science using the same methods as traditional research institutions.
 With the advancement of technology and science, we now have access to more data that helps us to make better decisions and improve our wellbeing.

So is this doing your own research?

Director Andzei and writer Siim Land, whose books Metabolic Autophagy, The Immunity Fix, The Mineral Fix and Stronger by Stress, which this movie is based on, discuss this new sciene, along with The Biohacker’s Handbook author Teemy Arina, breathwork expert Leigh Erwin, Biohacker Center co-founder Olli Sovijarvi and Inka Immonen, who is an expert in neuropsychology, meditation and yoga.

To learn more, visit the official site for the movie.

I saw a tweet the other day where someone was amazed that there are modern westerns that still come out. These are the same folks amazed that Trump won, that middle America outnumbers the cities and that DVDs are still for sale at WalMart. I mean, come to Belle Vernon, PA to my America’s Super Store and you’ll discover several aisles and bins just overflowing with movies like Eye for Eye.

According to his IMB page, writer, director and actor L.J. Martin is the author of over 68 book-length works from such major NY publishers as Bantam, Avon and Pinnacle with titles covering genres like westerns, thrillers, mysteries, and historical; two cookbooks, two how-to write books, a cartoon book and even a book on how to kil cancer, because L.J. hasn’t just beat cancer once, he beat it twice. He’s been a wrangler, camp cook, draftsman, water company manager, sailor, printer, real estate broker and developer, appraiser and contractor. And now, well, he’s making a movie.

With John Savage from The Deer Hunter as one of the leads, this is the story of Quint Reagan (Shane Clouse, who also composed the music Eye for Eye), whose small ranch runs afoul of men who kill his wife Consuela (Ashley Rae McGee) and take his land.

Sold as “a classic western revenge tale,” just go in knowing this is a modern shot on digital low budget movie where some anachronisms seep through. But if you’ve been renting modern films like this at Red Box or buying them from a swimming pool-sized container at WalMart, you already know that.

You can learn more at the official site for the film or the Facebook page.

Starring Chloé Guillot and directed by Chris Rakotomamonjy, Home-Sitters is about a young woman hired as a house-sitter for a mansion in the middle of huge gardens. This assignment looks like a dream job until mercenaries try to break in to get a mysterious McGuffin that’s hidden within the house.

Featuring choreography from veteran fight choreographer Jorge Lorca (The Cursed, From Paris With Love), Home-Sitters is filled with tense action and star Guillot has some pretty great abilities for someone who hasn’t been in many movies. The action never really stops, which is how to handle things if your budget isn’t all that great, right?

The special thanks for this movie are great: South Korean director Seung-wan Ryoo and comics creators Jim Shooter (a Pittsburgh-born comic book writer who started on Legion of Superheroes before becoming the architect of the post-Stan Lee Marvel Universe, as well as Valiant and Defiant comics), Roger Stern (who had an amazing run on Captain America with John Byrne and created the Hobgoblin), Bill Manto (who wrote ROM Spaceknight, Micronauts and created the Guardians of the Galaxy) and David Michelinie (who created War Machine, Venom and Carnage).

You can watch Home-Sitters on Amazon Prime.

Ex-military ops officer and current parole officer Conner Connolly (Kevin Dillon, The Blob) has just 24 hours to pay $2 million to gang leader Pettis (Leon Robinson, Derice from Cool Runnings) in order to save his kidnapped pregnant wife Candace (Brooke Butler, All Cheerleaders Die). Turns out that by saving a parolee by killing one of Pettis’ men, he’s lost his job and now has a price on his head. Luckily his old crew, which includes Brice Mason (Frank Grillo, who was awesome in the Purge movies), is ready to help him.

They’re going to need it, because they have a score to settle with Alston (Bruce Willis), a corrupt police chief who — you guessed it — is working with Pettis.

A lot of people may wonder why we get a Bruce Willis movie every week. Many of those people either don’t watch action movies or live near a WalMart, where these films on shelves or in Red Boxes need recognizable faces to sell them. So if Bruce wants to sleepwalk through these movies and we want to pay to watch him, who is really hurting?

You can find A Day to Die wherever you find Bruce Willis movies.

Kent Peroni (Stephen Brodie, Baphomet), his wife Steph (Cassie Shea Watson) and their kids Jack (Sawyer Bell) and Gabby (Lourelle Jensen) are living through the economic downturn that we’re all dealing with, forcing them to move back home into Kent’s dead father’s (Tom Proctor) house, a place that holds no happy memories for our protagonist.

But then the kids start seeing a monster, there’s an earthquake in the backyard and even the adults start feeling the temperature drop without any reason. Kent asks his friend Hector (Daniel Escudero) what he should do next, which dues ex Poltergeist means that Hector’s grandmother (Patricia Rae) is a psychic.

Of course, this seems like a haunted housee movie until the idea that Kent’s drunken and mefatherthr is trying to atone from beyond the grave from something that might be…well, look at the poster if you want to spoil the big twist, which I loved, because it’s way out there and kind of puts some peanut butter into the chocolate.

Terror Films will debut The Last Possession on the Terror Films Channel on March 4 followed by a digital and on demand release on March 11. For more information, visit their website and Facebook page. You can learn more about this movie on its official Facebook page.

During a massive pandemic — umm, we can all relate — and the lockdown that results, Clay (Osawa Muskwa) and Julian (Dean Persons) have to sell their campground. While that seems like it’ll be rough, the buyer’s representative Vanessa (Anne-Carolyne Binette) seems nice enough. But the actual buyer Aaron (Michael Czemerys) and the urbanites that he brings with him are the worst humanity has to offer.

Actually, the worst humanity has to offer are zombies, who show up near the end of the film, just as the two groups are ready to destroy one another.

I must confess to some zombie burnout. However, I liked the way this movie worked its way into the actual attack. Directed by Ding Wang (The Killing House) and written by Diane Janna (who was a location manager on another walking dead film, Warm Bodies), I understand why this has to be a zombie movie and the scenery looks great and it’s definitely a different take on the genre.

If you have more of an appetite for brain eaters, well, you’re going to enjoy this.

World Ends at Camp Z is now available on Digital and On Demand from Média DW. You can learn more on the official Facebook page.

Director-writer Chad Ferrin’s (The Deep Ones, Exorcism at 60,000 Feet) Night Caller pulls from so many films, feeling like a modern U.S. version of a late in the game giallo, which is not a bad thing.

It gets the genre names to get you into the movie part down, including Steve Railsback, Lew Temple, Bai Ling and Kelli Maroney in the lineup. And it really lays on the color switches, the gore and the weirdness throughout.

Clementine (Susan Priver) is a phone psychic for Jade (Bai Ling), except that both of them have some level of psychic ability for real. When a James Smith calls in, Clementine knows right away that he’s a killer and she can see his murders inside her mind, a talent her mother had and her father (Robert Miano) has worried about enough that he makes her carry a gun. Yet when the cops try to help, they end up dead and now the danger really begins.

With references to Maniac and literally showing Dementia 13 and Patrick, this feels like a straight to video VHS movie and again, that’s a good thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite willing to go absolutely for it, getting scalping, necrophilia and violent murder — not to mention misogynistic dialogue out of an 80s movie — into it.

The best part? Bai Ling is absolutely berserk. She should be in a real giallo, because I would pay money for that now. Let’s try to make that happen.

Night Caller plays MidWest WeirdFest on Friday, March 4 at 10 PM CST. You can get tickets and more information on the MidWest Weird Fest website.