Directed by Jesse Palangio and written by Rossa McPhillips and Simon Phillips, Blood and Snow is going to invite critical comparisons to The Thing, as its about a meteor landing near an oil well in Canada and a woman named Marie (Anne-Carolyne Binette) who is infected by it. She’s taken back to the base by Sebastian (Michael Swatton) and Luke (Simon Phillips) and — as you probably guessed by now — something isn’t right.
It’s always nice to see Vernon Wells in a movie. Here, he’s The Professor, one of the few scientists who might be able to figure this out. As for Marie, she wants to spread the virus inside her, starting with the rescue team that is coming to save everyone.
This obviously has nowhere near the budget that it needs to have, nor does the way too quick ending close things up the right way. But for what it cost — and tempered expectations — it’s a fine cold weather alien movie. There’s hardly any gore, either. Movies don’t need it, but when you’re expecting something based on what this is cribbing notes from, a little guts would be lovely.
The Cleopatra Entertainment blu ray of this movie has a trailer and slide show. You can buy it from MVD.
In the first two shorts by Kazuhiro Nakagawa, Godzilla has battled Hedorah and Gigan, destroying most of Tokyo. To save the human race, a robot named Jet Jaguar is sent to stop Godzilla.
I love the fighting style they gave Jet Jaguar here as he uses Superman punches and acrobatic kicks as well as parkour as he jumps and flips over buildings, using his speed to avoid Godzilla’s attacks.
There’s a fantastic scene where Godzilla dodges a punch and we get a point of view shot of Jaguar’s fist entering the building. He looks upset at the destruction that he’s created and loses Godzilla long enough to get hit with Atomic Breath.
Just as Godzilla is about to deliver the fatal blow, he’s blasted by Gravity Beam, which can only come from Ghidorah. The most evil of all kaiju descends from space, destroying the city, wrecking everything as Jet Jaguar helps Godzilla to his feet and in a reprise of their friendship in Godzilla vs. Megalon, released fifty years before this short, they shake hands.
Five year old Sam loved Jet Jaguar and Godzilla teaming up. Fifty two year old Sam feels exactly the same way, even if my body hurts when I jump up and down.
This leaves only one thing: to be continued. I can’t wait to watch Godzilla Fest 5: Battle of the Monsters.
Directed by Takuya Uenishi, who also made the short G vs. G, which led to 2022’s official short Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex, this celebrates the 50th anniversary of Godzilla vs. Megalon, making me feel very old.
“All bound for Mu My Land,” or at least Mu or Seatopia, as one of their priestesses has used the dead body of Gigan Rex to bring Megalon back to life. Godzilla still stalks Tokyo, destroying all of the still alive Gigan that escaped, as well as ones that humans foolishly kept to experiment on. As a streaming tries to break into a government lab, the priestess appears and attacks JSDF soldiers, bringing Megalon up through the ground.
I love that Heisei Godzilla continues in these movies and wow, I’ve never seen a kaiju battle that had this much destruction before. Megalon is so much more frightening than he ever was before, more of an armored and caped cockroach than his skinny first form. Godzilla also shows off some new powers here, like being able to direct atomic energy to his fists and also use it to power him into a dropkick, a move that he famously used back in the first version of this movie.
The only thing that this movie is missing is Jet Jaguar. Once that happens, this will be perfect. They can keep making these as long as they can, because they’re amazing.
Les Hackel (James Marsters) is down on his luck. Maybe even worse than that, as he wakes up to find that an explosive device has been implanted in his neck. Now, he must carry out heinous crimes in order to stay alive while trying to identify the mastermind ordering him to keep killing.
Also: This is a puppet movie.
Director and writer Evan Marlowe said, “We resolved (for some insane reason) to use only realistic lifelike hand puppets in actual settings, just like any other movie. No CGI backgrounds or actors wearing prosthetic makeup. This sort of thing has never been done. The Dark Crystal comes close, though there, the designers weren’t bound by the confines of reality. We’ve had a few incredibly skilled people helping out. Jeff Farley has been our lead puppet fabricator. Again, this kind of work isn’t common, so some amount of trial and error has been needed to find the balance of aesthetic, durability and function. Meaning, the heads need to look great on camera, hold up well under shooting environments that are often hostile,and let the puppeteer emote without too much effort. When it comes to the actual shoot, our puppeteer Danny Montooth lip syncs with each line, played on loop on my magical iPad until all the aspects (lighting, camera movement, mouth motion, eye line) are just right. Once I’ve got the footage, I edit it up and then our visual effects guy John Sellings smooths out any problems. When a scene is done, it gets color-corrected and graded, and then the sound and score are added.”
It took six years to make this movie. It also has an incredible voice cast, including Sid Haig, Robert Englund, Jordan Peele and Christopher McDonald. And there hasn’t been a movie ever before that looks or feels like this.
For those that can get past just how strange it looks to have human-sized puppets in every role, this movie is pretty awesome. Reality pretty much falls apart as Les has to place poison gas in workplaces, watch assassination TV shows and even slice the head off a baby which soon sprouts tentacles. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Can we even be sure after the end?
If you want to see a movie that goes all the way and beyond, Abruptio is for you.
Did you see that name and logo above? Anchor Bay Entertainment is back. The home entertainment and distribution company was a favorite of collectors during the early years of DVD and blu ray. Umbrelic Entertainment has revived the brand with a mission to release quality films that entertain, inspire, and challenge audiences.
The Anchor Bay blu ray of this movie comes with a commentary track with writer/director Evan Marlowe and producer Kerry Marlowe, a second commentary with puppeteer Danny Montooth, interviews with the performers and filmmakers and the first pressing will have a limited edition slip cover.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn
Spoiler warning!
Acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is universally known for making absorbing films dealing with children who have either lost one or both their parents or have a parent who excels at selfishness, neglect and abuse.
His 2023 film Monster is no exception.
The film is a modern variation of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Rashomon in that it chronicles a series of events from different perspectives. It cuts together almost like an anthology, using summertime Kagoshima and its surrounding as a romantic backdrop. The first telling of the events, which begins with a fire in a tower block, comes from the point of view of Saori (Sakura Ando), a supportive, if overprotective single mother raising her 5th grader son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) alone following the death of her husband. Minato is a child who seems to have a lot of secrets, frequently riding his bike off into the mountains and returning home sullen with only one shoe.
Once his overprotective mother begins to suspect her son is being bullied by his teacher, Hori Sensei (Eita Nagayama), all bets are off. Saori confronts the school with one goal in mind – to get them to admit Hori’s wrong-doings. Of course, the administrators will do everything in their power to protect the school’s reputation.
The film then switches to Hori’s POV where we find out, shockingly, that Hori never abused Minato. From his point of view, he is the victim. It’s Minato who is the villain, falsely accusing him. Hori loses his job and his girlfriend, all the while trying to protect a smaller boy in the class from Minato’s bullying.
We then switch to Minato’s POV, where it turns out Hori was wrong about him, too.
Minato and his perceived victim, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi) are secretly best friends, spending all their time together in the nearby mountains, creating their own world in an abandoned rail car.
Neither of these boys “fits in” with the other kids at school. Yori is the brunt of the entire class’s pranks, and they constantly tease him for being quiet and different.
While getting to know each other, the two boys find they have a lot in common. They’re both at the age where they are becoming aware that they are gay. Minato’s father is dead and Yori’s mother has abandoned him, leaving him alone with his alcoholic, homophobic physically abusive father. The father is the one true “monster” in the piece. An angry drunk who tells anyone who will listen that his son has the brain of a pig and that the boy must be “cured” of his “disease” of not being “a man.”
Yori lashes out secretly, setting the fire from the beginning of the film where his father frequents the hostess bar in the block.
The best parts of the film are Hori’s story and the growing relationship between the two boys, delicately portrayed by the film’s excellent child actors. It perfectly captures what it was like to be 11 years old, not yet fully sexually aware, but with a growing awareness of pre-pubescent feelings.
There’s also a subplot dealing with the principal at the school, who accidentally backed up over her grandson, killing him. We never find out if she did it on purpose, but we do that she has let her husband take the fall for her actions. We also see her deliberately trip a young child in the supermarket. Is she also a monster? Just when you think you’ve got her figured out, Kore-eda gives us a heartwarming scene between her and Minato in the music room at school where she tries to guide him through the difficulties of his emotions through making a lot of silly noise with brass band instruments.
In the end, everyone realizes they were wrong. Hori and Saori come together to find the boys who have gone missing in a typhoon having run away together to protect Yori from his increasingly violent father.
Sadly, the boys both die in a mudslide when their “safe” railway car is crushed in a mudslide. We never get to see the emotional impact of their deaths for any of the adults in the film, rather we are gifted with the final bittersweet image of the boys, running off together into the sunny afterlife, free to be their authentic selves.
Ultimately, the film is about perspective, assumptions, and misunderstandings. As a ghostwriter of autobiographies, I deal with this concept every single day. Monster perfectly illustrates the idea that everyone is a hero in their own story, and the villain in someone else’s.
Children? They don’t worry about it. They just get through their school day, have fun and explore their worlds, inside and out. Adults should give them a support system that allows them the freedom to grow up to be their authentic selves. but as Kore-eda has shown us time and again in films like Nobody Knows (2004), adults are very often huge jerks, even when they don’t mean to be, and the only remedy is for kids to build their own chosen families.
In this folk horror film shot in Rhuthun by debut director, writer and Rhuthun native Craig Williams, three men are called upon once again to carry out a terrible assignment in the quiet town of Rhuthun, North Wales.
Gwyn (Bryn Fôn), Emlyn (Morgan Hopkins) and Dai (Sean Carlsen) meet up and drive to the farm of Dafydd (Morgan Llewelyn-Jones), who they abduct against his will and throw in the trunk for the drive and hike up the hills of Bwlch Pen Barras. This has the feel of 70s British horror and while short, it delivers plenty of promise for what Williams and his crew, which includes cinematographer Sean Price Williams, have to offer in the future. There are some small moments in this that make it so deep and rich. And I loved the title card at the end, which places this even more in the look and feel of another decade.
In rural 17th century England, Squire Marlow (Mark Carlisle) offers several men double their normal wages if they carry his son’s coffin to the graveyard by night. The group includes best friend of the dead man Holt (Harry Roebuck), the drunken Ransley (James Swanton), the servant Pike (Richard Rowden) and the Squire, who wants to say goodbye to his son.
Despite the warnings and superstitions, they undertake the walk and begin to argue, as both Holt and Ransley had wronged the Squire’s son, who promises revenge. As it grows darker, they begin to see an ominous dog and spectres surrounding them.
I never heard of a corpse road before this. As England grew and churches became closer together, ministers had these highways created to connect faraway locations and mother churches with the main church having the burial rights. That means that poorer people had to transport the dead many miles through dangerous terrain. Unless they were a wealthy family, that meany that pallbearers would shoulder them by hand the whole way.
These roads were left unplowed and sometimes went near and even through homes, as changing the route was bad luck. This is also where the legends of corpse candles or fires started, as they were lights that would enlighten the pathway to the grave.
While a bit talkative and like a stage play, this was a great start to the All the Haunts Be Ours Volume Two set. Now I need to watch Sean Hogan’s other films. I’d seen his part in Little Deaths, but now I want to track down The Devil’s Business and Lie Still, as well as the fan films he made, The Thing: 27,000 Hours and Halloween:H33. I haven’t had the benefit of watching much 1970s British TV horror and I’ve read how scary it can be.
As always, I have so much homework to do.
To Fire You Come At Last is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including commentary by director Sean Hogan and co-producers Paul Goodwin And Nicholas Harwood; On The Lych Way in which Corpse Road Chronicler Dr. Stuart Dunn discusses the Pathways Of The Dead; a trailer and two short films, We Always Find Ourselves In the Sea and Our Selves Unknown.
Nathan (Hugo Dillon) and Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj) are dead. Nathan’s car hit Daniel’s motorcycle on an icy road and now they’re yelling at one another as two gates appear, a blue and red set. Daniel hears the singing of angels. Nathan, who has recently killed his wife in what he claims is an act of mercy, hears screams.
As Nathan and Daniel enter the red gateway, they finds several souls in the same place as him. And that’s when we realize this is a portmanteau of tales, telling us all about killer child Nina (Manon Maindivide) who works with Tony the Monster (Carl Laforêt) to murder people she doesn’t enjoy and a lawyer who goes by Julia (Ophélia Kolb) who hasn’t paid any attention to her daughter and now tries to keep a relationship after she kills herself. As for what happens to the men we met at the beginning, Norghul (Jean Rouceau) sentences Daniel to 4,000 years of solitude.
Director and writer Quarxx is a visual artist who makes this look gorgeous. As to how much sense it makes and how good of a movie it is, the answer lies in how much story you want versus how much graphic gorgeousness. It’s definitely bold even if you may just want to get back to the story that started this, which is usually not how you want a framing story to work in an anthology film.
The Arrow Video release of this film has interviews with Quarxx and special make-up/FX supervisor Olivier Afonso, an interview conducted with Quarxx while he captures footage of a baby being born, a making of, footage from the premiere, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Anton Bitel, a director’s statement and director Q&A.
The first movie from director and writer Francis Galluppi who comes right out of the gate with a movie that uses one location — a truck stop where everyone’s waiting for a tanker truck to fill up the gas pumps — and sets the tension on high and just lets everything boil.
The Knife Salesman (Jim Commings) is one of those people that just can’t wait to leave. Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue, The House of the Devil) is the waitress stuck there all day, dropped off by her husband, the sheriff (Michael Abbott Jr.). And then there are the two strangers that blow in full of menace, Travis (Nicholas Logan) and Beau (Richard Brake, the best part of many Rob Zombie movies). They just stole more money than you’d think was possible and are so close, so very close to Mexico.
The radio playing informs everyone that $700,000 was taken from the bank in Buckeye and that listeners should be on the lookout for a green Pinto containing several criminals. This makes Travis and Beau very nervous, as the camera goes to the parking lot, revealing that car as well as the damaged front end the DJ said to take special notice of.
The problem is no one has gas and the refueling truck hasn’t come yet. The pumps are dry. More bad news. The truck has rolled over and isn’t coming today, but no one knows that yet.
So many people come in and out of the diner with various agendas: Deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo). A Native American named Pete (Jon Proudstar). A young couple named Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick). Even Barbara Crampton, Alex Essoe and Faizon Love are in this.
It’d be easy to call this a Tarantino-style film. More to the point, it’s a film influenced by the same influences, made by a new filmmaker who is ready to make a statement.
It does — like Tarantino — have a Mexican standoff that — spoiler warning — wipes out most of the cast. The bloodshed isn’t close to being over at that point.
Someone really loved this. Sam Raimi. He approached Galluppi to make one of the new spin-offs. The director told Variety, ““It’s one of the movies that legitimately made me want to make movie. If I’d never seen Evil Dead I don’t think I would have grabbed my friends and went out to the desert and made my first short.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.
Amityville Zoo, Planet Amityville, Amityville Doorknob, Amityville Lockdown, Amityville Isolation, The Amityville Amityville and Amityville Fridge aren’t real but I would totally watch them if they did make them. After all, this is the 53rd Amityville movie I’ve watched and I don’t see stopping any time soon.
Movie Timelines host Josh Spiegel directed, wrote and stars in this as himself. In the middle of a new pandemic, separated from his wife Christie and daughter Stella (played by his real-life wife and daughter), he keeps trying to update his YouTube channel and have online meetings with horror fans in the midst of losing his job and being mailed a cursed doorknob from Amityville that puts him into his own horror movie.
Then everyone he meets has their heads explode and he learns from multiple Amityville director Lars Van Floof that every Amityville movie is cursed by an item sold from the original house. I believe this, as much as I believe that a demon has cursed me to watch every one of these films.
Made on a low budget and a found footage film, this feels made for people like, well, me. People who keep watching Amityville movies and get mad at themselves but then feel a sense of joy when a new one comes out. Josh is from Pittsburgh as well, even though we’ve never met, and therefore I feel some kinship for the terror he endures as he goes deep into the heart of 112 Ocean Avenue.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.