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.
Gregg G. Allin (Isaac Golub, who played Father Dingleberry in five Death Toilet movies, including Death Toilet 4: Brown Snakes on A Plane) — get it, G.G. Allin? — is a paranormal podcaster brought to Amityville by Mayor Dump (Roy Englebrecht, who was the boxing consultant for Celebrity Boxing), who wants him to “kill this toilet,” and by this toilet, I mean the Death Toilet that has been killing people in the same town where Ronald DeFeo Jr. was possessed all those years ago.
After the toilet kills the caretaker, the same man who has been randomly showing up to shoot hot snakes into the bowl, Gregg must battle the bowl, so to speak, to save the anuses of Amityville.
I always wonder about people who get to be in movies, want to brag to their family, and then see the name of their role, like Mike Hartsfield, who in this movie plays Misc. Men Making Mud Mounds.
Evan Jacobs has directed fifty movies, and this is one of them. Yes, all of the Death Toilets were directed by him and written by him. He also made the DV series about a serial killer who keeps filming himself. I would say that when he finally gets to the close of this movie, where animated birds, sharks, and flies all attack, it’s pretty funny. That took 55 minutes to get to, nearly an hour of people repeating themselves as they talk directly into the camera and act as if they’re streaming and being as dull as most streamers when they had every opportunity to retake these scenes and make something better.
However, the film does take a turn for the better, and the unexpected moment of a toilet uttering, ‘Leave!’ managed to elicit a genuine laugh from me. This is a level of humor that most Amityville movies fail to achieve, leaving you pleasantly surprised.
But if you haven’t made it through 47 other Amityville movies to get here, first of all, don’t. Please don’t make the same mistakes I have. Because you’re going to watch five minutes of this and hate yourself, hate cinema and perhaps even give up on life. Then again, if you’ve insulated yourself against things like plot, good sense and movies made with stock fire explosions that you can buy for less than the price of this DVD, dig in. It’s certainly at least as good as Amityville Karenand much better than Amityville Thanksgiving, a movie so caused that I feel like I never stopped watching it. Any second now, I will wake up, and it will start all over again. I’ll be trapped watching it forever and ever, amen.
You can buy this DVD from MVD or watch it on Tubi.
Mutilator may not have the fanbase of other slashers — you won’t find much merchandise or an aisle devoted to it in your Spirit Halloween store — but it does have a great tagline in “By sword, by pick, by axe, bye bye” and the legend that the original was almost unreleased because the gore earned it an X rating.
Now, four decades after this late in the game slasher came out, original director Buddy Cooper returns with much of the cast of the first movie, all to make a meta sequel as a sequel is being made at the original filming location, as well as a wrap party and fan convention to celebrate the end of a rough shoot. Ruth Martinez, Pam from the 1985 film, plays herself, as does Bill Hitchcock (Ralph).
After Jon (Mark Francis), the director of the new Mutilator is killed, a detective named Columbo (Damian Maffei) starts to investigate and the bodies pile up. I mean it, the last part of this movie wipes out nearly every new character one after the other. Somehow, Jon’s producer brother Julian (Dan Grogan) is able to convince the police to not investigate until the wrap party.
Terry Kiser — who played the dead Bernie twice — is actor Jack Chatham, the man who played Big Ed in the first movie (who has a cameo) and he’s obsessed with getting his hands on his old weapons.
Speaking of those weapons, all of them and more will be used to decimate this movie’s cast, including fishing tackle taking out an eyeball in a method that Fulci would savor and a speargun up the rear and out the mouth kill that blew my mind, as well as a lynching that was so disgusting that I forgot I was on mute during a work conference call and yelled out loud in excitement. A fish even gets pulled off the wall and used.
Despite having eleven writers — Cooper, John Douglass, Edmund Ferrell, Keith Ferrell, Semone Fournillier, Ann Hale, Marshall New, David Edward Roop, the Soska sisters and Keith Patrick Stoddard — once it comes time to end this movie, it does so Porky Pig-style as the credits start to run.
It’s a shame that this ends in such a ramshackle fashion, just as things are picking up. Then again, this would be a fun movie to see with an audience and it revels in its gore, which is both amusing and shocking. If you love Mutilator, you’ll be overjoyed that other people love it just as much as you. But if you adore it that much, you’ll be upset that the “Fall Break” song doesn’t play in this.
This was one of the movies I was most looking forward to in several fests this year, so I’m excited that I finally got to see it. Here’s hoping it gets another pass before it plays wide, as with some tweaking, I think this could get in front of even more viewers than its inspiration.
Kati Kelli was a YouTube personality as the form moved from people just posting anything to today’s world of content providers. In this collection of her movies, made by Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) and husband Jordan Whipple, we see the many faces that she put on online before dying in 2019 from a severe asthma attack.
You can see the original videos on her channel, Girl Internet Show, or watch this movie to see Kelli direct, write, edit and star in a series of films where her only other co-stars are animations. The last movie in this, Total Body Removal Surgery, was posted three days before her death.
In 79 minutes, we see where the internet was and where it was going, this film has so explorations by its star of beauty, image and online and offline personality. The internet has changed so much in the years since Kelli’s death but from this film, you get the idea that she would have transformed beyond it and led it somewhere.
Here are the short films that I watched at this year’s Fantastic Fest.
A Fermenting Woman (2024): Visionary chef and master fermenter Marielle Lau (Sook-Yin Lee) is about to be let go from the restaurant that she has given her life to. However, she has an idea to save things, as she begins to ferment a new dish that has an ingredient that truly feels like part of her. Directed by Priscilla Galvez and written by Maisie Jacobson, this puts you directly into the kitchen and all the time and energy that this dish takes. And perhaps it’s a pun to say that it has her blood and sweat in it, because Marielle uses her menstrual blood in her garden, so she decides that it should be the main ingredient in this fermented food. Marielle has taken a piece of her, perhaps the egg that she will never get to fertilize, and gives it to people who don’t pay attention to a bite of their meal, instead ignoring it as simple sustenance when she has given everything to make it into their mouths. The truest horror is that we create — whether its foods or the words you’re reading now — just so that they can be consumed and forgotten.
ATOM & VOID (2024): Gonçalo Almeida has magic here, a mixture of effects and real spider, as it watches the end of all things and perhaps the birth of a new adventure. The score, sound design and look of this film all work together to create perfection, just a true joy of watching and listening. In fact, I went back several times and saw it again, one of the few advantages of seeing this online and not in a theater. If you get the opportunity to watch it, take it. This is a short that I will think of far beyond most full length movies I see this year.
Be Right Back (2023): Ah, the worst words to say in a horror movie. In this short, Maria is left home alone while her mother goes to buy dinner. However, her mother takes way longer than she should and as the night grows dark, Maria is startled when she hears a knock on the door. Is it her mother? Or is it something else? Have you ever gone shopping when you were young and gotten lost, then looked for your parents only to find someone who you thought were them and were instead strangers? That’s the feeling that this creates and it is not one I ever thought that I would live through ever again.
A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers (2024): As if I couldn’t love this short enough, just check out this paragraph from its creator, Birdy Wei-Ting Hung: “My first encounter with Yang Chia-Yun’s Fēng Kuáng Nǚ Shā Xīng / The Lady Avenger (1982) was an uncanny experience. I was researching Italian giallo film when a vintage newspaper movie poster grabbed my attention. The advert depicted a sensational female vigilante that visually recalled Edwige Fenech in Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colors of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972), only this time it was an Asian woman’s face. Her alluring body was barely covered by a white sheet, and her lustrous black hair rested on her collarbones. Standing in a martial art squat stance, the way she holds a katana (Japanese sword) is reminiscent of Meiko Kaji in Shurayuki-hime / Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973) and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill(Quentin Tarantino, 2003). I had found our lady avenger Wan-Ching, who was played by Hsiao-Feng Lu—the Taiwanese “sexy goddess” of the 1980s, and Taiwanese pulp films.”
This short is a video essay that mixes “two specific female characters in Taiwan Pulp films and Taiwanese New Wave…the female protagonists in Yang’s The Lady Avenger, and in Edward Yang’s Gǔ Lǐng Jiē Shǎo Nián Shā Rén Shì Jiàn / A Brighter Summer Day.”
I love that this film puts these movies against one another, just as a young woman spends a day in the theater savoring a watermelon drink while watching several films beyond the two mentioned, as Deep Red is one of them. A sexual awakening as well as an exploration of what film tells its viewers about the path that being a woman can take, this is one of the most gorgeous shorts I’ve seen in years. I want people to just give Birdy Wei-Ting Hung as much money as she needs to create movies that will inspire us in the same way that films have motivated her.
Bunnyhood (2024): “Mum would never lie to me, would she?” In this short by director Mansi Maheshwari, writers James Davis and Anna Moore, as well as several talented animators, Bobby (Maheshwari) learns the answer as he is rushed to the hospital. The frenetic style of the animation creates the worries of childhood, replicating the fears that aren’t always rooted in the rational or the real. The hospital and surgery come across as horrific places where nothing good can happen and at times, our parents will lie to us to keep us from worrying about the truth. Is that the right way to be a parent? Who can say!
CHECK PLEASE (2024): I am a veteran of the wars of fighting for the check. The director, Shane Chung, is too. He said, “As a kid, I witnessed firsthand the quickness with which friends can turn on each other whenever my parents took me to dinner with their pals. It was all smiles until it came time to pay for the bill – then the fangs came out. “I got it!” “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s my treat!” “You can get me next time!” It got so serious for no reason. Arguing, subterfuge… it was killing with kindness taken to another level. I wondered how far someone could take fighting to pay for the bill. Inspired by my love of goofy slapstick action comedies like Drunken Master and Everything Everywhere All At Once, I thought: what if they literally fought each other? I challenged myself to write a ten-minute long action scene where two Korean-Americans fought each other with chopsticks, grill coverings, and credit cards… and CHECK PLEASE was born.”
Starring Richard Yan and Sukwon Jeong, this is a simple story but is so perfect. It gets across what it means to be a man — paying the bill — as well as the director’s attempts at getting across the feeling of assimilating to a new culture. It’s also filled with great action. I laughed really hard throughout and found joy here.
Compost (2024): Directed by Augusto and Matías Sinay, this film presents an intriguing way at looking at grief. Anastasia (Natalia di Cienzo) has just lost the love of her life, Lisandro (Maximiliano Gallo), after an accident as he builds the greenhouse where she plans on spending most of her time. How can a dream place be as such when it is filled with so much pain? And can she carry through with his last wish, which is to become compost for their plants? Can we become part of the cycle of death and rebirth when emotions are part of our equation, unlike the plants that we help bring to birth each year, only to have to watch them die in the fall?
Considering Cats (2024): A short experimental documentary shot at the Long Island Pet Expo in 2023 by director Matt Newby, this short asks us to “Take a moment to consider the cat.” Seeing as how I live with two, I do this every day. This does a good job of showing the joy that people find in the small creatures that become part of our lives, if only for a short time, in an interesting lo-fi style.
Do Bangladroids Dream of Electric Tagore? (2024): Allem Hossain’s short is described as “desi-futuristic sci-fi.” Interesting. The director says that this genre is “a body of sci-fi work that dares to imagine speculative futures through a South Asian lens.”
In this, a documentarian goes into the New Jersey Exclusion Zone to meet the droids that live there and learn why they are obsessed with a subversive Bengali Renaissance poet. Featuring the poem “Freedom” by Rabindranath Tagore, which is read by Bernard White, this is AI generated but its director asks us to think of “how AI and other technology will impact us but I think we should also be thinking about our moral and ethical responsibilities towards what we create.”
Don’t Talk to Strangers (2023): Imanol Ortiz López has created a short that looks like vintage Kodachrome and is set within a toy store that only looks bright and friendly. Even the IMDB description of this movie is somewhat scary: “Mom always told me not to talk to strangers, but Agustín is not a stranger, because whenever we go to his store he offers me treats.” A young girl is saying that and in this, she’s played by Inés Fernández, who explains how she was abducted by Agustín (Julio Hidalgo). It sounds simple and expected, but in no way does what is revealed end up that way. A really interesting short.
Down Is the New Up (2018): Directed and written by Camille Cabbabe, this is the story of how an ambitious filmmaker and his crew attempt to tell the story of the last hours of a man who plans on killing himself at dawn. To be honest, I found it kind of indulgent and wish that I had spent a bit more time watching it. Maybe it was the language barrier or honestly how many shorts I watched in a few days, but there wasn’t anything here that jumped and grabbed me. I feel I owe the filmmaker an apology and am certainly willing to try and see what was here one more time.
DUCK (2024): The sell copy for this promises that this is “a classic spy thriller turned on its head.” What it is is a deep fake generated film starring almost every actor to blame James Bond and Marilyn Monroe, all voiced by director and writer Rachel Maclean.
As someone who uses AI for my real job and to create music, I have no hate for it. I do, however, dislike this movie. It should be something I love, one that gets into aliens and conspiracies while using pop culture characters. Instead, it feels like robbing the graves of the cemetery at the lowest part of Uncanny Valley. It goes on and on, reminding you of the much better work of the actors who it is raising from the dead to serve as stiff actors for a plot that can be worked out in seconds. I believe AI and deep fake can create the kind of cinema that we want to see, movies that create joy. This just engendered ennui.
Empty Jars (2024): After the last two shorts I watched, this brought back the love I have for film. Director Guillermo Ribbeck Sepúlveda has crafted a fantasy world where a woman (Ana Burgos) deals with the loud guests at her hostel by freeing a ghost from a jar, a spirit that, well, fills her with something else, giving her an experience that she hopes to replicate again and again. Yet, as this movie shares with us, the dead are even less trustworthy than the living. What a gorgeous looking and feeling short. I can’t wait to see what else Sepúlveda can do!
Faces (2024): Look out for Blake Simon. In this film by the director and writer, he starts with Judy (Cailyn Rice) being invited to a fraternity party by Brad (Ethan Daniel Corbett). However, in the ether all around this is a character called The Entity, a creature that has been abducting women the same age as our heroine, such as Bridget Henson. Now, as the frat party hits its height, the struggle for identity and who or what people are plays out. Faces feels like an entire film in its short running time and could easily become a full length feature. Whatever The Entity is, whatever it is looking for and why it does what it does are all unimportant. What is is that Simon seems ready to become a valued new talent in horror and this announces him so well.
Godfart (2023): Directed and written by Michael Langan, this is “The very true story of how the universe was created.” God (Russell Hodgkinson) is looking for breakfast. This short explains it all. This is part of something called the Doxology Universe. As someone who loves breakfast, I want to know more.
How My Grandmother Became A Chair (2020): Director and writer Nicolas Fattouh has created the perfect way of showing what it’s like to slowly lose an aging family member, something that I have gone through several times of the past years. His grandmother is losing her senses, one by one, until she — as the title lets you know early — becomes immobile furniture. There are times when it takes animation and the surreal to make life — which never makes all that much sense — something more easily explainable. This looks so wonderful and moves so perfectly that even though I knew where it was going, it still ended up as an emotional experience.
Huntsville, July 1981 (2024): In Sol Friedman’s short, four characters must deal with the ferocious attacks of a creature that is hiding in the woods. I loved the look of this, which seems like the wildest sketches the weirdest kid in school made and here they are, coming to life.
J’ai le Cafard (Bint Werdan) (2020): “J’ai le cafard” means “I have the cockroach,” yet it also means “I am depressed.” Director and writer Maysaa Almumin is followed everywhere by a dying large cockroach, which is her mental anguish. She connects more with this gigantic roach than anyone else around her until she realizes the impact that it is having on her life. I loved the puppet work and enjoyed seeing how this idea came to life. Can you be friends with an insect? This movie asks that question and I think the answer is yes, but roaches can be just as infuriating as people.
Manivelle: The Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow (2017): Directed by Fadi Baki Fdz, who wrote this with Omar Khouri and Lina Mounzer, this takes a realistic look at an unrealistic story, exploring the life of Manivelle, an automaton from Lebanon whose life seems to mirror the history of the country. His glory years were in the past, when life felt free, and today he is falling to pieces, his body failing him, reaching out in vain to people whose lives he ruined. Manivelle has been an actor, a soldier and now, he’s just a lost robot that claims to run a museum and read books, but he fails at all of that. I absolutely loved how this was shot. It’s perfect.
Yummo Spot (2024): Directed and written by Ashley Brandon, this is about a couple who moves to the woods and tries to start a family. Soon they learn that the Live, Laugh, Love lifestyle may be more difficult than they thought. This had a strange vibe but you may enjoy it more than me.
Two of Hearts (2024):Director and writer Mashie Alam places a boy (Anaiah Lebreton) and a girl (Basia Wyszynski) in a battle over some decisions, like eating a piece of pizza. Are they brother and sister? Are they a couple? Where did they get all of those great clothes? What’s happening? This is one of those times when the way something is filmed outdoes the basics of the script. Does the title refer to a Stacey Q song? Where is this house where they live? Can I visit? This movie has an amazing look and I want all of the answers to these questions and so many more. It’s good to have questions. It’s good to want to know more.
Skeeter (2024): Chris McInroy gets me every time. Actually, he’s made me physically sick a few of those times, no complaints. That’s because his movies are always fun, like this one, where someone has been raised by mosquitoes. If you’ve seen his movies Guts, We Joined a Cultand We Forgot About the Zombies, you know what you’re in for here. Thank you again, Chris, for shocking me and reminding me to never eat popcorn — or any food — during your movies.
Directed by Yusron Fuadi, this Indonesian horror-comedy is very Cabin In the Woods as it begins. Five archetypes — the jock, the nerd, the rich person, the pretty one and the popular kid — all head off to a cabin where they’re warned away but stay anyways. We’ve seen it all before — from 1978-1981 we saw it hundreds of times — but then we learn that these characters are the mercy of a screenwriter who is trying to figure it all out. The greatest horror that they face isn’t a slasher killer, but the fact that they’re unreality and the whims of an omniscient creator will only get them killed in the worst of ways.
Ani (Anggi Waluyo), Budi (Ibrahim Alhami), Iwan (Adhin Abdul Hakim), Amir (Winner Wijaya) and Wati (Anastasia Herzigova) have all gathered at an old family vacation cabin that has fallen into disrepair, as you’d expect from the genre, and there’s a murder the first night. From there, Amir has to guide them — Scream style — through the rules of horror. Yet when they change from idea to idea, that gets difficult.
As characters die and come back to life, cars appear and re-appear, and even the style of film changes, the only way for the protagonists to make it is if they realize they are a narrative and embrace their unreality. That’s about the least spoiler-free way I can describe what I just watched.
The filmmaker knows you’ve seen it all before, but you have never seen it like this. And don’t worry. If you’re a slasher fan and don’t really want to consider all this meta-textural mumbo jumbo, there are just enough bloody murders to keep you sated.
Mona (real-life bodybuilder Jacqueline “Jay” Fuchs, once listed as one of the “ten best female bodybuilders in the world”and who was Rosi in Mad Heidi) is fortysomething bodybuilder whose entire life is spent sculpting her body, which means not living or eating like other human beings as she creates a body that holds up to an unreachable ideal. Everyone she meets or knows is someone who does the same, as she’s pushed to try new drugs or avoid certain meals by her manager Kurt (Julian Sands). Her only companion is her cat.
As she gets into the last three months before a competition, she meets a man named Nic (Adam Misík) in the showers. Their quick encounter burrows its way into her subconscious and creates a break in her normally disciplined life.
So much of Body Odyssey feels like its trapped between a world that is trying to place human manifest destiny upon the fragile body and rigors of aging while the environments feel either alien naturescape or future bleak. There are many voices inside Mona, all battling for control, all as she struggles to fight back against time, against a body riddled by decades of steroid abuse, against denial of the very simple pleasure of eating a carb.
This film looks and feels like it’s own world is so much stronger for that. Director Grazia Tricarico has created a place that is at once our existence and then not, a world where someone can hear the voices in the water and then begins to doubt everything; where the only way to reclaim what you want is at times to destroy.
I’ve thought about this movie several times since I’ve seen it and keep reflecting back on the ways it shows liquid and sinew. We may not all want a body like Mona, but we have to consider that she has created something that belongs to her, even in a world where men feel no issue with telling her how they’d like to photograph her or how her image could be co-opted for marketing. They only know her for a fleeting moment; she has had to construct this form for many, many years.
Director and writer JT Mollner — working with producer and cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, who shot this in 35mm — has created a twisty tale that is “one day in the twisted love life of a serial killer” yet also one that unfolds in the narrative technique that Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction. Read that as time doesn’t matter and expectations are continually dashed.
Told in six out of order chapters and an epilogue, this is the cat and mouse survival battle between The Demon (Kyle Gallner) and The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), as well as the people pulled into their storyline, often at the cost of their lives, such as Genevieve (Barbara Hershey) and Frederick (Ed Begley Jr.).
An opening text explains that — just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — that we’re about to see a real story. Except just like that film, this sets us up for a true crime experience that isn’t. There’s even Jason Patric’s voice narrating a true crime story later in the film. The truth in every frame of this movie, every single moment in fact, is subjective and ever-changing.
It even knows when to slow down, as the leads discuss a sexual encounter before it happens. The Lady says, “Do you have any idea the kind of risks a woman like me takes every time she decides to have a little bit of fun?” She declares that women love casual sex just as much as men. The difference is, they don’t die more often when they have it.
While I’d love to tell you more, I want you to go into this as cold as I did. Just let me tell you, it combines giallo style lighting, as well as the forms embrace of kink and ambiguous motivations. Some may be put off by the fact that it narratively takes such wild jumps, almost feeling like a totally different film from moment to moment. Yet that’s the joy of this, a movie that is going to win over audiences if they give it just 15 minutes.
It’s as close to perfect cinema as I’ve seen this year with Fitzgerald making the kind of star turn that young actresses often only dream about.
I watched Strange Darling at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.
Directed and written by Ludvig Gür, Gudstjänst — which is being released in the U.S. as In the Name of God — is about Theodor (Linus Walhgren), a priest who is often the only person at his masses. The worshippers are dying off and his wife Felicia (Lisa Henni) wonders if they should move on. He’s happy that his mentor Jonas (Thomas Hanzon) has come to town. The problem is that it seems like he may be deranged. After all, he just killed a dove right in front of him and sprayed him with hot blood.
Yet when Felicia collapses and is soon hospitalized, dying from a mysterious ailment, Jonas offers to save her if Theodor follows him just as he did by going into the priesthood. Now, he must accept the true priesthood of God and kill sinners to save his wife’s life.
Jonas has already captured a rapist and all the younger man has to do is snuff out his sinful life. He does. His wife is healed. He becomes known as a faith healer and people come back to the church. His wife is with child. God has a plan.
Yet to make the prayers of his new followers come true, he must keep killing. Because the God who has listened to Theodor is the Old Testament one, the vengeful demander of sacrifice, the God that asked Abraham to murder his own son just to see how far he would go.
This is the very definition of a moral quandary. Isn’t murder a sin? Yet aren’t the people who Theodor is hunting and destroying evil incarnate? Isn’t all this murder making the world a better place? And if he can make miracles happen at the same time, isn’t that God’s will? Can you become addicted to creating magic happen in the lives of those who follow your teachings?
I watched In the Name of God at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.
Struggling artist Lola (Faye Tamasa, Ringworms) has nowhere to stay. She decides to visit her brother Louis (Burt Thakur), who she hasn’t seen for years, and he offers her a place to live. His roommate Cage (Robert Brettenaugh) seems strange but it isn’t for long, right? Well, that’s when the city goes into lockdown for reasons unknown. Is it another pandemic? War? And why are seeds showing up in the mail? Lola plants the seeds, which end up creating a psychedelic plant that warps her brother into another reality and makes Cage even more sinister.
Directed and written by Jake Macpherson, this is a unique feature that creates its own world for the characters, as mostly it’s Lola and Cage on screen with Louis lost somewhere in-between. The plants that grow appear otherworldly, beyond the strange happenings outside like helicopters constantly flying overhead and the TV turning to static. This feels like the worst trip to a drug buddy’s house that gets bad, you get stuck and there’s no way you can leave. It’s tense, gripping and a great first feature from this label and Macpherson.
The MVD release of Terror Firma has a director’s commentary, an extended director’s cut, a gallery of behind the scenes photos and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.
Directed by Josh Yunis and written by David Kirkeby, Sarah Kruchowski and Jason Romaine, Camp attempts to be a throwback to the summer teen sex comedies that I grew up with, yet with its head and heart fully aware of the changes that have happened since then.
The thing you may not realize is that this was made in 2016. So maybe it’s not as much a throwback as a frozen leftover.
Teens gather for their last summer at Camp Pearlstein, a place that even has its own twin rabbis, Jason and Randy (played by the Sklar Brothers), as well as traditional counselors like Hulk (Horatio Sanz) and Ruth (Sarah Kruchowski). Well, traditional is just a title, because they’re stranger than any of the kids they’re watching over.
The plot is what you expect: Jake (Brendan Meyer) is in love with Maya (Mychala Lee) but has to contend with Ezra (Ian Nelson), a peeping tom with a smart phone who just wants to see as many of the girls naked and in his bed as possible. And despite being prominent on the poster, Joey King is barely in this. She became a bigger star than most of the cast in the time this sat on the shelf.
I guess instead of trying to relive my memories of all the sleepover camps of my teen years — which were only experienced on the TV and through VHS — I should just go back and watch those movies. There are a few funny parts — the Sklar Brothers are pretty funny — but that strange subplot about the counselors dressing as Nazi specters is…weird. Like the movie forgets that it’s a comedy weird.
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