Meat Friend, a short that director and co-writer (with Steve Johanson) Izzy Lee made, is one of the best short films I’ve seen, so I was excited about this feature.

Mia (Fayna Sanchez) has lost her husband and her baby, which has led to her being jailed in her home, as she lives in a state where miscarriage is murder. Under house arrest, she moves in with her new boyfriend, Marc (Vincent Stalba), and tries to get through things with her sanity intact.

But ah, that Bava lighting clues us in that this is in no way paradise. And Marc isn’t a dream partner, either.

So what happened with her husband Adam (Mason Conrad), who was found in their animal clinic with a syringe in his neck, a death that caused her to lose the baby and be arrested for his murder, until it was learned that Adam had killed himself? Marc soon loses it over her memories of Adam, demanding she destroy everything with a memory of him attached and then drugging her despite her being on probation. To make things worse, her probation officer (Lee Boxleitner) continually calls her a murderer, and social media personality Lexi ShokToks (Laura Dromerick) is stalking her, hoping to push her into creating viral content.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where this film no longer feels entirely horror. Yes, the ghosts are from the fantastic, but the lack of body autonomy for women isn’t just speculative fiction. This adds a darkness to this film that haunts every frame.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

In 1998, the Disney Channel Original Movie Halloweentown was filmed in St. Helens, Oregon. Since then, it has seen 50,000 visitors every October, even 25 years later. Yet, just like the town in the series of Disney films—Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge, Halloweentown High and Return to Halloweentown—the locals believe that there are real hauntings. And beyond that, like any small town, there’s plenty of gossip to listen to.

Directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, this film feels like a real-life Waiting for Guffman. A zombie dance is choreographed by a girl who had to drop out of dance and wants to reconnect with her father. A newcomer to the town has bought a favorite restaurant, the Klondike Tavern, and his social media mistake causes his entire staff to mutiny. A woman claims to the town council that she is being attacked in her dreams and that the town is becoming possessed by demons. A team of paranormal investigators is also investigating the hauntings they claim are real.

This film never makes fun of its subjects, instead allowing them to tell their stories. I absolutely loved this and have been raving about it to everyone I can, as it’s a perfect non-spooky way to get yourself ready for the Halloween season. Here’s hoping it finds a streaming home soon so more people can enjoy this fun hangout in a town that has embraced its history as a spooky location.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Directed and written by Richard Peter Hunter, this is , quite simply, a movie about people being bad. Six people give in to their impulses; this can happen no matter your station in life, whether you’re an ex-con trying to get back to a normal life outside of jail or a rich lawyer in a dead marriage.

Shot on digital video, this feels like life being captured, even if the way the screen fades to black instead of a resolution may frustrate some. My issue with it was that the BDSM was used as an indicator of weirdness or sin; yes, it’s someone cheating on their life and at odds with what they preach, but the desires of this lifestyle aren’t inherently wrong. This came off as a vanilla judgement.

It’s exclusively men behaving badly here, from a dry cleaner who misreads signals and touches a co-worker to a minister obsessed with dead mice, a stray cat and pornography. Some of these evil deeds may just be mistakes. Others are sins. I wonder if we’re complicit for judging between them.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

I am obsessed with the films of Johannes Grenzfurthner (Razzennest, Masking Threshold), and I was somewhat concerned, as you know how when your favorite band has a new album, you worry if this is the one where they lose it or worse, sell out? That’s how I felt about this. Luckily, my concerns could be laid to rest. This has all the wildness that I expect from his films and then some. While I’d love to see him selected to direct a remake of RoboCop, I don’t think Hollywood is calling anytime soon after this.

That’s a good thing.

Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries!) is an American researcher who is going through a farmhouse in search of Nazi documents. But that’s the least of the strangeness that he uncovers, as Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), the man who owns the property, takes him through the moldering home of his grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (archival footage by Otto Zucker, Grenzfurthner’s real grandfather), a man who disappeared and left no trace.

The team finds a metal pipe and decides to explore it until leader and Polish academic historian Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen) has a mental breakdown from being near whatever is inside it, accidentally killing another member, Cornelia Dunzinger (Jasmin Hagendorfer). Everything is shut down, but Holbrook is now beyond intrigued; what he finds won’t just drive him insane; it will transform his body into some kind of rot. We learn that he and Krystyna were lovers, that he went AWOL when he got PTSD from serving in Kuwait and that he’s been a mercenary in Bosnia. Now, he will experience something perhaps no other human has or should.

I had the sheer joy of a long series of conversations with the creator of this art (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are posted here), during which he discussed the origins of this film in depth.

“The idea for Solvent came from this moment when I stepped into my grandfather’s old farmhouse after not having been there for ten years. There had been a rift in our family—my mother and her sister didn’t speak for a decade, partly due to inheritance disputes and family drama. When my aunt passed away, her daughter came back to Austria for the first time in twenty years, and we went to see what she inherited. It felt a lot like the story of Solvent.

When I stepped into that house, I could feel the mold attacking my lungs—it was horrendous. The smell was unbearable, and everything was decaying. But I spent some of my best childhood days there, so walking into that house again and seeing what my aunt had or hadn’t done with it hit me hard. I saw it through this nostalgic lens—how it used to look in my childhood, compared to how it was now, in ruins. Something in my brain shifted, and I thought, I need to do something with this. It felt like the perfect setting for a horror story.

I’ve always been fascinated by Austrian history, and the movie was born out of a need to confront Austria’s historical baggage—not in a traditional or sanitized way. The farmhouse, tied to my family’s history, became a metaphor for exploring guilt, complicity, and how the past still seeps into the present. Austria has this unique way of dealing with its Nazi past. When I was in school in the 1980s, we didn’t learn a lot about the Nazi era. The German school curriculum, by contrast, was much more proactive about it. But in Austria, it was as if the country didn’t exist between 1938 and 1945. Austrians were very eager to forget, despite the fact that most of the concentration camps were run by Austrians.

Austria was never good at confronting the past, and I saw this gap in my conversations with friends, their parents, and grandparents. It was as if Austria had this hole in its soul, this thing that no one wanted to talk about. The more time passes, the more people forget. And that’s the core of the film—there’s something in the ground in Austria that never goes away, something that still affects us. It doesn’t matter if you talk about it or not—it will catch up with you. It’s very Freudian, embedded into everything, this festering wound that never heals.”

I usually do my best to avoid found-footage films, as the shaky camera and rules of the form feel nauseating and constrictive. That said, Grenzfurthner’s films are so technically proficient and just plain unsettling, moving and wonderous that I get over myself very quickly. This is yet another triumph for him, a film that begs to be experienced.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

This movie is so perfect for me. Just imagine, a more well-thought-out Midsommar that has actually seen The Wicker Man — and on drugs, mind you — but also knows about collecting records, the joy of finding lost media and understands the allure of strangeness like the Arica, Source Family/Father Yod/Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Process Church and how today’s youth only gets the cool veneer of these lost groups — well, The Process is now kinda sorta Best Friends Animal Shelter — and not the at-times harsh reality. It’s easy to love black metal for its aura of kvlt, yet I doubt you’d participate in the burning of a stave church.

Made for the price of a used car, this movie finds Pater Noster and his band/church lying low after recording several albums in the distant past, one found by Max (Adara Starr), a record store employee that probably only is there to get the discount and build up her own collection of albums. Store owner Sam (Shaley Renew), co-worker Abby (Sanethia Dresch), Gretchen (Shelby Lois Guinn), and Jay Sin (Josh Outzen) get obsessed with the songs. When an invitation to visit the actual Pater Noster compound comes to Max, they all decide to go. Armed with info from cult podcaster Dennis Waverly (Tim Cappello, not playing a sax), they think this is going to be a laugh.

Maybe they haven’t watched the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis or I Drink Your Blood.

Meeting Pater Noster (Mike Amason) may be the last thing they do.

Even crazier is how perfect the music is for this film, featuring The Restoration, Brandy & the Butcher, Turbo Gatto, EZ Shakes, Stagbriar, Ass/Bastard, In/Humanity, Transonics, Hot Lava Monster, Marshall Brown and Larb as well as Tim Cappello playing that sax.

Here’s how the movie was sold on Indiegogo: “The movies we make are punk rock demo tapes. We operate outside of Hollywood and traditional distribution routes. We make movies for people looking for something different, not defined by focus groups and corporate interests. You won’t find this movie in a Walmart because it doesn’t belong in a Walmart.”

That couldn’t be more true. This feels truer to the insane spirit of drive-in movies that you wonder, “Who is this for, other than me?” than any movie I’ve seen in years. Yet it feels real, lived in, authentic. This is, quite literally, the actual shit. A movie where you feel for the victims just as much as for the victimizers, a place where you think that you too could be trapped, because as much as I love the cults of the 70s, I know I would never survive.

A near-perfect film. Find it and live in it now.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Detective Mitchell Morse (Albert Jones) seems to have been on this case forever, but it doesn’t seem like that. He may really have been.

Directed and written by Neal Dhand, this begins with a body and a foot washing up on a beach in Jacksonville. The foot doesn’t belong to that body. And there just might be a serial killer on the loose. Morse has an unraveling relationship with his wife Emily (Keesha Sharp) and doesn’t really trust his younger partner, Dreyfus (Tom Lipinski). These are all the things that you expect from a neo-noir detective story, but this is setting up for a rug pull near the end.

With incredible photography by Charles Ackley Anderson, I wanted to love this more than I did. Dhand is making his first film and went all out, which you have to commend. I’m not sure how well it all came together, however, as it wasn’t until the last few moments reveal that what I saw as the flaws in the film were explained. The acting is good, the idea is right, but something just didn’t add up for me. That said, your mileage will always vary, and I could see others loving this.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Bob Morgan — someone I never knew before watching this — is a second-generation Kentucky artist and LGBTQ activist who learned art from his mom and “honed his creative identity under the influence of his mentor and gay dad Henry Faulkner and his gay mom Sweet Evening Breeze.” He may have started as a drag performer, but he now feels that he is telling his story and the tales of others through his photos and mixed media artwork.

I love this line about the movie: “Bob’s just going to tell some stories–about art and garbage, sex and drugs, subversion, AIDS grief, queer joy, and being an outsider turned community icon.”

Directed by Grayson Tyler Johnson and Tom Marksbury, this shows why Bob not only collects all the things he finds, but also the stories. I used to feel like when we escaped the Reagan 80s that life was going to get better and the negativity about gay people or any marginalized people just seems like it won’t die, huh? Life would be gray without all of thee colors and yet, here we are. I’d rather just hear Bob go on and on.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

While many may know him as the lead on the CW series Roswell, New Mexico, Michael Vlamis has always been shooting and writing his own films. This full-length debut, which he also stars in and co-wrote, is something else—something that comes from real pain. As he told Deadline, “I’m interested in exploring the guilt and grief that haunted me following a tragic accident I experienced a few years back. If you don’t try to face your feelings, they’ll eventually consume you.”

Tessa (Aurora Perrineau) and James (Vlamis) came together over the crossword. They challenged each other with it. They raced to see who could do it first. Even their wedding proposal was inside one. They had a daughter, Lily, who died in a drowning accident, and since then, their lives have changed. She’s become a famous writer of children’s books, starting with Lily Learns. He’s retreated into…mostly grief. She suggests he get back to the crossword as part of his therapy.

The clues for each day seem way too close to his life. Every coincidence can’t be one. A boorish houseguest playing hide-and-seek gives way to James having an emotional outburst. He starts to believe that maybe Tessa now has everything she wants. Could she have watched their daughter die? Or was it because he was more concerned with his crossword and not watching her in the pool?

Every frame of this drips with grief and hard work. Harvey Guillén from What We Do In the Shadows shines in a small role as a magazine interviewer who has no warning that he’s stepped into a house filled with conflict. Both leads shine and play off each other so well. And yet while the ambiguous ending may frustrate some, I’m not sure it could end any other way.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.