Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

PHOBE: THE XENOPHOBIC EXPERIMENTS looks like the sort of oddity you would run across on a cable access channel back in the early ’90s. That is because it is that oddity. Shot in the early ’90s in and around the Niagara, Ontario area with an amateur cast that often doubled…

What an excellent way to wrap up PHANTASM WEEK! PHANTASM RAVAGER, the fifth and final chapter in the PHANTASM saga had its world premiere at FANTASTIC FEST in Austin, Texas last night. The cast and crew of the film were in the audience for the screening and Assistant Editor Mike…

EYES OF MY MOTHER is a creepy little horror flick from director Nicolas Pesce. The film tells the story of a young Portuguese girl living on a secluded farm in what appears to be the American Midwest who is so afraid of being alone that she’ll do just about anything…

SALT AND FIRE (France/Bolivia/USA/Germany/Mexico, 2016)   I am sure there will be those who disagree with me, but I think the majority of Werner Herzog’s fans and admirers will admit that, overall, his documentaries are superior to his narrative films. But what I always have and always will enjoy about…

  My second day here started easily enough, pretty much rolling out of bed, grabbing a shower and then heading to The Highball around 10 for coffee and a breakfast taco. I banged out the previous days roundup although its quickly becoming apparent that writing real estate is hard to…

THE INVISIBLE GUEST (Spain, 2016)   In the opening scene of THE INVISIBLE GUEST, Adrián Doria, a successful technology entrepreneur, meets Virginia Goodman (Ana Wagener), a cold-blooded trial attorney who has never lost a case. It takes only a couple of minutes for it to be established that Adrián has…

It’s sad to think the first half of Austin, Texas’s Fantastic Fest has already nearly come and gone, and here have been a few highlights for me: THE RED TURTLE (dir. Michael Dudok de Wit) Here is an animation collaboration with some of the finest names in the industry (Studio Ghibli,…

PHANTASM RAVAGER had its world premiere only hours ago at 2016’s FANTASTIC FEST and Phanboys MATT WEDGE and MIKE VANDERBILT simply couldn’t get to bed before they discussed the fifth and final entry in Don Coscarelli’s sci-fi horror series.   MATT WEDGE: It is hard for me to write a…

BELIEF: THE POSESSION OF JANET MOSES (New Zealand, 2015)   I always have a tough time with documentaries that rely too heavily on staged recreations of events. My thought process is usually, “if staged footage takes up more than half your films, why don’t you just craft a narrative film…

In honor of the release of PHANTASM RAVAGER those lovable scamps from the JURASSIC GANG run afoul of something that isn’t quite an asteroid! Created and written by Mac Bell, additional gags and artwork by Andy Vanderbilt.

24×36: A MOVIE ABOUT MOVIE POSTERS (USA, dir. Kevin Burke) The rise of collectible screen prints and movie posters over the last decade or so has happened in conjunction with the growth of the Alamo Drafthouse brand–and, by extension, Fantastic Fest–so it makes perfect sense that a film about the…

SAFE NEIGHBORHOOD—which had its world premiere at this year’s FANTASTIC FEST—is a twisted holiday horror tale with a pitch black sense of humor. Even as someone who feels spoilers are inconsequential (if spoilers ruined a movie, nobody would own EMPIRE STRIKES BACK)It’s almost impossible to talk about what makes the…

A.D. Calvo’s SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL played earlier this week at FANTASTIC FEST. The ghost story—set in the late ’70’s—has a very Carter-era aesthetic with it’s perfect costuming and set design. SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL feels like something that Jess Franco or Jean Rollin would have produced around that time….

DON’T KILL IT (United States, 2016)   Dolph Lundgren stars in silly movies. Even back in the days when he was appearing as a heavy in studio movies and starring as the miscast hero in movies for Cannon Films, the end result was usually something so tonally bizarre, it could…

TERRY TEO (New Zealand, 2016)   Writer/director Gerard Johnstone made waves in 2014 with HOUSEBOUND, a horror-comedy that was a blast of pure entertainment. I was so happy with that film, it made my “Favorites” list for that year. So when I spotted his name as the writer/director of TERRY…

A DARK SONG (Ireland/UK, 2016)   The debut feature by writer/director Liam Gavin, A DARK SONG is a deceptively simple tale of the damage that grief can do to the psyche. It is also profoundly difficult to watch at times and creepy as all get out once you get by…

THE VOID played the midnight slot of the opening night of this year’s FANTASTIC FEST and there is really no better place to screen this movie. A Carpenteresue take on Lovecraftian mythos chock full of gooey, gory special effects, EMPIRE PICTURES would be jealous of THE VOID circa 1986. The…

    ARRIVAL (USA, dir. Denis Villeneuve) When twelve alien ships suddenly appear all over the globe, linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is enlisted by the government to attempt to communicate with the creatures that landed in the midwest. Joined by physicist Dr. Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Banks manages…

Director A.D. Calvo’s SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL is a very ‘70s, very lurid, very European romance that brings to mind the works of Jess Franco. The film has an impressively tight 76 minute run time, and while the scares are few and far between, the leads (Quinn Shephard and Erin…

  The last thing you expect when you go into a new Chan-wook Park film is to be highly entertained. I do not say that as a slight to one of the finest directors currently working in world cinema, merely that his particular brand of carefully constructed, shot, and edited…

  This has been a long time coming. It seems as long as I’ve had easy access to the internet I’ve been reading about FantasticFest. A cinematic paradise where you can see days worth of crazy genre fare and then immediately walk into the lobby afterwards and talk to the…

    WHAT KIND OF RECURRING DREAMS OR NIGHTMARES DO YOU HAVE?   Original art by Andy Vanderbilt!   Much has been said this week about PHANTASM, in particular the dream logic of the films. Events occur without rhyme or reason — sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s silly, and in the case…

  Music is one of the key components to make a movie into something more than just a visual experience. What would the STAR WARS series be without the iconic work of John Williams? Would HALLOWEEN still be as memorable without the unsettling theme song that you will no doubt…

Chances are, even if viewers haven’t seen Akira Kurosawa’s classic SEVEN SAMURAI, they have seen one of its many variations that have echoed down through the ages. Despite being made over 60 years ago, Kurosawa’s film has become ingrained in the cinematic landscape— not just through its own great filmmaking…