Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

  [DAVE MADE A MAZE has been previously reviewed briefly in DG’s coverage of the Chattanooga Film Festival and its coverage of the Boston Underground Film Festival]     Many filmmakers are intent on pursuing the feelings and experiences they had when they were children. Whether it’s in massive projects…

          If nothing else, KUSO can be seen as a unfiltered peek into Flying Lotus’s pure, diseased id. There is no good or bad here, no standard qualifier, no use for the usual critical metrics applied to reviewing movies. For better and worse, this is an…

When the era of the superhero film is judged fifteen years from now, Marvel and DC’s output will be looked upon as pretty good—if bland—summer blockbusters. The STAR WARS franchise will be perceived as welcome diversions, but never truly be equal to the stellar filmmaking of the first trilogy, particularly…

Shortly after the screening of A GHOST STORY, the new film by writer/director David Lowery opening wide this weekend, attended by myself and some of my friends, a conversation emerged about how the film appeared to viewers who’d seen the trailer.  One friend remarked that he didn’t want to see…

When a horror film works, it should be either scary enough to frighten you or silly enough to entertain you and in a perfect world, both. Sometimes a good horror movie does both. John R. Leonetti’s WISH UPON does neither. The film begins with a young mother placing something enclosed…

The summer box office is always crowded with big studio tentpoles, blockbusters designed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, so it’s rare to see a studio taking a chance on something very different. It’s tough not to admire distributor Broadgreen’s ambition for releasing WISH UPON, a small teen…

It’s hard to watch a SPIDER-MAN film without thinking of, and being reminded of, the five previous Spidey pictures. Opinions of those preceding iterations aside, there’s only so many ways to show Peter Parker shoot webs and swing around New York. Fans, including this author, had grown tired of the same…

  THE BEGUILED is a refreshingly old-fashioned film. Sofia Coppola’s stylishly erotic take on Thomas P. Culinan’s novel, A Painted Devil features lurid storytelling and period drama that make the film feel like the kind of movie that our parents’ generation would have talked about in hushed whispers. It’s appropriate…

  I don’t hang out with the same crowd I hung out with twenty years ago. Nothing wrong with those old friends, but people change. Some got married and had kids. Some got married and didn’t have kids. Some just had kids. Some got divorced. A few people died. I…

  In the mid to late ‘90s, there was a glut of films featuring wiseass criminal types, non-linear storytelling, and of course, an abundance of pop culture references and retro tunage. This era of Quentinsploitation came about due to the success of both RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION and while…

        Noomi Rapace (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) is the perfect choice to play the heroine in this action-packed sci-fi horror film. Her emotive face expresses both her relationship with son and ex-husband in the establishing scenes in the beginning of the film, and then outright…

  The Fifth Chicago Critics Film Festival ran from May 12-18, 2017 at the historic Music Box Theatre.   This was my third year attending the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Unlike previous years, I no longer live in that great city so I was only able to make it back…

Paranoia is powerful. At its grandest, it can bring down entire empires and nations and more intimately, it can also destroy friendships and families. It has also been a helpful seed in many a horror and sci-fi screenplays. Both Howard Hawks THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and John Carpenter’s reimagining…

“I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see is not so nice, and is certainly not God. I’d love to explore where she goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise cannot be what you…

        Title: CONTAMINATION Other Titles: ALIEN CONTAMINATION; ALIEN ON EARTH; TOXIC SPAWN Year: 1980 Director: Luigi Cozzi, a.k.a. Lewis Coates Cast: Ian McCulloch, Louise Marleau, Marino Mase, Sigfried Rauch   Nasties: Slo-mo exploding torsos Exploding rat Point-blank gunshot to the head Man-eating avocado cyclops Machine gun killing…

    FRANKENSTEIN CREATED BIKERS is a depraved, sick, and twisted film that takes the concept of good taste, drags it out back, and beats it savagely with fists. So in other words, it’s a great piece of grindhouse cinema, and is perfect for people who love their movies ridiculously…

    Back when the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon was in full swing and the movie was in the works, Lionsgate produced a feature film adaptation of Addicted. The novel by popular erotica author Zane concerned a happily married woman who harbors a dark secret: sex addiction. It was…

    Boston, sometime in the 1970s. A van barrels down the mean streets of Beantown, a dilapitated jalopy piloted by a pair of knuckleheaded, wiseacre junkies, jawboning about the night before, when Stevo (Sam Riley), a scrawny macho misfit with a needling whine of a voice, got a black…

  One of the best things about comic books is that they can be anything. They can be incredibly light and funny or dark and violent, characters die and are resurrected, and storylines change and reset. The possibilities are endless, and that’s why they are so fun to read. You…

    As is befitting what should be an outlaw region of filmmaking, there are very few rules when it comes to indie genre films. Really, there is only one rule that I expect a film like SLASHER.COM to follow: Do not be boring. That’s it. It’s very simple. I…

On the surface DEVIL IN THE DARK seems like it is going to be a fairly typical story. Estranged brothers go on a weekend camping and hunting excursion only to find themselves stalked by an unseen force that appears to be hostile in nature. Yet, as the story unfolds you find…

He walks down the street alone at night, nervously looking an address he can’t seem to find. A car pulls up alongside him, idling, its driver making no indication of what they want. There’s a twist — the street, with its leafy trees and well-kept yards, is in the middle…

        Last month at the Sundance Film Festival, Macon Blair’s directorial debut I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama, the festival’s top honor. It was a surprise for many but not to those who have followed Blair’s…

This review contains spoilers for YETI: A LOVE STORY.   The current state of independent filmmaking is a strange and wondrous place. As digital cameras, editing software, and sound equipment have become higher in quality and cheaper to own, nearly anyone with a dream of making a film can make…