Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

BUFFALO BOYS is everything I want out of the movies: it’s thrilling, it’s funny, it’s exciting, romantic, and intense. This Indonesian riff on Western tropes seamlessly combines martial arts cinema with the works of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood yet is wholly original in its execution. This thing…

STRANGER THINGS, SUPER DARK TIMES, STEPHEN KING’S IT: the new wave of ‘80sploitation has certainly fostered some gems. These films rarely focus on capturing the youthful feelings of teenagers, but rather attempt to capture the feel of the movies that filmgoers of a certain age grew up on. SUMMER OF ’84 settles…

  In 1994, independent comic book creator Mike Diana became the first person in the United States convicted of obscenity, forbidden to even practice drawing in his own home. While his case was followed and heavily noted by both comic book fans and first amendment advocates at the time, the…

It’s been over twenty years since the original TALES FROM THE HOOD, the socially conscious anthology horror film from minds of Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott. The original film took on themes of police brutality, child and spousal abuse, and simply being black in America through devilishly clever E.C. Comics…

  I’ll be the first to admit it, but I slept on UNFRIENDED, a.k.a. CYBERNATURAL, when it released into theaters in 2014. I think it was the glut of less than stellar post-2000s teen horror films that really exhausted me and I just didn’t have it in me to watch…

It’s notable that, more than in any other genre, the horror anthology works. These short bursts of terror have been creeping audiences out for decades, thriving in the ‘70s with the Amicus films and continuing throughout the ‘80s and 90’s, when filmmakers who grew up with E.C. Comics gave audiences…

  THE CAPTAIN (Germany, dir. Robert Schwentke) Willi Herold (Max Hubacher) is on the run, a deserter from the German army in the final days of WWII. He happens upon an abandoned car that has a captain’s uniform, and puts it on as a goof when he’s found by a…

  In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I know some of the folks who worked on GAGS both in front of and behind the camera. I had been looking forward to it for some time, ever since the initial Gags “sightings” in Green Bay, WI were…

  Exploitation can be righteous. For all the talk of shoddy production values, stiff acting, lurid content and narrative wonkiness that that term can dredge up, the best exploitation films are often also possessed with a seething, incendiary rage borne from being an outsider to the established Hollywood order. When…

  Joel Potrykus grabbed the attention of some horror fans with his second feature BUZZARD, in which the protagonist retrofits a Nintendo Power Glove with blades to mimic the iconic weapon of Freddy Krueger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. BUZZARD is hardly a slasher, although the glove does get…

  Creating a medieval period piece with a limited budget is tough. You can’t just go to a local thrift shop for clothing, you can’t just use normal locations, and don’t even get me started on the historical accuracy of props and accents. It’s no wonder that most microbudget filmmakers…

  Let’s just get this out of the way up front: CABIN BOY is a psychotronic comedy classic, but it’s not surprising that Chris Elliott’s utterly bizarre starring vehicle failed to launch him to A-list leading man status. Ever since his work on Late Night With David Letterman in the 80s,…

  If nothing else, I have to give credit to LUCIFERINA for managing to find a way to show an exorcism onscreen that I can not recall ever seeing before. That said, too much of the rest of the film is made up of genre bits and pieces that I…

  What can you say about a horror movie that takes bits and pieces from roughly a thousand other well-known genre films, but does not stretch for any original ideas or scares if it does a competent job of putting together a straight-forward narrative of those borrowed ideas? It is…

There’s an ocean’s worth of distance between what makes an “independent film” versus what makes an “indie film,” and it’s not just one is a shortened term for the other. Independent films are truly that — films made away from the aegis of Hollywood, made by scrappy upstarts out in…

Full Moon has been cranking out low-budget horror (and sci-fi, and softcore, and sci-fi softcore, and etc. etc.) for 30 years now, and one of their most enduringly popular properties is the PUPPET MASTER franchise. Launched with its first entry in 1989, the series has been going pretty consistently for…

    In the acknowledgement page of THE 1990S TEEN HORROR CYCLE: FINAL GIRLS AND A NEW HOLLYWOOD FORMULA, Alexandra West mentions the way that SCREAM affected her love of horror, how watching Ghostface slash his way through the teens of Woodsboro while on his mission to kill Sidney Prescott…

There’s a certain breed of bad movie that has a look that tells you right off the bat that what you are about to watch is going to be a bad movie. You know the look. It’s a high digital gloss look, all blue tint gels that give  indoor scenes…

The Chicago-based Cinepocalypse Film Festival has hit its stride this year, hosting a great number of world and midwest premieres rivaling those of Fantasia or Fantastic Fest.  In addition to the premieres, however, the festival has also been the home of several revival screenings, featuring rare theatrical showings of such…

  One of the greatest pleasures of any film festival is the discovery of a film that comes seemingly completely out of nowhere and blows your mind. The excitement generated by such a find is directly proportional to how rare they are; this is compounded by the ready availability of…

  It is hard to come up with anything new to do in the “rogue cop driven to take down a master criminal” genre. The best you can hope for are good action scenes and well-drawn characters to make the film stand out. THE BRINK delivers on the action front…

  The bodies bounce and pogo in a wave, a tumult of flesh giving in to drug-induced sonic abandon. Guitars squeal while a snarling singer barks righteous punk fury into a microphone. A mosh pit careens around, a frenzied whirlwind of action, undulating to the rawness of the music. An…

Being a lover of films and, specifically, documentaries about films, I was excited for WOLFMAN’S GOT NARDS but had my reservations as sometimes you get fan made fluff pieces that feel like a pat on the back more than a thoughtful film. Thankfully, this time, that was not the case.  …

  I might be mistaken here, but I’m fairly certain HEAVY TRIP (it has also played under the far more awesome title A BAND CALLED IMPALED REKTUM) is the cutest film about a “Symphonic, Post-Apocalyptic, Reindeer-Grinding, Christ-Abusing, Extreme War, Pagan Fennoscandian,” grave robbing black metal band I’ve ever seen. Yes,…