The Slamdance Film Festival runs Digitally and In-Person from January 19th to January 28th.
Short, sweet and to the point, Abby Falvo‘s silent horror comedy is a slick and funny tale about what happens when you mess around and find out. Originally filmed in a “One Take Super 8” event as part of the 2022 WNDX Festival of Moving Image in Winnipeg, the premise for “*666” is deceptively simple. It’s the tale of two women using a pentagram to contact a demon.
Now Available from Synapse Films.
Behind every good movie series there are the fans that help fuel it and Tom Sullivan is probably one of the biggest and best of them all. One of the biggest indie horror success stories is Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” and how it rose from low budget feature to horror masterpiece. It wasn’t an overnight success but one that was helped by the fervent love and passion by its creators Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Tom Sullivan. Sullivan was one of the FX artists that helped Sam Raimi engineer “Within the Woods” in to “The Evil Dead” and worked very hard on “The Evil Dead.”
Director Luis Grane’s short experimental animated film is a genuinely unnerving albeit creative narrative that revels in its randomness. As with most of these kinds of shorts, “Nowhere Stream” is an existentialist computer animated nightmare that ponders on life on the internet as opposed to life in reality.
Playing at the LA&M Film Fetish Forum Saturday, January 20th at 7pm; it will be Co-Presented by Cinematic Void.
Director Yann Gonzalez’s “Knife+Heart” is a movie that’s too silly to be taken as a giallo, and too serious to be taken as a dark comedy. It’s constantly shifting in tones and storylines which makes its narrative frame work feel so disorienting and ultimately kind of unbearable. Truth be told I slept through a quarter of “Knife+Heart” because it has so much trouble maintaining its multiple plot threads that it just rambled for long periods of time. Any kind of momentum or tension that picks up during “Knife+Heart” feels accidental as director Gonzalez can never quite decide on what kind of story he’s trying to tell.
Now Streaming Exclusively on The Peacock. “Ted” The Movie is Now Available.
It’s probably not much of a surprise to discover that Seth McFarlane’s talents work much more when applied to serialized television than with feature length films. While “Ted” has gradually evolved in to a favorite of mine, and “Ted 2” is—well—good enough to pass the time, Seth McFarlane’s transplanting of his concept to the small screen is very good. Often times it’s great. This is also stunning considering Seth McFarlane’s earlier humor was often so dark and nasty. “Ted” actually manages to bring a lot of what we love about the humor from “American Dad” and “Family Guy” but also injects some actual heart and substance to McFarlane’s bizarre formula.
Exclusively in theaters January 19th.
It’s the classic tale of humanity. When you dig deep and throw away all semblance of civility, we’re all savages that will do anything to survive. “I.S.S.” is a mean but thought provoking science fiction thriller that teeters on the edge of horror quite often. It’s that classic post apocalyptic tale about man kind resorting to desperate measures to stay alive; by the end of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film, the whole setting of science and technology are merely props meant to spread a cloak of the nastiness that humans are capable of. “I.S.S.” is one in a trend of post apocalyptic movies that don’t really fetishize the idea of the end of the world, but depict it as a waking nightmare.
Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Tubi TV.
Director Andrew Walsh’s microbudget indie film thrives on being a mumblecore character journey that is unabashedly aimless with its narrative. It’s not so much a linear narrative so much as it is a series of encounters a small journey our character Eleanor experiences. She’s in search of stability and has a hard time adjusting in a city where she comes across nothing but oddballs and unusual characters. Eleanor is an admitted victim of her own being as she spends so much time self sabotaging her own life, and can never figure it out.