Shorts Round Up of the Week – Festival Bound

This week we have a trio of shorts premiering at film festivals, one of which stars Brianna Hildebrand, while another explores a common turning point in a woman’s life. There’s also a review for a nail biting horror film, and I re-visit one of my favorite short films of all time starring Eric Bogosian.

If you’d like to submit your short film for review consideration, submissions are always opened to filmmakers and producers.  

Continue reading

Scary Stories (2019)

“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout…”

If you’re looking for a wonderful companion piece to the upcoming feature film adaptation of the infamous book trilogy “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” Cody Meirick’s documentary “Scary Stories” is a great refresher course for fans. It’s also a wonderful look at how history repeats itself, with the elementary school touted horror anthology nearly suffering the same amount of censorship and hysterical panic that EC Comics endured decades before its release. It’s a fascinating but nasty bit of history repeating itself, but history also learning from itself, as well.

Continue reading

At the Drive-In (2017)

One of the best movies about the American Drive-In that I’ve possibly ever seen, “At the Drive-In,” is a wonderful documentary directed by Alexander Monelli that embraces and celebrates everything that’s so enchanting about the drive-in. It’s also a testament to the love and commitment that movie buffs are capable of, even in the face of financial dire straits and a changing climate of pop culture. Drive-Ins have become something of a memory of American pop culture and in the new generation is a community that has struggled to stay alive. One of the few standing is the Mahoning Drive-In in Pennsylvania.

Continue reading

Shorts Round Up of the Week – 4/2/19

For this week’s edition of “Shorts Round Up of the Week” we view the apocalypse through two lenses, dissect nature through the killer whale, and look at the cycle of life through animation.

If you’d like to submit your short film for review consideration, submissions are always opened to filmmakers and producers.  

Continue reading

Elephants (2018)

There’s no better statement on romance than the idea that sometimes the ones that we love the most aren’t always the best thing for us. With “Elephants” director-writer Alexander Hanno constructs a truly good romance dramedy based around how nostalgia can often leave us stagnant and stuck in one place. “Elephants” is a very sad movie about two people so in love that they automatically hurt each other’s prospects at success in life, but also about getting stuck in remembering the past, and not accepting that we have to move forward and look ahead.

Continue reading

¿Quieres Que Hoy Te Bese? (Do You Want Me to Kiss You This Time?) (2018) [Final Girls Berlin Film Festival]

“Growing Pains” Shorts Block

Directors Iker Arce and Miriam Ortega Dominguez’s “¿Quieres Que Hoy Te Bese?” is a nearly half hour short film that resonated deeply with me when it was all over. What we assume is a short horror drama about a teenage girl coming in to adulthood in the most sinister fashion, we soon discover is a very brilliantly constructed, disturbing non-linear horror tale.

Continue reading