It’s always good to see an indie success story and Bryce McGuire’s is the latest. After delivering the pretty creepy short “Night Swim” in 2014, McGuire was able to develop it in to a feature film and, ironically, mid-way through it I found myself thinking “This would work better as a short.” I wasn’t trying for sarcasm, it’s just that “Night Swim” presents only a seed of a potentially scary horror film that never actually feels fully fleshed out or extensively realized. Its penchant for ambiguity is its big downfall as it’s a victim to so many of the typical haunted house tropes, banal fake outs, and clumsy ghost scares, without ever trying to re-invent the wheel.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Suitable Flesh (2023)
“Suitable Flesh” feels like a movie displaced from the nineties. It feels like a film that would have originally starred Linda Blair and Julie Strain in the duel roles we see in Joe Lynch’s newest horror film. In many ways that’s both a pro and a con as “Suitable Flesh” is completely out of what director Joe Lynch typically delivers. While “Suitable Flesh” pegs itself more as Lovecraftian body horror, the movie leans very heavily more on erotic camp revolving around a lot of body switching and hyper sexual violence. While the movie will definitely have its fans, at the end of the day “Suitable Flesh” and I just didn’t click with it.
BAD MOVIE MONDAY: DEVIL’S EXPRESS (1976)
My first review of the year is for, appropriately enough, the very first movie that I saw in 2024. New Year’s Day happened to be on a Monday and that’s obviously when BAD MOVIE MONDAY is held. So me and my friends started the year off right. DEVIL’S EXPRESS is a 1976 Horror/Kung Fu/Blaxploitation movie starring the majestically named Warhawk Tanzania, along with Larry Fleischman, Wilfredo Roldan. Stephen DeFazio, Elsie Roman, Moses Lyllia, and Brother Theodore! It was directed by Barry Rosen, and written by Rosen, Nikki Patton, and Pascual Vaquer.
A Thousand and One (2023)
In as much as it is a film about a mother and her son, “A Thousand and One” is also a movie about the rising tide of gentrification in New York City. This adds a layer of absolute tension between Inez and her son Terry because as they’ve hidden out for years within their city, now it’s grown and pushed them out so much that they’ve officially run out of places to set up their lives in. So much of the movies around New York in the modern age have been about the looming specter of gentrification and we witness it in real time, the idea of the old New York becomes more and more just a relic of a bygone era.
OSS 117 Box Set from Music Box Films (2023)
The OSS 117 films have been around for a very long time. Originally a sort of French response to James Bond and his 007, OSS 117 films seemed to disappear for a while and then, in 2006, Jean Dujardin stepped in the suit and made it his own. His films as the famed spy started with OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006), followed by OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009), and OSS 117: From Africa with Love (2021). The box set released by Music Box Films recently contains the first two films only, something that was a bit of a letdown. However, it is a solid release of these films.
The Flying Swordsman (2022) [aka The Hidden Fox]
Following the death of two warriors, a map goes missing. When the map is back, the assassins come back with a plot to get the map, leading to the appearance of a swordsman with incredible skills.
Dress Code (2022)
I had a lot of respect for Joseph Pupello’s desire to deliver a gangster picture that’s less about gangsters and more about our personal lives. It’s rough around the edges, and the screenplay by Peter Panagos isn’t entirely cohesive, but they do manage to concoct an interesting storyline for a central character who is being pulled in all kinds of obligations. The one big goal in his a life involving mobsters, and assassinations, and a pregnant wife is to live as the person he really wants to be, and that makes his struggle pretty turbulent.