Don’t Kill It (2016)

A demon has taken over the town of Chickory Creek, Mississippi.  As things escalate quickly an FBI agent and a demon hunter arrive in town and are forced to cooperate to save the locals.  As the demon jumps from body to body, they must find a way to stop this demon and not become one with it at the same time.

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Detour (2016) [FrightFest Glasgow 2017]

As his mother lays in a coma, possibly brain dead following a car accident for which he holds his stepfather responsible, Harper drunkenly meets and subsequently hires a shady man to take care of things and avenge his mother.  As he questions his decision the film goes into two paths at once, creating a layered story that must be followed until the end to be fully understood.

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Getting Schooled (2017)

In 1983, a group of stereotypical teens are in detention on the weekend with a wheelchair-bound teacher.  Soon, they start getting picked-off one by one in varying levels of violence and blood.

The writing team of Chuck Norfolk, Steven Scott Norfolk, and Tim Norfolk have written a film that wants to be an 80s movie and gets some of the true 80s feelings and vibes, but they also use a lot of more current way for characters to act.  Directed by Chuck Norfolk, the film feels like what a full-grown filmmaker thinks the general public wants to see about the 80s.  It’s less John Hughes homage and more caricature of the 80s through a 2010s teen’s eyes.  The film has some things that work, but the attempt at rendering the 80s feels force and like something without much thought put into it.  The film uses a lot of clichés from other films without thinking if they fit in here, thinking if it looks like what we think the 80s were like, it will work.  However, the 80s represented here do not feel right; they don’t feel like the 80s of many other films, or even the 80s this reviewer remembers.  The characters in this setting feel mostly like caricatures with one feeling a bit less like so, but looking more like she would belong in this decade or the 2000s.

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The Werewolf Reborn! (1998)

It’s another episode of “Filmonsters!” and while I appreciate the inherent idea behind Full Moon composing hour long movies with broadly written monsters that vaguely resembled Universal’s staples, this second movie isn’t good. In fact it’s almost the exact same movie as “Frankenstein Reborn!” To evoke emotions in the vein of RL Stine’s “Goosebumps” the producers make a young girl the star of their story. I think if it took off, every “Filmonsters!” would have had young teenagers who realize something about themselves or their families while fighting monsters. I wonder if there would have been a “Gillman Reborn!” with a young girl realizing she’s from a family of ancient lizard people or something.

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Joe’s Violin (2016)

Kahane Cooperman’s Academy Award-nominated documentary short offers a simultaneous pull on the heartstrings and a classical meditation on violin strings. The eponymous instrument is a violin donated by Joseph Feingold, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, to an instrument donation drive conducted by a radio station to help music students in cash-strapped schools in New York. The violin went to an all-girls academy in the Bronx, where it was presented to 12-year-old Brianna Perez, a gifted student from a broken home who aspires to become a music teacher.

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