Courgette (Zucchini) is a young boy who has had a tough life. His father is gone and his bother drinks a lot of beer. One day, something happens to his mother and he ends up placed in a group home. Through learning to trust others with the other kids in the home, he also learns to love himself and others.
Tag Archives: Comedy
Brain Damage (1988)
Say what you want about Frank Henenlotter, but even when he makes a bad movie, it’s a guarantee you won’t see another movie like it ever again. I am by no means a fan of “Basketcase” but I still have yet to see another movie like it. “Brain Damage” is another movie so far ahead of its time and so surreal that it didn’t stand a chance at being recognized in 1988. It’s too bad too, since the eighties embraced a lot of interesting premises, so “Brain Damage” should have caught on. Thankfully it later garnered a following in the VHS rental market, and it’s a horror comedy that deserves to be embraced by the horror community. It’s short, and simple but absolutely gruesome, and a unique spin on the theme of drug addiction and substance abuse.
We Just Want to Play (2013)
I really like where James Cappadoro and writer Frank De Rosa’s heads are with “We Just Want to Play.” There is always someone who is trying to hand us a new kind of college classic like “Animal House” or “Revenge of the Nerds,” and director Cappadoro’s short film has an infectious energy that made it a blast to sit through. The one downfall behind it all is that the movie is only about sixteen minutes in length. Chalk it up to budget or whatnot, but “We Just Want to Play” looks like it has material for at least a ninety minute movie. That said, the current short is fine as it is and works as a very entertaining and fun tribute to classic college comedies about underdogs fighting the alpha males and corrupt deans.
Cauliflower (2017)
Director-Writer Phoebe Torres’ short “Cauliflower” plays out like a skit from a comedy show, and that’s not at all meant to be a slight since it’s a damn funny short film, that also conveys a full narrative in under five minutes. It’s weird how much the fear of looking ignorant can often turn us in to clowns nevertheless, but Torres has a great sense of capturing how sometimes we’d rather feign knowledge no matter how stupid we look, than not admit to ignorance.
Drive-In Massacre (1976) [Blu-Ray]
Stu Segall’s attempt at a horror movie is only seventy minute in length but feels like it goes on for an eternity. Resembling a really cheap and gory cop drama, “Drive In Massacre” is painfully paced and poorly plotted with a tone that is literally all over the place. Sometimes it’s a slasher, sometimes a murder mystery, sometime it tries to be a true crime drama, and other times, it opts for comedy. How are we supposed to take our heroes at all seriously when, in an effort to infiltrate the murderer targeting drive in couples, one of the officers decides to dress up as a woman? What is the intent behind “Drive-In Massacre”? Are we supposed to consider it a satire that was way ahead of its time? Was the director aiming for something in the vein of “The Town that Dreaded Sundown,” except it’s all confined to a local drive in?
Night of the Virgin (2016) [FrightFest Glasgow 2017]
On New Year’s Eve, a young man goes to a party hell-bent on losing his virginity. There he meets an older woman who takes him home and tells him all about a goddess she learned about in Nepal. Quickly things take a turn for the weird, the weirder, and the WTF.
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.