Director Matt Westrup is the latest indie success story as his 2011 directed short film “The Gate” is being turned in to a feature length film by Wayfare studios. As a short film it’s a product of a premise that definitely could benefit from a feature length treatment, because Westrup inadvertently serves up so much story for us and throws so many questions in the air, that eleven minutes just isn’t enough to keep us satisfied.
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Ghoul (2012)
I think at the end of the day the reason people will dislike “Ghoul” are for the reasons I really liked it. “Ghoul” isn’t so much a horror movie about an actual ghoul, but about the horrors of growing up in and around dysfunction. For many this film will be especially off putting since the whole notion of an actual ghoul is put in to the basic back burner in exchange for character focus and exposition galore. I for one am a sucker for coming of age tales, and “Ghoul” is an especially powerful one that focuses on three young boys in the middle of the eighties and their attempts to uncover a horrific secret their local forest is hiding.
The Gingerdead Man (2005)
The best thing to do with “The Gingerdead Man” is not take it seriously. At all. It’s a dumb, goofy, and cheesy horror comedy that invokes the likes of “Jack Frost” and “Child’s Play” to tell a story that’s giddy with cheesiness from the get go. One of the fun aspects of the movie that I intend to follow is the location of the ingredients that spawn the Gingerdead Man. Once bakery owner Sarah receives a mysterious box of gingerbread ingredients, the mysterious mix spawns the evil gingerdead man from the dough. Where did it come from? Who sent it? Who has it out for Sarah? I want to know and I hope the sequels tackle this mystery in the next two films of the apparent trilogy.
Gamma (2012)
There’s no other lover of post-apocalyptic cinema than I, and Factory Fiffeen’s short film “Gamma” is right up the alley for anyone in search of a bleak piece of cinema that examines the end of the world thanks to giant corporations and our ability to search for easy fixes. Factory Fifteen’s short is something of a gem simply because to accentuate this world that has been lost to radiation and reduced to ruins, the film crew resorted to filming an enormous portion of the short in the ruins of Chernobyl.
Gut (2012)
It’s very rare that independent horror movies manage to make me turn away from the screen and cringe. Not even Tom Six’s “Human Centipede” accomplished that and those movies were desperate to be considered disturbing. “Gut” and its beauty is in what is not completely put in front of the screen. Director Elias has every chance to be gratuitous, gory, and absolutely grotesque, but “Gut” isn’t for the grue fans, so much as it is for folks who appreciate delving in to the disturbing corners of the mind. The corners that elicit arousal that would be otherwise deemed taboo by civilized human beings. We all have that darkness within our mind that find something somewhat enticing, and the same can be said for character Tom, whose friend and consistent hanger on Dan, shows him a special kind of erotic film that not only embeds itself in to their minds, but haunts Tom until he begins to re-assess his feelings for the film in general.
Green Lantern: Extended Cut (2011) [Blu-ray]
It’s a shame when a movie has such potential to be greater than the whole of its sum and fails to live up to it in the end. That’s the case with “Green Lantern,” a movie with great promise to be one hell of a space epic with fantastical elements and a killer weapon, and yet… when all is said and done, “Green Lantern” is just a rank mess, a blunder of script faults and horrible exposition that jumps from scene to scene and only manages to pick up once our hero Hal becomes the Green Lantern. And then when he becomes the Green Lantern it’s all the movie is about. He becomes the Green Lantern and…? Nothing else. “Green Lantern” has the promise to be so much more than it puts on the screen, but what it makes up for in action set pieces it lacks in severely uninteresting characters.
The People vs. George Lucas (2011)
I had originally wanted to see “The People Vs. George Lucas” mainly because I hoped it would vent out many of the frustrations that I felt as a ex-Star Wars fan. But at the end of the day, “The People vs. George Lucas” has no idea what it is or what it wants to be, thus we’re left with a generally muddled and awfully confused movie that seeks to do nothing more than make money off of and exploit Lucas as Lucas has purportedly done to his fans. We should love him but hate him. We should question him but also understand he has great intentions. He’s a hack but he’s an artist. He’s a hollow businessman, but a surefire juggernaut of filmmaking. He hasn’t made a film in years but he changed the industry. And that’s no end to what confusing mixed messages you’ll received while watching this slapdash wishy washy little film.