I’ll admit I wish I’d known more about filmmaker Nico Raineau sooner, as he’s managed to deliver some really interesting short films lately. “Mother’s Day” is a complete departure from the bone crunching action drama of “Brix and the Bitch” and it’s a fine drama comedy that I wanted more from. And you know you’re watching a great short film when you could have sat through two hours of the characters barely noticing the time pass. Lauren Schacher (who co-writes with Raineau) plays Mara, a young clubber who awakens in the house of the man she spent the night with one morning.
Tag Archives: Indie Film
Supernatural Horrors Shorts Block Part 1 [Horrible Imaginings Film Festival 2016]
Mona (Kosovo) (2016)
This interpretive dance short by Lorena Sopi is a beautiful haunting piece about a dance reflecting on life and the accident that changed it. This short has fantastic, dreamy lighting and makes good use of Christmas lights and snow fall. The acting is soft and appropriate while the dancing is fascinating to watch.
Human Killers and Psychological Terrors Shorts Block Part 1 [Horrible Imaginings Film Festival 2016]
Dante’s Penance (Music Video) (USA) (2016)
A rap music video showing a man ready to commit murder for a beautiful woman based on the 9 circles of Hell, this video written and directed by Dante Moran who also did the cinematography, editing, casting, was a part of the effects team, etc is a visually interesting but its story feels as though it’s part of something else, something as of yet incomplete. The cast led by Thomas Gunter gives decent performances and the effects look good. It will be interesting to see how it ties into the bigger Penance project.
Girl House (2015)
If you can accept that Nick Gordon’s “Girl House” is a digital age version of “Slumber Party Massacre,” you might be able to make it through the so bad it’s good horror film just fine. I feel like punching people that use the term “Hate watch,” but “Girl House” is the very definition of a Hate Watch. It’s stupid, tedious, and makes no sense, but is saved miraculously by a very mean spirited and intense second half. It’s not often a movie starts out as a cheesy thriller about an internet stalker and transforms in to Leatherface: The Handy Man in “California Power Tool Massacre.” Actor Slaine does as grand job as monstrous villain “Loverboy.”
All Through the House (2015)
Todd Nunes takes “Black Christmas” and wraps it in the Santa slashing madness “Silent Night, Deadly Night” for what is a pretty wonky slasher film. I appreciated the humor and inherent mean spiritedness of it all, as Todd Nunes definitely has a love for slasher films. He and his crew even seem dead set on creating their own iconic slasher with our silver faced Santa who has a knack for mutilating his victims with garden sheers. There’s also his habit for turning his male victims in to eunuchs, which is of shocking importance once the finale rolls around. I really like that Todd Nunes stuffs the film with more Latin and Hispanic actors, providing a very welcome diverse cast.
Pretty Dead – 10 Horror Films (DVD)
Just in time for Halloween, Mill Creek Entertainment offers consumers a bargain with ten very notable indie horror films available in one pack. With just the right variety, “Pretty Dead” is hours of horror entertainment and interesting horror cinema that will make for a great weekend for any experimental horror buff. First up is 2011’s “Bunnyman,” the survival tale about a group of friends that run afoul a psychotic family of cannibalistic deviants that delight in torturing travelers. In order for them to make it back home alive, they have to evade the psychotic bunnyman, a deranged lunatic dressed as a giant rabbit. “The Lake on Clinton Road” from 2015 is a cabin in the woods thriller about a group of friends partying who begin disappearing in to the night. “The Lights” from 2008 stars Joe Estevez, and involves four friends who venture out in to the wilderness to catch a rare meteor shower.
Lake Nowhere (2016)
I don’t know if I’d called Maxim Van Scoy, and Christopher Phelps’s “Lake Nowhere” a masterpiece, but I have to say that the more it unfolded, I appreciated its enthusiasm more than anything. It wants to deliver a genuinely retro horror experience, and by god it succeeds most of the time. I’m not completely bowled over, though, as “Lake Nowhere” is really only fifty minutes in length. Five of those minutes are devoted to some faux horror movie trailers you’d find in front of a cheap horror VHS.