I’m not entirely sure what “Fall Out” was aiming for from minute one. All I know is that director Derek Dubois keeps the audience in the dark, providing a narrative that’s about eighty percent ambiguous. And I was okay with that. If you can’t really offer a larger exploration of the world you’ve built, especially considering when it’s set during the apocalypse, the best thing to do is focus on getting us to know the characters in this situation, and director Dubois accomplishes that in spades.
I had such a good time with Kevin Chenault’s road trip dramedy. It’s spewing indie flavor with a lot of its narrative very much in the vein of Wes Anderson. It’s surreal without ever being pretentious, and it’s about two wandering souls questioning their own lives, but never gets saccharine at any moment. I was just won over by minute one, and had a great time watching these two individuals face a harsh world side by side, and travel in to a weird land.
Director Jason Shurkey’s “The Witch” is light on story and narrative, but it’s a good student film, nevertheless. It garners some really tight editing and an atmosphere that make it a Gothic short horror film that’s very much worth experimenting with. Director Shurkey really knows how to develop a tone from the outset, and follows through with a surreal horror film.
Whether you love or hate George Romero and his films, there’s no denying that without his zombie movies there wouldn’t be the zombie culture we know today. Surely we might have two or three zombie movies concerning the sleepy servants of voodoo masters, but we wouldn’t have the flesh eating hordes that are currently consuming pop culture and the world as we know it. There’s also a very good interview where filmmaker Alex Cox notes that were it not for “Night of the Living Dead” becoming public domain, there likely would not have been inspiration for filmmakers to offer their own zombie entertainment for horror fans.
What’s worse than a bad zombie movie? A bad zombie where the zombies are painfully easy to kill. How can you be terrified of zombies that can be killed by drum sticks and golf clubs? It’s also a lot of fun when the director can’t seem to decide if his zombies are shamblers or runners. Sometimes they run, sometimes they shamble around in a sleepy haze. Sometimes they bite relentlessly, but when lunging at our characters, they’re easier to fight than a toddler with a full diaper. Which is a shame, because nine times out of ten, the zombies look creepy as all hell, while director Logan McMillan manages to paint a pretty atmospheric apocalypse. For the first fifteen minutes, at least.
You can definitely look at director Eric England’s horror drama in two plains. You can either watch it as a gory tale of a woman rotting gradually in to something beyond herself, or you can look at it as a metaphorical tale of a woman rotting in to the ugly being she’s probably always been her entire life. When you cut it down, the character Samantha is the protagonist, but never really is an empathetic individual. She’s this lecherous, vapid, and utterly narrow minded being who does nothing but ride on people’s good will and expects big returns. That’s not to say she deserves what is coming to her, but who’s to say her final transformation isn’t what she’s been her entire life?
Director Dave Cholewa’s “Dead Shadows” is HP Lovecraft meets “Night of the Comet,” and while surely that sounds like the ingredients for an amazing horror film, in the end it’s just a serviceable post apocalyptic horror thriller. It’s by no means a waste of time, but it never delivers on a lot of its ideas and story themes. Much of the concepts and sub-plots feel very under developed and half baked, with “Dead Shadows” unfolding in a very inexplicable series of events. I tried my best to follow along, but Cholewa really offers horror audiences a convoluted narrative for a movie that boils down to shooting aliens and monsters in the dark.