Like clockwork every year a studio releases a Christmas themed anthology for the masses, and almost always it’s a big letdown. It’s not really enough to inject the whole Christmas aesthetic. A genuinely scary story helps, too. “Nightmare on 34th Street” is a rambling, often nonsensical, unscary Christmas anthology movie that is literally all over the place. It re-uses actors, garners a whole cast that spend their time obviously reading from cue cards off screen, and director Crow doubles down a shoddy editing job that makes his film more confusing and jarring than scary.
Tag Archives: Indie Film
Token Taverns: An Arcade Bar Documentary (2023)
Before the video game age, arcades were one of the biggest social spots for mainly kids and teenagers to commute, compete, and share their passion. Once home video game became a mainstay allowing kids a more personal and intimate video gaming experience. This prompted the unfortunate collapse of the arcade industry for a very long time. That is until the last twenty years when many folks that fondly recall the arcade age and the joy it brought them sought to revive not just the arcade, but the social experience of the arcade.
Bad CGI Gator (2023)
See here’s my problem with “Bad CGI Gator.” It’s not that it takes a short coming and tries to turn it in to some kind of schlocky B movie element. It’s that the movie is only fifty eight minutes and it’s called “Bad CGI Gator.” And said Bad CGI Gator doesn’t make an appearance until at least seventeen minutes in to the movie. If you have only sixty minutes to work with, and your movie is called “Bad CGI Gator,” and you’re promising a Bad CGI Gator, I would think one would try to plaster the titular Bad CGI Gator on every frame as much as humanly possible.
Freddy’s Fridays (2023)
With great success of a blockbuster, there’s always bound to be a mockbuster that comes up from the rear to pull from the momentum. What with the shocking success of “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” we have the UK mockbuster known unsubtly as “Freddy’s Fridays.” From director Ben J. Williams (who gave us “Supernado,” and “Spiders on a Plane”) comes a pretty dull horror movie that is a hefty mixture of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Hellraiser.” It’s a paper thin premise that probably took a paragraph to expound on on paper, and amounts to a barely eighty minute movie that works hard to stretch the run time with a ton of filler.
Flinch (2021)
A hitman who took over the family business from his father ends up taking a young woman after she’s witnessed a hit. There is something more to her that is making him care about her survival.
Hell Van (2022)
10/31: Part III (2022)
Director and writer Michael Ballif’s anthology series “10/31” has been a mixed bag of mostly treats that’s done well in celebrating the Halloween season. It’s been way too overlooked in a barrage of indie horror films out on the market, and that’s a shame. “10/31” as a whole is a movie series that deserves a bigger audience, in spite of “Part III” never quite sticking the landing. I’d say it has a lot of good ideas, but never manages to be as good as the first two films, when all is said and done.