John Nicol’s “Channel Zero” is an unusual but ambitious film that will inspire a lot of avid movie lovers to check out more than once. It’s packed with some heavy ideas and unique themes about reality, and the state of existence, all in the face of what is a pretty vicious prologue and epilogue. Director Nicol has a very striking directorial style that makes “Channel Zero” feel like an absolute nightmare. And though the movie is considerably low budget, director Nicol manages to evoke a world that feels very empty and barren. It’s not very easy to do, especially with independent filmmakers, but director Nicol is able to accomplish that task.
Tag Archives: Indie Film
An Interview with Heather Buckley [WiHM 2017]
Heather Buckley is a behind-the-scenes lady and a writer for multiple publications and websites. She has supervised effects on films such as We Are Still Here, played a monstrous mother in the SyFy original movie Dead Still, produced special features for discs such as the newest releases of The Thing, Exorcist III, Return of the Living Dead, and many more. She has written for Fangoria, Dread Central, Scream magazine, Diabolique, Vulture, and a slew of others.
You can hear her on podcasts such as The Bonus Material Podcast and the Mass Hypnosis Podcast. She’s basically a horror super woman and a total badass.
An Interview with Filmmaker Pablo Absento [WiHM 2017]
Pablo Absento is a writer, director, and producer of short films with three under her belt: Call My Name, Shi, and Japanese Legends: Slit (in which she also stars).
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.
An Interview with Filmmaker Maude Michaud [WiHM 2017]
Maude Michaud is a multi-talented French-Canadian director, writer, producer, actress, etc. She creates horror films from scratch and that can hit close to home for some. Her films have shocked some and enthralled others; she has a style quite of her own.
An Interview with Staci Layne Wilson [WiHM 2017]
Staci Layne Wilson is well known for her film reviews, interviews (on camera and in writing), her writing, and now producing and directing. Her interests are varied, but she clearly has a preference for horror as seen in her films such as the trippy triptych The Key to Annabel Lee, the sexy Fetish Factory, etc. Her knowledge of the genre and Hollywood’s inner workings is wide and she uses it well in her creations.
Her trivia on IMDB is rather telling: “Has worn Freddy Krueger’s hero claw, George Romero’s glasses, and the original Hannibal Lecter mask.”
Working Class (2011) [San Diego Film Week 2017]
Using A Tale of Two Cities, this documentary tells the story of Mike Giant in San Francisco and Mike Maxwell in San Diego who are both artists and friends who connected through tattoos the first put on the second. Throughout the film, their lives are paralleled and compared until it eventually brings them together.