Tag Archives: Mystery

Consumer (2023) [Chattanooga Film Festival 2024]

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So Long and Thanks for All the Dangerous Visions Shorts Block

I wish we could have gotten a longer format version of “Consumer,” as Matthew Fisher’s horror tale is ripe for feature film potential. “Consumer” watches like a segment from “Creepshow” even packing in a wonderful synthesized score by Bethany Farnsworth, respectively. I loved the low tech, mid-eighties revenge tale that director Fisher creates, as it’s old fashioned enough, but never feels dated, or dull.

It works well within its short run time and offers some scary ambiguity in the end.

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Blue Velvet (1986): The Criterion Collection [4K UHD/Blu-Ray]

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Now Available from Criterion Collection.

My first experience with David Lynch was with “Mulholland Dr.,” a film that is far and away breath taking but also difficult to decode. After trying to find an explanation for it someone told me that it was only one of his easiest to access. But I like to think that it’s “Blue Velvet.” Lynch’s 1986 Neo Noir is a nightmarish fever dream in to the American dream. Lynch paints a portrait of two mirror worlds, one with the perfect Norman Rockwellian picket fences and women with babies on their shoulders. The other America is a bleak and violent Wonderland where deviants and criminals lurk in every corner waiting to prey on the weak.

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Bedroom People (2022) [Film Maudit 2.0]

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The new standard for horror entertainment has become the lo-fi, filmed on VCR fodder that had lent something of a realism to even the more outlandish premises. The aesthetic has been used in a lot of facets of horror in the last eight years, including horror movies. The classic ARG aesthetic just works and it works well for the short from skilled animator and concept artist Vivien Forsans entitled “Bedroom People.”

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Gunfighter Paradise (2024)

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Recently selected to the 2024 RiverRun Film Festival. 

Like a Southern fried “Donnie Darko,” writer/director Jethro Waters’s darkly comic dissection of America and masculinity is truly one of the most unique and bizarre dark comedies to come out of the independent circuit. I don’t think audiences are ready for what someone like Waters has in store, placing America’s current social climate up to a big lens and lending some insight in to the lunacy of it all, and how the lunacy has become the new norm.

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Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

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Now Exclusively in Theaters.

I’ve had my problems with the “Bad Boys” series in the past, but unlike the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, it’s been one of the most consistent series of action films ever released. The vision for “Bad Boys” has remained very precise and direct without adding too much or taking too much away. The stakes get higher with every film, and through it all we’ve stayed with Marcus and Mike only without adding on so much excess characters like “Lethal Weapon” fell victim to. “Bad Boys” has mainly been a vehicle for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, sure, but at least it knows what it is and tries to deliver on more complex ideas and bigger stakes.

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Hanky Panky (2023)

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Now Available to stream on VOD.

It takes a special kind of balls to make a film so utterly abstract and bizarre and not pay the cast. But the press release insists that “nobody got paid” therefore they must have had a lot of faith in this project. Lindsay Haun and Nick Roth’s horror comedy is a weird cabin in the woods sitcom that pits a bunch of new age yuppies against a weird evil force. This force involves a sentient talking handkerchief, a supernatural fedora and a main protagonist who has an encyclopedic knowledge of finer materials and clothing fabrics.

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