The Movies:

Scorpion Releasing, as part of their Katarina's Nightmare Theater line, release a double feature of Australian cult/thriller movies

The Dreaming:

Directed by Mario Andreacchio and released theatrically in 1988, The Dreaming was originally put out on DVD years back by Elite Entertainment and now it lives again. This is an odd one. Four hundred years ago, a group of whale fisherman lands ashore the sandy beaches of Australia and lay waste to a few aboriginal types. Skip to the present day, well 1988 at least, an Australian archeologist named Professor Bernard Thornton (Arthur Dignam) out on an expedition opens up a tomb and unleashes the spirits of the now long dead fisherman who quickly possess her body.

When a few of the artifacts from the tomb find their way into a local museum, distant relatives of the aboriginal people killed at the begi...Read the entire review

I'm a strong believer that there is a difference between a "film" and a "movie". A film is artistic, it's a statement, it relies heavily on great acting and great directing. A film has deeper meaning than what you see on screen, and it's tailor made to be discussed and picked apart. A movie is entertaining, it's a fun time, it relies on mostly action, either comedic or intense. A movie can be taken at face value, and the less you critique it the more enjoyable it is. Now, some actors can switch back and forth between films and movies with little effort; Tom Hanks, for example, can move from funny to dramatic, heavy to lighthearted. Others se...Read the entire review

Reading a short online synopsis, "Ninja: The Mission Force" sounds like it could be decent. This Telly Award-winning series takes footage from public domain ninja flicks and splices it in with new footage shot by comedians, with new voice-over tracks to match the revised story. Done well, the show could find a funny medium between What's Up, Tiger Lily? and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra; sadly, this second season doesn't do much for me as a newcomer to the series. Despite some chintzy charm, the jokes are pretty limp, and the integration of the film footage plays out more like a budget booster than a source of creative comedy.

Bruce (Brad Jones), villainous ninja from the first season of "Ninja: The Mission Force", is not as dead as he ought to be. Rising from the grave with a desire for vengeance, he once again sets out in his quest for take over the world. This time, his master sch...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Most independent, super low budget films tend to be in the horror genre, with their built in audiences more amenable to such fare, and forgiving of its shortcomings. Shroud is no exception to this, with the addition of an old west motif to the proceedings.

Victoria Celestine (Nicole Leigh) is a young Dutch woman who has lost her husband Jonathan (Tyler Mason). Jonathan had gone to America in his work for the shadowy Nine Sabers Authority, a secret society which travels the globe fighting evil. When Victoria reads a letter from Jonathan to her father, who has died, asking for his help, she resolves to travel to the U.S. to aid her husband herself, taking along her young brother Abraham (Dylan Barth).

Their search takes them to the tiny, out of the way town of Shroud, Arizona, so small and insignificant that it's not even on the map. The town is mostly depopulated, all o...Read the entire review

The Film:
Let's begin with the simple belief that all movies are good, except for the bad parts. Some times these bad parts are trivial and inconsequential, and don't really get in the way of enjoying a movie. Some times, however, the bad parts are big and cumbersome, and nearly impossible to overlook because they are so...well...big...and cumbersome. It's when the bad parts of a movie become so unwieldy that everything that is good about a movie--and remember, all movies are good, except for the bad parts--actually comes close to being bad. And that's kind of what's going on with Luv, an otherwise good movie that suffers from a single bad part. Unfortunately, that bad part is the story itself.

Rapper-turned-actor Common stars as Vincent, an ex-convict recently released from prison, looking to go on the straight and narrow by opening his own restaurant/nightclub. Vincent is idolized...Read the entire review

WWII From Space is the latest attempt by The History Channel to wring new programming out of a subject long since exhausted. Good documentaries are still to be found at the cable channel, but much of THC has gone the way of reality programming. Show content is now not just enhanced, but driven by gaudy re-enactments and modern computer graphics. A trailer for a recent History Channel offering, for instance, casts handsome young actors as big American industrialists, running roughshod over "the rules" while "building America."

After getting past the misleading title, WWII From Space sounds like an intriguing idea. The show's tagline says, "See World War II battles from a whole new perspective." Animated maps have often been used to explain strategic warfare on film. Disney's wartime propaganda pictures made excellent use of ...Read the entire review

This movie had disaster written all over it from the beginning. When I first saw the trailer I thought it was a joke. I couldn't imagine that someone actually thought that it would be a good idea to produce this film. But then I got to thinking, as I sometimes do. Maybe I was the one who was stupid for not seeing the genius behind this project. I mean, it must have cost about five dollars to make; it's set in a house and at a local high school, the only star who's popularity would demand any money is Chenoweth, and the director did his own producing & editing. And you know it's going to make some money; Chenoweth herself...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Comedy is one of the most difficult film genres to do well, not least because it relies heavily on idiosyncratic genius in performance and the mastery of timing. For a filmmaker to move from low budget horror (which is notoriously easy to do well, at least well enough to gain an appreciative audience) to low budget comedy is something of a feat. Henrique Couto manages to pull that feat off quite well in his Depression: The Movie.

The film focuses in turn on four people: Lenny (Corey Montgomery), Bruce (David Neely), Bill (Mike Canestaro), and George (Moriah Yux). George, in case you haven't guessed, is a young woman. A snippet out of each of their lives is shown, in all their pathetic glory. Lenny is plagued with unstable girlfriends, and seems to only be attracted to those that are unavailable or otherwise unworkable, even passing up perfectly good, beautiful, enthusias...Read the entire review

Note: Although I treated Sader Ridge with the same objectivity as any film that I've reviewed for DVDTalk, in the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that I'm acquainted with co-writer / producer / assistant director John Portanova, who asked me personally if I would review his movie.

Samantha (Trin Miller) has never known her real family. Raised by foster guardians (referred to only as "the Harrises") who refuse to tell her about her biological parents, Sam doesn't even know where to start looking until she inherits a house from a late aunt. Eager to learn a little something about her heritage, she gathers up her friends Caitlin (Andi Norris), Roman (Josh Truax), and Mark (Brandon Anthony) for a road trip to the middle of nowhere. Upon arriving, they're greeted by a reclusive caretaker named Eric (D'Angelo Midil...Read the entire review

The Movie:
One of the vital tasks for any horror film, and this goes double for independent, low budget fare, is to select a villain / monster / enemy that's suitably creepy and terrifying. Unfortunately, ultra-low budget film Fetish Dolls Die Laughing went with the Tickle Monster, an eons old demon who possesses guys and compels them to tickle women to death. It's weird, yes. And a bit creepy. But the inherent goofiness prevents it from being frightening in the least.

The film starts with a young woman being chased through the woods by a giggling man with red rimmed eyes. He runs her down, and tickles her to death, also ripping out her entrails with his bare hands. Intercut with this is young boy Adam, whose wizened grandmother regales him with the story of the Tickle Monster. Cut to the present day and we see adult Adam (Aaron Bernard) tickling the feet of his girlfriend, police ...Read the entire review

Anyone who saw Anywhere USA -- a list that's probably less than five hundred people long -- likely took notice of young actor Perla Haney-Jardine. Most people will have seen her in Kill Bill Vol. 2 as Beatrix Kiddo's daughter, but she steals Anywhere away from an eclectic cast with a performance that conveys deeper and more complicated emotions in 20 minutes than many adult actors express in a whole movie. Following more B.B.-sized parts in Hollywood productions (Spider-Man 3, Untraceable), it's exciting to see her take on a lead role in director / writer Jenny Deller's debut Future Weather, but the results are underwhelming, saddling Haney-Jardine with a tiresome character designed to push an agenda on the audience.

13-year-old Lauduree (Haney-Jardine)...Read the entire review

The Film:

THE MOVIE:

Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has been enjoying an international renaissance over the last decade or so. For English-speaking readers, it began with a series of translated volumes showcasing his short work, curated by Optic Nerve-creator Adrian Tomine. Tatsumi's cartooning represented an aspect of manga (the Japanese name for "comic books") that has rarely been seen stateside. The artist pioneered a more adult, experimental style analogous to the alternative and independent comics we have over here, and a far cry from the toy tie-ins and girly anime that was popular amongst U.S. fans (of which I would consider myself one). This newfound attention culminated in the publication of A Drifting Life, Tatsumi's sprawling autobiograp...Read the entire review

In 1965 Hammer Films was going strong. Their traditional line of Frankenstein and Dracula movies still showed life, and some of their best work was on the way, like Roy Ward Baker's Quatermass and the Pit, a return to science fiction filmmaking. They even hired Ray Harryhausen in an attempt to revive the dinosaurs vs. cavemen genre. Hammer's psychological horror line had begun years before, shortly after the great success of Psycho. The excellent Taste of Fear (aka Scream of Fear) was followed by several so-so shock pictures about scheming relatives or demented madmen.

Ha...Read the entire review

More proof that Val Lewton's RKO horror thrillers had a major impact on fantasy filmmaking, Columbia's The Soul of a Monster is a 1944 cheapie with artistic pretensions. Rarely showing up in genre studies, even reference books about horror films, the picture gets a maximum of moody atmosphere from its 61 minutes of grim story plotting. The original script by Edward Dein is a throwback to an earlier era of fantasy filmmaking. There's no monster, exactly, but we do get good performances by fading cult actress Rose Hobart and the great actor George Macready in an unexpected leading role.

Beloved philanthropic surgeon George Winston (George Macready) is dying of complications from an infection. His wife Ann (Jeanne Bates) prays to anyone in the great beyond who can save his life, an invocation that summons Lilyan Gregg (Rose Hobart). ...Read the entire review