The Movie:
Giallo (Italian thrillers popularized in the seventies) can be a difficult genre. Inconsistency, plot holes and general loopiness are found in even the best, and are something of a hallmark of the films. There are a huge number of them that are simply too out there and incomprehensible to be called great. Some few rise above the genre, such as the entries of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, to become something unique and interesting in its own right. Enzo Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear is one such film.

Peter (Gianni Garko) is a playboy British solicitor, living it up and indulging with call girls and strippers, and generally living the wild bachelor life. He lives with his uncle, Judge Biddle (Fernando Rey), a high profile magistrate. One evening, Peter brings home beautiful Italian prostitute Anna (Giovanna Ralli), intent on a frolicsome evening of fun. Unfortunately, at h...Read the entire review

The Movie:
A lot of the same stories get recycled over and over in horror / thriller films, and it's not always a recipe for failure. A film with an old story can work if there's something new to explore, or an interesting take is tried, or even if the same old thing is done exceptionally well. The Condemned a/k/a Los Condenados is not exactly a new take, and it's not an exceptional film, but it does well enough to deliver a few chills and compelling characters.

Ana Puttnam (Cristina Rodlo) returns back to her family home with her ailing father, world renowned cancer researcher Dr. Puttnam (Axel Anderson). Rumors have been swirling about ethical violations, and Ana wants to rebuild the good name of Dr. Puttnam and the Puttnam Foundation where it began, in the tiny village of Rosales, where her father's first research into childhood cancer was performed. This will also give h...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Documentaries often get a bad rap. They're staid, boring, pretentious, and they're often about subjects that could bore your average research librarian, when they're not credulous special pleadings biased toward one improbably belief or another. Cannibal Possession: Heart of Ice looks to upend that reputation, somewhat, focusing on the Canadian legend of the Wendigo, though it retains a scholarly air about itself.

Nathan Carlson is something of an amateur Wendigo expert and researcher, so he was happy to be interviewed by his local paper in 2008, discussing the topic. Just a few days later, a man named Vincent Li, one of whose jobs was delivering that same paper, boarded a bus in Manitoba, attacked a passenger, beheaded him, and ate his flesh. Li later begged to be killed in court. This attack deeply disturbed Carlson, and he felt somewhat to blame, since the attack echo...Read the entire review

Twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska make quite an impression with their sophomore outing as writers and directors, with the visceral and affecting body modification film American Mary. It's quite a change in mood from their first feature film, Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which sounds quite brutal but has something of a sentimental heart. With American Mary, they've moved past any sense of sentimentality, with a subtle but unabashed look into the darker areas of human nature.

Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) is a struggling med student, passionate about her dreams of being a surgeon, but chronically short of cash. Desperate for money, she answers an ad for fetish models, "no sex required", at the Bourbon A Go Go club, where she meets sketchy club manager Billy (Antonio Cupo), whose audition requirements include neck rubs. Mary is able to make a quick five grand when a club employee is v...Read the entire review

The Movie:
One doesn't see too many Danish noir thrillers released in the U.S., so it's difficult to know what to expect from something like ID:A. Fortunately, it's a tightly scripted number with compelling characters, and a central mystery that draws in the viewer.

We open to see a young woman, who we later come to know as Ida (Tuva Novotny), awake from unconsciousness half submerged in a river. She's been wounded, with a gash on her head, she has a heavy canvas bag next to her, and no memory of who she is. She stumbles to a nearby hotel, and finds that she's in France. She hits it off with the hotel owner's son Pierre (Arnaud Binard), and after checking in discovers that the bag is full of money and a gun. The plot thickens when two men come around looking for her, with clearly ill intent. She needs to leave, and quickly.

When Pierre tells her that she has a Danish accent, she ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Ordinarily, having Uwe Boll's name attached to a movie, especially a zombie movie, is a sure marker that the film in question is a big puddle of mediocrity and failure. So, when I saw that Italian zombie film Eaters was "presented by Uwe Boll", I was hesitant, and expected something ridiculous and awful. What I got instead was a very well crafted, original and fun movie.

Eaters dispenses as quickly as possible with context setting, using short snatches of news broadcasts to get the viewer up to speed. A global flu-like pandemic has killed most of the people on the earth, striking women more quickly than men, and transforming its victims into shambling zombies. Our heroes, such as they are, are two soldiers: wise cracking, cynical Igor (Alex Lucchesi) and laid back Alen (Guglielmo Favilla). They work out of a decaying compound, capturing live zombie specimens for u...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 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

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

The Movie:
It's rare that a sequel can compare in quality to the original that spawned it, especially in horror movies. Such great films as Return of the Living Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street and The Exorcist were all followed by less than stellar films. But Norwegian slasher Cold Prey II a/k/a Fritt Vilt II is up to the task, easily equaling, and perhaps improving upon, the original.

Cold Prey II starts up exactly where the original left off. Jannicke (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) has survived the attacks of the mad killer who has slain all...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Independent horror has a lot of potential for groundbreaking, unsettling material and approaches. It also has a lot of potential for mediocrity, and outright failure. Scrappy, under an hour vampire film Indemnity: Rage of a Jealous Vampire isn't quite a total failure, but stumbles more than it dances.

William (David Dietz, who also writes and directs) is on the run. He flees through the darkened woods, pursued by a female figure with glowing red eyes. He's clearly in fear for his life. Luckily, a truck stops by the road, and offers him a ride to a nearby tavern, called the Rinky Dink, which is quite rustic, complete with a pig rutting outside the front door. He's safe for the moment. Inside, he meets the grizzled proprietor Joe (Daniel I. Radakovich), and they strike up a conversation.

Meanwhile, Angela (Crystalann Jones) relentlessly follows, picking up a ride from a ...Read the entire review

The Show:
Dirk Gently, as fans of Douglas Adams know, is an unorthodox detective, who looks into the fundamental interconnectedness of all things in order to solve his cases. Dirk Gently is also now a BBC television series, sadly cancelled after the first series, which is more inspired by than adapted from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and less so the sequel The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

The first series has the pilot, and three regular episodes. The pilot is loosely based on Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but it's significantly altered and modernized (the novel came out in 1987). The rest of the episodes have small elements from the novels, but are basically original stories. And while the writers may have diverged, of necessity, from Adams' original plots, they certainly retain his sense of whimsy and wonder, and penchant for the biz...Read the entire review

The Show:
British detective show Thorne has points that work quite well for it, and points that tend to drag it down. On the plus side, and as I've said many times before, the British have a particular gift for television detective drama, and that gift finds a particularly well executed expression here. On the minus side, the jaded, damaged detective who "doesn't play by the rules" has sort of been done to death, and when coupled with a dearth of likeable characters, as in Thorne, it can make viewing a bit of a slog.

David Morrissey plays the eponymous detective Tom Thorne, and he's a brooding, driven man, who doesn't mind a bit of strong arming, skirting the rules and violation of procedure if that's what it takes to snag the bad guy. And in the two stories included on this release, separated into six episodes, they are most definitely very bad fellows. In Sleepyhead...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The Lake Placid franchise isn't dead yet. It has one last (so they claim) entry with Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, and while it looks quite slickly produced, it leaves a lot to be desired.

This is the fourth in the series, and though I have missed the second and third, I don't think the experience suffers for it. Yancy Butler reprises her role from the previous film as Reba, the mouthy, somewhat unstable game warden. She kills off a croc in a bloody convenience store right at the beginning, but soon becomes embroiled with the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers to surround the lake with an electric fence, so that the species can be studied. Ryan (Paul Nocholls) leads the engineers, with his son Max (Benedict Smith) working for him as a contractor, while Sheriff Giove (the lovely Elisabeth Rohm) worries about the safety of the local townsfolk, and specifically...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Girls Against Boys is another revenge drama, though following a somewhat different path than most, and quite muted in its way. Technically, it's near perfect, but this perhaps contributes to the fact that the tale itself seems a bit anemic.

Shae (Danielle Panabaker) is having a bit of a bad weekend. Her married boyfriend Terry (Andrew Howard) has just dumped her to go back to his wife. When she goes out on the town with new friend Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), they have a few drinks, dance a few dances, and meet a few nice seeming boys. Later that night, one of those nice boys sexually assaults Shae in the hallway outside of her apartment. And no one seems to care. Her mother can't tear away from meetings and business long enough to hear about her daughter's troubles. The police are nonchalant, bored and suspicious. Terry just sees her request for help as an invitation to have ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The revenge narrative is a powerful tale, and people have been making films with that theme for a very long time. There's just something about seeing the wicked smitten that strikes a chord in the human soul. Henrique Couto presents his take with the ultra-low budget Bleeding Through.

Sandy Behre plays Lindsey, a depressed, repressed, painfully shy college girl, who can't get over her parents' death, and refuses to sell their house and move out, even though her brother (Henrique Couto himself) is pushing her in that direction, not to mention that she can't afford the exorbitant mortgage. And that's just one of her problems. Her boss is a jerk. She's failing at school, and her creepy professor's offers to help are perhaps not entirely altruistic. Her boyfriend storms away in a huff when she won't put out. A group of alcoholic hooligans at her school are intent on mocking ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
At title like Night of the Tentacles brings along with it some expectations. There's an implication of a Corman-esque experience to come, with perhaps some blood, breasts and gore to be served up. The film delivers on most of these expectations, but can't quite bring us as tight and effective of a movie as it wants to be.

Dave (Brandon Salkil) is a freelance graphic artist specializing in erotic horror art, and is something of a loser. He pads around his apartment in pajamas, arguing about the appropriate way to represent alien semen, and for entertainment waits for his pregnant downstairs neighbor Esther (Nicole Gerity) to come home so that he can masturbate while lying on the floor listening to her loudly do the same through the paper thin partitions that plague his domicile. But his life is about to get interesting. A congenital condition causes him to have a heart at...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The Thais have a pretty strong tradition for cool martial arts action movies, the Baa Ram Ewe movies particularly, and the producers of Bangkok Assassins are trying to continue that tradition, with a little something extra to spice things up. That extra spice is the addition of a teen heart throb, young romance angle, and it doesn't entirely mesh seamlessly.

The film follows the lives of four young men: Pong, Na, Ga and Chi. All four have been abducted by a scurrilous gang that forces them to work as crippled beggars. In punishment for running away, among other things, Pong's tongue is cut out, Ga is deafened by blows to the ears, Chi has his eyes gouged out, and N...Read the entire review

The Movie:
There are a lot of things going against Sean Stone's horror entry Greystone Park from the beginning: it's a hand held, "found footage" movie, and those are pass ; it's set in a haunted asylum, and that's even more pass ; it's supposedly based on true events, and that can't possibly be true; and it's co-written and directed by Oliver Stone's son, so surely there's some nepotism going on and it's just because of Sean's connections that the film got made. But all of these things don't matter, and / or aren't true. Greystone Park is a truly disturbing, if unoriginal, ghost story that delivers genuine chills. There's something to be said for doing the same old thing with craftsmanship and passion.

The film is based on a real life trip to an asylum taken by Sean Stone and Alex Wraith, the day after they met at a dinner party at Sean's father's house. (Most of the charac...Read the entire review

The Movie:
In many ways, the late seventies and early eighties were a great time for horror movies. Supposedly important things like coherence and incisive characterizations weren't considered all that important, and plenty of character actors with great, craggy faces were available, people like George Kennedy and Richard Crenna, both of whom star in Death Ship, an at times lackluster, but nevertheless pretty cool creeper from 1980.

Kennedy plays the embittered Captain Ashland, who is literally three days from retirement, helming an ill-fated cruise ship that runs smack into a ghostly derelict vessel while on a normally boring run. The only survivors from the cruise ship are Ashland's second in command, Marshall (Crenna), his wife Margaret (Sally Ann Howes), their children, an elderly passenger Sylvia (Kate Reid), ship's officer Nick (Nick Mancuso), his latest sexual conquest Lori ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The vampire genre is almost as old as film itself, going all the way back to Nosferatu. Its popularity comes and goes in waves, as does the originality of the particular specimens. There's something of a fallow period going on in bloodsucking movies these days, so producers want to come up with a new spin, which is what the creators of The Caretaker have tried to do. It's at times inventive, and fun, but not always successful.

The premise is pretty simple: a wave of a vampire like infection is sweeping Australia, and perhaps the world. A number of disparate people get trapped in a remote house with a vampire. He offers them a deal: he'll protect them from other vampires at night, if they protect him from humans during the day.

The vampire is Dr. Ford Grainger (Mark White, who also produces), and he ar...Read the entire review

The Movie:
With so many entrants into the horror / thriller arena these days, including many with little interest in the genre itself beyond a quick buck, it's nice to see an independent film come along that appreciates the craft of scaring the audience, even if it's not perfect. That imperfect film is Andrew Hyatt's The Frozen.

The Frozen follows seemingly happy young couple Emma and Mike (Brit Morgan and Seth David Mitchell) on a camping and snowmobiling trip into the wilderness. Both are city kids, and familiar neither with camping nor snowmobiles. Adding to the tension is the fact that Emma discovered that morning that she's pregnant, and is distressed by the news, and hesitant to talk to Mike about it. This general anxiety merely simmers, until Mike glimpses a figure standing in the trees and promptly crashes the snowmobile.

The snowmobile is well and truly broken, an...Read the entire review

The Movie:
One can imagine the pitch for Osombie. It's simple. "What if Osama bin Laden was a zombie?" The ad copy practically writes itself. Whether one thinks this is a genius idea for a horror movie or not, the premise should result in a fun, weird experience. It certainly is both at times, but not enough to make it truly successful.

The story follows Dusty (Eve Mauro), who is wandering through the wilds of Afghanistan searching for her conspiracy nut brother Derek (Jasen Wade), who is convinced that Osama bin Laden is alive, and is determined to kill the man himself. Unbeknownst to Dusty, and most of the world, Afghanistan is awash with zombies, a result of the misuse of American chemical weapons. Dusty is saved from the bloodthirsty ghouls only by the timely intervention of a US / British special forces unit, on its way to an insurgent base camp where rumor has it something bi...Read the entire review

The Show:
It's been said many times before, and often by me, that the British have a particular penchant for making high quality crime and detective dramas for television. Inspector Lewis, a spin off from Inspector Morse, maintains this tradition of excellence in its fifth series. (Please note that this is Series Five only in the United States, because of differences in the way PBS aired and grouped the episodes throughout the life of the show. In Europe and the rest of the world, the below episodes would be considered Series Six.

Series Five brings back all the old characters, familiar as a comfortable hand me down sweater by this point: Old fashioned pro DI Robert Lewis (Kevin Whately), his intellectual but devoted sergeant DS James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), their boss Chief Superintendent Innocent (Rebecca Front), and medical examiner, and perpetually...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Making independent films is often a hard slog. There's usually little money to be made, to go along with the miniscule budgets, and that lack of funds can often hamper creative expression, and even cripple it. This is not the case, however, with ultra-weird, low budget horror effort Dropping Evil. This is bravura independent filmmaking at its gonzo best.

The story revolves around four high school students. The two cool ones, Samantha and Mike (Rachel Howell and Tom Taylor) ask their significantly less than cool former friends Nancy and Becky (Zachary Eli Lint and Cassandra Powell) to go on a weekend camping trip, more out of pity than anything else. (Yes, Nancy is a guy with a girl's name, for reasons that are hinted at in the film.) Nancy happens to be a devout Christian, and is constantly lecturing the girls on their whorish ways, and overly concerned about his apple j...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It can be hard for low budget films to be unique or groundbreaking, especially visually. A lack of funds can often severely limit the avenues and methods one can use. The producers of Future World: City of Mass Destruction have managed to create a visually striking film, despite a paucity of funds. It's a film that has flaws, and big ones, but they're trying to do something very interesting, and that's worth a lot.

It's difficult to summarize the plot of Future World, because there really isn't an overarching story. It consists of several short features, each self-contained, that sometimes overlap. They are all set in the far future, 30,000 AD, in the only city that has managed to survive on earth: Grand Rapids, MI. Why Grand Rapids is left when so many others are gone is never fully explained. Grand Rapids is controlled by three groups: The DeVoz family, the Fill...Read the entire review

The Show:
The Brits have a long tradition of high quality mystery and thriller stories, both in fiction, on the stage, and on television and film, going back to Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and before. The producers of Kidnap and Ransom continue on with that august tradition, even while giving the genre a unique twist of their own.

Instead of the normal police detective or private investigator, Kidnap and Ransom revolves around the exploits of a team of hostage negotiators, led by the indefatigable Dominic King (Trevor Eve). Along with his business partner Angela (Helen Baxendale) and assistant Carrie (Amara Karan), Dominic eschews involvement with the police, and does his best to get kidnap victims returned to their families unharmed. Though his relationship with his wife Sophie and daughter Tess (Natasha Little and Laura Greenwood) suffers at times because of it, Dom...Read the entire review

The Movie:
There aren't a lot of movies made based on Rudyard Kipling stories these days, let alone horror movies. But that's exactly what the producers of Rudyard Kipling's Mark of the Beast have make, and though it has its share of missteps and flaws, the filmmakers are truly stretching themselves, and deliver an intriguing and at times disturbing film.

I went back and read the original short story this afternoon, and though the location has been moved from colonial India to the northeast United States in modern times (which does set up a bit of confusion), the film follows its source material quite closely. Dick Boland plays Strickland, a local sheriff who hosts an annual New Year's Eve party at his isolated home. Neighbors and old friends come to stay the weekend, drinking, playing games and indulging in delightful conversation. Debbie (Debbie Rochon) drags along another neighb...Read the entire review

The Movie:
What does it take for a film to become a cult classic? It doesn't always require high production values or flawless execution. In fact, these might even be a detriment. Don't Answer the Phone certainly qualifies as a cultish movie, and does lack a certain something in the quality department. But it's entertaining, and features a sublimely outrageous (and fun to watch) performance by Nicholas Worth.

Worth plays the serial killer Kirk Smith, who works by day as a photographer, and has a penchant for killing his beautiful young models. And also prostitutes, and random women whose houses he breaks into. He also likes to call in to the radio show of psychologist Dr. Lindsey Gale (Flo Gerrish), pretending to be a Puerto Rican with emotional issues. For him, it's all a lark, and perhaps a way to prove himself after growing up with a disapproving and stern father. The police are...Read the entire review

The Show:
The fourth season of offbeat police procedural The Mentalist continues the tradition of top quality television with a fresh take on the standard detective series. This season is somewhat darker, however, and delves deeper into the troubled psyche of California Bureau of Investigation consultant Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), and explores what he is prepared to do to capture notorious serial killer Red John.

At the end of Season Three, Jane had succeeded in killing the man he thought was Red John, shooting him dead in the food court of a mall. But now, Jane isn't so sure that the man was in fact his age old nemesis, and others doubt as well. The rest of his CBI team is back. Lead agent Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney), Wayne Rigsby (Owain Yeoman), Grace Van Pelt (Amanda Righetti) and Kimball Cho (Tim Kang). They have a new boss, Agent Wainwright (Michael Rady), and are joined by in...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Action films can be hard to do well on limited budgets. Things like stunts, weapons, cars and effects cost money, and audiences can generally tell the cheap dodges from the quality material. Nevertheless, the producers of A Day of Violence manage to pull it off quite well, even though the film does have a few flaws.

Mitchell (Nick Rendell) is a regular guy, a tough who collects outstanding debts for the local mob. He may beat people up, and worse, to get them to pay back their loans, but he is hopelessly devoted to his wife Abbi (Tina Barnes) and step-daughter Holly (Bryony Mechan). His relationship with them sours, however, when an angry debtor rams Mitchell and Holly in the car, putting Holly into a coma.

Living on his own, and not doing very well, Mitchell thinks he's finally found the answer to his prayers, and the funds to pay for the expensive experimental treatm...Read the entire review

The Movie:
French art house director Jean Rollin can be something of an acquired taste. His fantasy horror films are often chock full of nubile young women in various states of undress, but just as often slow moving, confusing and obscure. Nevertheless, he has influenced a lot of more mainstream filmmakers, such as Rob Zombie (if he can be described as mainstream), who named a song after the film under review today, The Living Dead Girl

The Living Dead Girl itself is a little hard to classify. As the title implies, it's a story of a young woman who returns from the dead, but sort of as a hybrid between a vampire and a zombie. Catherine (Francoise Blanchard) died young, but is revived after a few years when some clumsy chemical plant workers accidentally spill some nasty barrels they are trying to secrete in her crypt. The fumes from the chemicals wash over Catherine, and she...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Mario Bava made a number of films, some quite good, some only fair. Hatchet for the Honeymoon is perhaps in the middle of the pack. It's not brilliant, but is quite interesting. It's a lower budget film for him, but he proves that he has the cinematic chops, even when he doesn't have a lot of money.

One thing that is unique about Hatchet among giallo films is that the audience knows right away who the killer is: fashion designer John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) admits up front in narration that he is a serial killer, talking over footage of him actually killing a young couple on a train. So, this isn't a mystery film per se. We already know the culprit. The interesting thing is why he is doing it. Every young girl he kills (always newlyweds, or girls wearing wedding dresses) reveals a bit more to John of the blurred memories of his mother's death.

His psycholog...Read the entire review

The Movie:
A lot of men in their thirties and forties (and plenty of others) have fond memories of youthful hours misspent watching cheesy B horror movies, and an awful lot of those movies starred one of the three original scream queens: Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley. Screaming in High Heels: The Rise and Fall of the Scream Queen Era is an adoring documentary about those three, how they got into movies, and the environment in which they worked, and is also lots of fun.

The film is made up of archival footage of their films and interviews, both with the three scream queens, and people who worked with them: actors such as Jay Richardson and directors like Fred Olen Ray and David Decoteau, and others. The film explores the childhoods of the trio, and one would guess that even fans will discover a new tidbit or two about their idols that they didn't know before. For...Read the entire review

The Movie:
As an homage to the silly fifties B-movies of yesteryear, Atomic Brain Invasion works pretty well, with references to such "classics" as Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Mole People for the cinephiles out there. But despite all its pep and earnestness, it can't quite pull off the feat of making this into a really great film.

First off, we're treated to a grainy, black and white intro with one Dr. Baxter Frank explaining something about fish men, and rambling on (for perhaps a bit too long) before finally kicking off the film. Then it's full on fifties America, as we're introduced to most of our characters, a group of high school kids, as they listen to their teacher lecture about astronomy in an observatory. We've got Lukas (Michael Reed) the trou...Read the entire review