The Movie:

John Bennett (James Congdon of The Rockford Files!) and his pretty wife Ellen (Katharine Houghton of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner) are a well to do couple who like to enjoy life on the tropical island where the live. They own a massive house, party with their socialite friends, and employ a few of the locals as hired help around the house. When one of their friends impresses Ellen with her fantastic garden, Ellen jumps at the chance to hire her hunky gardener, Carl (Warhol favorite Joe Dallesandro of Heat and Trash), and her husband, who is so wrapped up in his business affairs that he isn't really paying attention when he should be, doesn't seem to mind footing the bill.

When Carl arrives at the Bennett home he starts things off rather strangely, insisting that he work alone and refusing to affiliate with any of the other help around the house. ...Read the entire review

"I was painting a green plant growing out of a black void, when a breeze rippled the canvas and gave me an idea. What if the painting could move?" With that thought Philadelphia art student David Lynch launched a highly unlikely film career. This self-published disc collects his six short films, or at least the six he will own up to, in a characteristically enigmatic art gallery format. The disc package greets us with a disturbing nightmare image of a man's face undergoing some trial of mutilation, with no other clues beyond the title, a scrawled Lynchian signature and a 2005 Absurda copyright. It's Lynchland all right; we're not in Kansas any more.

The disc offers up no more secrets in text form. Putting the disc on takes us to a moody welcome screen and a second menu screen lists the six films without comment. Once centered on an individual o...Read the entire review

The Product:
When David Lynch opened his official website some years back (and asked members to pay a monthly fee to partake of all its online wonders) the one thing the auteur promised was original content. As time went by, he delivered the delightfully surreal series Rabbits, about a group of bummed-out bunnies living in a strange post-apocalyptic space. His other main offering was Dumbland, another dip into Lynch's oddball sense of humor. Not unlike the weird wit of his only foray into television comedy, the short-lived On The Air, Dumbland derived a great deal of its laughs from this artist's alien perspective. Now it's available on DVD, and if you can dial into his dementia, you may find yourself giggling as well a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A few years ago, David Lynch made available for sale only on his website a beautifully restored version of his cult classic, Eraserhead on DVD. The transfer went through a serious restoration courtesy of Mr. Lynch himself, and the results were fantastic. So was the price. It was an expensive release made even more expensive by the additional shipping costs required to accommodate the unusual boxed packaging that the disc was housed in. Members of Lynch's website picked it up as did a fair amount of other die hard fans, but the general public had to more or less make due without it until now. The film and the supplements that adorned that earlier restored release have been ported over to this standard edition that is now available at regular retail outlets in a normal keepcase and at a lower price thanks to distribution from Subversive Cinema.

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The Film:
Based on the true story of an Australian cop and his connection with a notorious criminal, the packaging for this hardboiled thriller suggests that it was the inspiration for the FX series The Shield. That may or may not be true, as The Shield does share some similarities with Blue Murder. At the same time, Blue Murder has a lot in common with television shows like NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Streets, as well as films like Goodfellas. And if you really want to dig deep and talk about similarities, influences and out-and-out rip-offs, we better mention Kinji Fukasaku's 1975 masterpiece, Cops vs. Thugs, a film that every great tale of police corruption owes a debt to.

The action starts in 1970s New South Wales, when hardboiled cop Roger "the Dodger" Rogerson (Richard Roxburgh) crosses paths with two-bit criminal Arthur...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The late, great Donald Pleasance (of Halloween fame) plays a scientist named Professor Nolter who is currently studying human mutations and meat eating plant life. He's an odd duck, to say the least, but he really puts his all into his work. Nolter hopes to some day make something out of his studies so that he can stop making a living as an English professor and dedicate himself to his beloved arcance science full time.

What Nolter's university pals don't realize is that he has a full fledged secret laboratory deep within his huge home, where, with the help of his facially disfigured assistant Lynch (Tom Baker of Dr. Who fame!), he uses his laser and his secret serums of dubious origin to turn people into giant plant-human hybrids. In short, he makes freaks. Lynch also has a hand in running a circus sideshow, an endeavor he undertakes with some help from a dw...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Flat out balls-to-the-wall grindhouse/exploitation filmmaking collides head on with a crime noir aesthetic in Gordon Trueblood's 1973 drive in hit, The Candy Snatchers. Never before given a legitimate home video release anywhere since its theatrical run over thirty years ago, this has always been one of those often talked about but rarely seen films of genre lore but Subversive Cinema change all that now with the films DVD debut.

Jessie (Tiffany Bolling of Wicked, Wicked and Kingdom Of The Spiders), her brother Alan (Brad David) and their friend Eddie (Vince Martorano of Cornbread, Earl And Me) are a gang of small time thugs who get a bright idea one day – they decide to kidnap a high-school girl named Candy (Susan Sennett of Big Bad Mama) and stash her away in hopes of extorting a half a million dollars in diamonds from her father, Ave...Read the entire review

Sometimes, a movie comes along that surpasses your expectations. From the title and the description, you expect one thing (a feel good comedy, a spine-tingling exercise in horror). But when the film finally finishes messing with your anticipation and settles in to show you what it REALLY has, the experience is incredibly shocking and 'oh so' satisfying. There are lots examples in the world of independent cinema, where the unknown quantity aspects of the unheralded artist make it hard to believe all the hype. Still, when one of those amazing auteurs steps up and delivers the unanticipated, it makes all those moments in front of the movie screen, mindlessly starring at stereotypical drivel seem well worth the time waste.

Battlefield Baseball is such a film. From the box cover and the ad copy, you'd think you were getting a cunning horror farce. Zombies and high schoolers engaged in a battle roya...Read the entire review

Shugo Fujii's Living Hell (2000) is a low budget horror film that was made in nine days for around $100,000. By no means great, for a film made in nine days, it is better than you would think.

Yasu is a wheelchair bound twenty-two year old living with his father, sister, and brother. His condition is mental, and his fragile constitution is put to a very extreme test when two relatives move in, an old, seemingly senile, woman, Chiyo, and her mute, anorexic looking granddaughter Yuki. For some reason, at night and during the day while the others are gone, Chiyo and Yuki begin to torture Yasu. His family assumes that Yasu's stories are part of his mental state. Unbeknownst to Yasu, while he suffers at the duo's hands, a tabloid reporter is tracking the strange case of a murderous old woman and her granddaughter, a twisted tale involving siamese twins, a mad doctor, and the lineage of a family ...Read the entire review