This is one I should have liked more, since it deals with video equipment and an obscure piece of TV history. In 1987, the airwaves of Chicago were briefly hijacked by a prankster wearing a Max Headroom mask. He managed to override the signals feeding the TV transmitters and first broke into a local newscast for just a few seconds, but the alert engineers saw it right away and were able to restore the signal. He then tried the city's PBS station, which didn't have as many technical people on duty, and was able to override an episode of "Doctor Who" for more than a minute. His audio signal wasn't too clear so nobody's sure what he was saying other than some possibly rude comments about local TV personalities. This was before the internet but the incident made the national news. The FCC looked into it but to this day the perpetrator has not been identified. He wisely never made any further attempts at...Read the entire review

Possum:

Writer/director Matthew Holness stretches dread like taffy in Possum, his cinematic adaptation of his own short story. In our Google-influenced world, it's interesting to note that the third entry when one types 'Possum movie' completes as 'Possum movie explained'. That entry, however, is instructive, as Holness' black, bristly-haired confection is neither an easy swallow, nor a neatly wrapped package. On the other hand, it is an uneasy tour-de-force filled with haunting cinematography and two stunning performances. While Possum is absolutely Highly Recommended on its own merits, you need to ready yourself for a macabre, minimalist meditation, and if that sounds groovy to you, you'll not do much better.

There's not much in the way of plot, beyond mention of an abducted teen, and a sad man, Philip (stolid, wounded Sean Harris) who spends his time in a dilapidate...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Ted Geoghegan and co-written by Geoghegan and Grady Hendrix, 2017's Mohawk is set during the War Of 1812, with Americans and British/Canadian forces locked in frequent, bloody combat. Here we meet a Mohawk woman named Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn). There's more to Oak's situation than they realize, however. She's involved in a bit of a love triangle with fellow Mohawk Calvin (Justin Rain) and a British arms dealer named Joshua (Eamon Farren). Calvin was involved in a raid against Hezekiah Holt (Erza Buzzington), an American that gathers together a few men to form a posse of sorts. Their intentions are to kill any Mohawk unfortunate enough to cross their path.

As such, Oak and Calvin, with Joshua going along with them, go on the run, hoping to find safety in the woods and with their tribespeople. But of course, Holt is overtaken with his bloodlust and his thirst f...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The fourth installment in writer/director Adam Green's Hatchet series is 2017's Victor Crowley. The film begins with a prologue in which a man and his girlfriend are in the swampy woods of Louisiana, clearly in love. He proposes to her just as the film's titular villain (once again played by Kane Hodder under a lot of prosthetics and makeup) shows up only to slaughter them both after she says yes. It's an amusing and remarkably gory way to start the film. Cue the opening credits and we're off.

Unfortunately from there, the movie slows down immediately. From here we catch up with Andrew Yong (Parry Shen reprising his role from the last film in the series). He's the only man to have met Victor Crowley and lived and while there are those who believe he killed his friends and not Crowley, he's never the less written a bestselling book about his experiences. In fac...Read the entire review

MFA, whose title comes from the Master of Fine Arts academic degree which the main character is pursuing, has been mostly promoted as a revenge film and seemed potentially satisfying- the main character suffers a brutal rape and then makes the perpetrator pay for it- dearly. 1978's I Spit on Your Grave, done with little sense of taste or restraint, is a perfect example of that. For me however this turned out to be partly about revenge but also partly a "social issue" movie, where the writers want to address a problem and have it appear to be nearly inescapable and happening everywhere in the world the story takes place.

Francesca Eastwood (Clint's daughter, who appeared with him at a ...Read the entire review

There are two potentially great movies in the premise of Catfight. One is a pitch-black and brutal slapstick comedy about two women who just hate each other's guts. The other is a satire in which the two women's ongoing battle represents some sort deeper metaphor about conflict. While Catfight is frequently very funny, even featuring fleeting glimpses of deranged brilliance, the film never quite finds a clear path within the two possibilities.

The two women in question are Ashley (Anne Heche) and Veronica (Sandra Oh). Briefly friends before a vaguely-defined falling out in college (which may have been caused by Veronica's discovery that Ashley is a lesbian), they reconnect years later in wildly different circumstances: Veronica's husband, Stanley (Damian Young) is celebrating the closure of a contract which will make his company billions off an impending war in the Middle East, an...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Before giving this Blu-ray a spin, I assumed One Eyed Girl was a horror movie. It is not, though it is about some horrible things, like a brainwashing cult, addiction and suicide. There seem to be a lot of movies being made about cults lately, including the superior Martha Marcy May Marlene and Ti West's The Sacrament. One Eyed Girl...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The hospital-is-limbo/waiting room from hell concept behind Convergence is a good one. If only I knew what the hell was going on half the time in this frenetic, muddled thriller from Drew Hall. Convergence wants desperately to mean something, and it might have succeeded with a better editor. After responding to the scene of a bombing, Detective Ben Walls (Clayne Crawford) becomes trapped in a mysteriously anachronistic hospital with faces new and familiar. Thus begins an odd mix of horror, thriller, mystic and religious elements that confounds more than it entertains. I'm all for a head-trip, but Convergence gave me a headache.

The film makes vague allusions to the 1996 Atlanta bombings, though it begins in 1999. Det. Walls leaves his wife and baby daughter at home. The wife is mad because of something that happened in the detective's p...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Ryan Wise, I Am Thor starts in the early days of one Jon Mikl, later to become better known as Thor, the real life Canadian heavy metal superhero. We learn how Jon was obsessed with comic books and superheroes as a kid, even going to class dressed as Superman. From there, through his older brother, he got into bodybuilding and weight lifting and soon after became a competitive bodybuilder. This led to a career in show business, with Jon soon working in a nude review among other things. This, in turn, segued into a career in rock n roll. We learn how Jon had always been interested in music, starting a band at a young age called The Ticks, but with his bodybuilding past it was time to try something new, something different… it was time for Muscle Rock wherein he'd combine his love of hard driving music with his not inconsiderable physique to really put on a sh...Read the entire review

I don't know how the rest of you feel, but I thought 2015 was a pretty lackluster year for horror. I was anxious to see Sinister 2, but the filmmakers veered away from the original's restraint to deliver the same cookie-cutter bullcrap I wanted to get away from. After 8 years of talking about film projects that never came to fruition, Eli Roth returned with not 1, but 2 new feature films. Unfortunately, both The Green Inferno and Knock, Knock only served to remind me how overrated he is as a filmmaker. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension promised to finally show the stuff that's been hidden throughout the last five films… but, you know, too little, too late. Oh, and the Poltergeist remake? Killer film… as in, its poor performance killed the budgets of future genre flicks, such as the theatrical rendition of Stephen King's IT. You might say, "What about...Read the entire review

When categorizing a period in horror movies, trends in subgenres would often be looked at as breaking points, such as "torture porn" (as weak and misused a term as it is) or "found footage". However, horror's real modern renaissance kicked off with the 2009 release of Paranormal Activity, a runaway success that prompted an industry-wide shift toward low and micro-budget genre pictures. In addition to Paranormal's five sequels, Insidious and Conjuring turned into cheap franchises for major studios, with The Purge soon to join their ranks, and the production company Blumhouse has essentially made its name on sub-$10 million productions, many of them horror. Yet, despite an ongoing trend that shows no sign of stopping, it'd also be hard to get horror fans to collectively point to a classic film that's come out of this phenomenon. Buzz is easy to come by (It...Read the entire review