The Movie:

The feature film debut of Belgian filmmaker Jonas Govaerts, 2014's Cub introduces us to a twelve year old Cub Scout named Sam (Maurice Luijten). He's a quiet kid, he keeps to himself a lot and isn't nearly as social as the other boys are. This winds up seeing him picked on by some of the other kids now and again, he's a bit of an easy target. This doesn't go unnoticed by the troop leaders, however, and among the adults he is well liked except for one leader, Peter (Stef Aerts), who picks on the poor kid pretty relentlessly.

When the troop head out into the woods for their latest camping trip, Sam's keen sense of observation comes in handy. See, they're camping the woods that are rumored to be haunted by Kai (Gill Eeckelaert), a feral boy who runs around in a mask that he's made out of bark. Most don't actually believe that Kai exists but Sam sees him shortly after ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Chris Alexander, editor in chief of genre mag Fangoria, has branched out in the last few years and entered the filmmaking arena, beginning with his low key vampire film Blood for Irina and its sequel Queen of Blood. Now he is trying a slightly different subject matter with the very low budget, shot entirely on I-phone Female Werewolf.

The film is extremely spare and minimalist. The main character, referred to in the credits only as She (Carrie Gemmell), is a frustrated woman who plods along at her nondescript office job during the day, while indulging in increasingly bizarre fantasies by night. These fantasies are sexual, bloody, and mostly focus on the office girl she works with (Cheryl S...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Argentinian filmmaker Valentín Javier Diment in 2011, Memory Of The Dead (or La memoria del muerto if you prefer) sets things up with a scene in which we meet a man named Jorge (Gabriel Goity) and his wife Alicia (Lola Berthet). Their life together seems idyllic, at least from this quick opening scene, so it's quite a surprise to Alicia when she finds her husband dead. She grieves, of course, but then a short while later gathers together a group of his closest friends at her late husband's remote mansion estate where they plan on throwing a little get together/wake in his honor. And so a painter named Nicanor (Matias Marmorato), Jorge's childhood best friend Mauro (Rafael Ferro) and his girlfriend Ivana (Flora Gro), and another friend named Hugo (Luis Ziembrowski) and a woman named Monica (Lorena Vega) all come together with Alicia to do just that.

The Movie:
We don't see too much Argentine film in the US, so it's nice to see a solid offering turn up, especially in the horror genre. La Memoria del Muerto a/k/a Memory of the Dead is a sharp, contained horror film, that amps up the weirdness and generates a solid ninety minutes of gonzo spectacle.

Jorge (Gabriel Goity) is a hearty man in the prime of health, with an adoring wife and a lovely estate. It's something of a shock to Alicia (Lola Berthet), the wife, when she wakes up one morning to find him dead. She is bereft at the loss of her lover and helpmate, but does manage several months later to arrange for a group of Jorge's closest friends to assemble at the estate to spend a weekend of fond remembrance and memorializing of their lost comrade.

Of course, this being a scary type movie, there's more going on here than is obvious, and odd things start to happen rathe...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's a bit of a stretch to describe Toad Road as a horror movie, at least in the traditional sense. There's very little blood, no gore and none of the standard horror film clichés. But it does create a convincing sense of disquiet and dread, and a feeling of unreality pervades it that keeps the audience off balance.

James (James Davidson) is something of a slacker: a heavy recreational drug user whose father refuses to support him anymore unless he enters therapy, which he does grudgingly. He'd much rather party with his friends, drop acid and eat mushrooms. His outlook on life changes a bit when the innocent Sara (Sara Anne Jones) joins the group, and starts taking tentative steps into the drug culture. As Sara becomes more and more enamored with hallucinogens as a gateway to an expanded consciousness, James becomes more discontent with the culture, and protective of S...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Horror anthology films are certainly a hot item right now, and generally that's been a good thing. Korean entry Horror Stories is somewhere in the middle of the pack quality wise, with two of its four segments being exemplary, and two only mediocre.

The film has a framing segment involving a young woman, Ji-won (Kim Ji-won) who's been kidnapped, and whose kidnapper (Yoo Yeon-seok) asks her to tell him scary stories to help him sleep, or he'll kill her, Arabian Nights style. Ji-won proceeds to tell the scariest stories she knows.

The plots are varied. There's a serial killer on an airplane, a couple of kids alone at home, a Cinderella style tale of jealous stepsisters, and a zombie story. Below are short descriptions of the segments, as provided with the DVD:

Don't Answer the Door
A little brother and sister home alone at night and under siege....Read the entire review

THE FILM:
There's a fine line between the shocking and the merely salacious. There's an even finer one between exploiting a subject and over-exposing an audience to material too grim to humanly contemplate. Take a film like I Spit on Your Grave. The subject matter wants to make the total debasing of an innocent woman it's first half stock in trade. Then, once she's been significantly defiled and left for dead, she returns to seek her revenge in ways just as nauseating as the manner in which she was treated. Then there's efforts like the Japanese Guinea Pig films, giddy gorefests where nothing is left to the imagination and everything is spelled out in alarmingly sexists visions of blood and torture. Sitting somewhere between these two extreme examples is the Chilean chum bucket Hidden in the Woods. As an illustration of how homemade horror filmmakers view their often uns...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Beautiful people in jeopardy is probably the most basic, and most successful, horror formula out there. The producers of Swedish splatter film Wither take that age old idea and run with it, throwing in buckets of blood, demon possessions and heavy homage to Sam Raimi.

A group of friends, led by the charming Albin (Patrik Almkvist), is heading to the country to stay the weekend in an abandoned farmhouse that Albin's father ran across. Along for the trip are Albin's girlfriend Ida (Lisa Henni), her brother Simon (Patrick Saxe), Markus (Max Wallmo), and a couple of other girls to round out the prettiness factor. The audience knows something's not right in the area, since the film opened with a middle aged man having to kill his daughter, who was possessed and eating his wife. The attractive young people don't know what they're getting themselves into.

The trouble starts w...Read the entire review

The Film:

As seen through the eyes of Jasna (Isidora Simijonovic), the life of a Serbian teenager is not much different from anywhere else. She is frustrated by nearly everything her mother asks her to do, especially in regards to helping her father, who has been struck down by illness. She works out her emotions by hitting clubs with her girlfriends, where she courts a thuggish boy named Djole (Vukasin Jasnic). Most of her interactions are filtered through the video camera on her mobile phone, which she uses to document her turbulent lifestyle. Although each new development in her life presents another form of responsibility for Jasna to take on, she continually throws caution to the wind, rushing forward with the wild abandon that epitomizes reckless youth.

Given the dramatic disparity with which films depict the life of teenage girls vs. teenage boys, it feels almost unfair to say that Clip doesn't...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

Writer/director Gu Su-yeon's "Hard Romanticker" is a tough film to digest. On the surface, it's a unique brand of Yakuza film, focusing on Korean-Japanese immigrants and their experiences in the Japanese underworld. What makes the film even more intriguing is it's actually the semi-autobiographical tale of the writer/director. Within the first few minutes of the film, any viewer with common sense would realize that a huge emphasis should be placed on the "semi" portion of that claim. Japanese TV star, Shota Matsuda serves as the nearest thing the film has to a protagonist, as Gu, the character I assume we're to believe represents the film's captain.

The underlying problem with "Hard Romanticker" is the massive disconnect between reality and an...Read the entire review