// Category Archive for: Film Festivals

SXSW Movie Review: Lamb

By Brad Henderson

I’m a sucker for awkward, low-key relationship dramas. Lamb is one of those films that is easy to fall in love with. It is beautiful, heart-breaking, and just brutally uncomfortable at times.

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SXSW Movie Review: We Are Still Here

By Brad Henderson

I’ve been obsessed with horror films all my life. Early on I had a fascination with 1970s and British horror films. This was mainly because our local video store stocked a lot of the Hammer titles and those caught my eye first before I discovered the nitty gritty SOV horror films from the ’80s.

That is one of the main reasons why I absolutely loved We Are Still Here. It feels like it was pulled right out of 1976 and thrown into our laps with modern gore and special effects. Virtually everything shown in the film uses practical effects and there is minimal CGI. This made it much more enjoyable and gave it that old school feel.

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SXSW Movie Review: The Invitation

By Brad Henderson

Dinner party movies are becoming a favorite of mine. I love the premise of a dinner party because most of time we are dealing with a group of friends and usually the characters are relatively close to one another. These past few years I’ve seen films like Would You Rather, The Perfect Host, Coherence, and now, The Invitation. Each time I’m surprised at the routes the films take and how different each film is in its own way.

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SXSW Movie Review: Deathgasm

By Brad Henderson

At the beginning of the Deathgasm screening Sam Zimmerman from Shock Till You Drop asked the audience, “Have you ever seen a movie and thought, ‘Yes, that film was made for me’?” I truly feel that the filmmakers of Deathgasm somehow knew that I love and cherish heavy metal horror and decided to bring me their movie. Heavy metal and horror movies are similar in many ways and they work even better when they are blended together.

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SXSW Movie Review: The Final Girls

By Brad Henderson

Most horror parodies aren’t smart and in recent years they have gotten really tedious and boring. Towards the beginning we had films like Pandemonium, Student Bodies, and Saturday The 14th. Then the craze died down but came back with a huge bang due to the success of Scary Movie. Ever since then we’ve had a few films pop up here and there (Cabin In The Woods, Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, and Scream) and more serious filmmakers even started making these kinds of movies. With the newer flicks, parody was thrown out of the window and they turned into horror comedy throwbacks. The Final Girls will give a new meaning to these kinds of comical throwback flicks.

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TAD Film Fest Review: Refuge

By Less Lee Moore

If you’ve seen The Road or Season Four of The Walking Dead, you’ve seen more artfully realized versions of the film Refuge. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s the truth.

Andrew Robertson’s film peeks into the lives of some of the survivors of a bacterial plague that has wiped out much of humanity. Unfortunately, we find this out in a post-credits montage that is reminiscent of 28 Days Later or The Bay but not as clever. In fact, we’ve all seen so many zombie/post-apocalypse movies at this point it would have been more compelling to just show that kind of footage without explaining what actually happened. It would have given the movie a much-needed bit of creepy mystery.

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TAD Film Fest Review: Why Horror?

By Less Lee Moore

Why Horror? is for every person who’s been mocked for loving everything encompassed within horror film fandom. Horror writer and hardcore fan Tal Zimerman is the subject of this documentary from Nicholas Kleiman and Rob Lindsay that explores why people are drawn to one of the more maligned, misunderstood genres in popular culture.

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Knoxville Horror Film Fest 2014: Feature Reviews

By Jeffery X Martin

The Editor

Most of the movies screened at the Knoxville Horror Film Fest are now available for either VOD rental or disc purchase. They weren’t at the time, though; technology moves quickly, and so does consumable product. Here’s a quick rundown of what was shown, with a humbly presented opinion on each.

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TAD Film Fest Review: The ABCs Of Death 2

By Less Lee Moore

K is for Knell, by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper

The ABCs of Death was a worthy, if not always satisfying, exercise in horror anthologies (review). In some ways, it’s more ambitious than the V/H/S series; trying to fit in 26 films by 26 directors is a challenge, especially when the only common theme is death. While I quite liked the first installment, I think The ABCs of Death 2 is in many ways a better film.

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Knoxville Horror Film Fest 2014: Finding Your Tribe

By Jeffery X Martin
Photos by Hannah Martin

There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don’t understand. Internal is the human heart.
—John Carpenter

They stare at us as they leave, that smug crowd of assholes leaving the theater. Art movie snobs, still dabbing away tears caused by The Hundred-Foot Journey, the white guy with the neckbeard talking out of the side of his mouth to his Asian-American girlfriend about how he is so far above the real message of Dear White People that he didn’t actually like the movie, but it’s OK.

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