These days it feels some films are made because of their “twists.” Please stop. Twists are fun and they work some of the time, but if you have a cool minor idea for a twist, please don’t build a very subpar feature around it.
When I first saw Wolf Creek I was amazed. The film still holds up to this day. It’s also one of the best “true story” films I’ve ever seen.
Ever since The Legend Of Boggy Creek there has been a plethora of Bigfoot films. Luckily Bigfoot is something I’m slightly obsessed with, so I love how this has become a full-blown subgenre that is still booming to this day.
Breakfast
Should one try to understand Death Bed: The Bed That Eats? No. Should one watch Death Bed: The Bed That Eats? Yes.
I have and will always be biased when Gina Carano plays the lead or has a major role in a movie. She’s always been a favorite of mine and I get super giddy whenever I watch anything she is in. When I heard about her new film In The Blood I was freaking pumped.
Sci Fi on a budget is one of the hardest tasks in filmmaking. One thing you constantly worry about is how the effects in your film will look. You don’t want them to look cheap and cheesy because that’s a good way to lose your audience quickly. Also, when it comes to this genre, you need a story that is original and not a copy of a copy.
I’m in love with many distribution companies—Scream Factory, Cult Epics, Synapse, Arrow, Scorpion Releasing, and many more—but one company that stands out from all the rest is Vinegar Syndrome. It is the one company that is all over the place in terms of genres as well as the one that is releasing everything that is dead or dying. These guys truly believe in film preservation throughout all genres of film and yearn to keep them alive. The only other company that comes close is Cult Epics, who are well on their way to greatness.
I often ask myself: what is the most disturbing movie I’ve seen? I can never come up with an answer because the most disturbing things aren’t in films. We have seen countless things online that are real and have never left our minds. Nico B’s Pig and 1334 will never leave my mind . . . ever.
Ahhh, Death Spa. . .
I felt like I was eight years old all over again when my copy of Death Spa arrived last week. I distinctly remember renting it at the video store one summer while I was visiting my grandmother in Ohio. It was a night I would never forget. Death Spa is the perfect example of a fun, cheesy, straight from the ’80s horror flick that maintains both goofiness and bloodshed until the bitter end.
Suspense is vital to the horror genre. Blood and guts can be effective, true, but without suspense, they’re just gore. Filmmaker Ti West has proven that he can build tension in a film until we’re begging for release. The House of the Devil was a master class in how to freak the hell out of audiences starved for actual scares. Plus, it’s just a great movie. The Innkeepers was less terrifying, but still worthwhile, and West’s contribution to the first V/H/S found footage anthology, “Second Honeymoon” is one of the few films in the last five years to make me sleep with the lights on. What’s most impressive about that is the way absolutely nothing happens in the film for the longest time, so the payoff is inexplicably frightening.
All of this made me extremely excited for The Sacrament, especially since West was once again tackling found footage (a style which I quite like), but this time using the real-life events at Jonestown as the basis for his film. It makes me sad to report that The Sacrament did not live up to my expectations.