Apologies first: last week, I said the Dark Backward review would appear, but real life intervened and we couldn’t get it out. Expect to see it appear early next week. Other reviews that are planned, but may or may not appear next week: our long-anticipated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind treatment, John Hand’s low-budget [...]
David Firth, creator of our first Saturday Short “Crooked Rot”, receives his second appearance on our site with the eighth episode of his bizarre comedy series, Salad Fingers. (If you haven’t seen the previous seven, don’t worry. There’s no background information you’ll need in order to understand this one.) Whether you laugh [...]
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (2009): An intriguing, though badly underpromoted, idea. Shades of Waking Life, a team of animators animated scenes from the public [...]
Background: reader Funkadelic has gone above and beyond the call of duty in making suggestions/recommendations for inclusion on the site, both in the feature and short film categories. Not that I want to encourage readers to compete to outdo him and try to get their own dedicated posts, but I thought I could clean [...]
DIRECTED BY: James Felix McKenney
FEATURING: Don Wood, Christine Spencer, Angus Scrimm, Reggie Bannister, Debbie Rochon, Michael Berryman, Larry Fessenden
PLOT: In this re-imagining of the “Christ-sploitation” films shown in churches and
probably a few Southern gynocologists’ offices of the 60s and 70s, we follow a young man and woman who make all the wrong choices in a haze [...]
DIRECTED BY: Luc Besson
FEATURING: Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker
PLOT: 300 years in the future, an ex-special ops agent turned taxi driver must collect
four stones and discover the fifth element to stop the universe from being destroyed by evil, with the help of a scantily clad supreme being.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: [...]
DIRECTED BY: Peter Jackson
FEATURING: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon
PLOT: A murdered 14-year old girl watches her family search for her killer from the
afterlife.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There are a few weird visual elements in Susie’s pleasant and candy-colored Purgatory, but The Lovely Bones tells a conventional, if unusual, [...]
DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand
FEATURING: John R. Hand, Amy Olivastro
PLOT: A scientist—or perhaps his monster, it’s never quite clear—kills women to harvest
their body parts so the doctor can resurrect his dead love.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Missing apostrophe aside, there’s lots to admire about Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare, though not as much to love. Director Hand [...]
Some low-budget, under-the-radar reviews are coming next week: look for pre-release coverage of James Felix McKenney’s Christian scare film parody, Satan Hates You (2009), and John Hand’s micro-budget artsploitation horror Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare (2006). For something more mainstream, we’ll throw in a review of the bizarre, reader-suggested black comedy The Dark Backward (1991). (How many [...]
DIRECTED BY: Run Wrake
PLOT: A young girl finds a magical dancing idol when she cuts open a rabbit.
COMMENTS: Run Wrake’s Rabbit is a beautifully frightening, and award-winning, parable about greed that taps into the ancient, grim fairy tale tradition of placing children in harm’s way to illustrate a cautionary point. Rabbit, however, turns that motif [...]
