DIRECTED BY: Eric Mandelbaum
FEATURING: Thora Birch, Keith Carradine, Brendan Sexton III, Leo Fitzpatrick, Dean Winters
PLOT: An unambitious young man balances uneasy alliances with the authorities and his
psychopathic girlfriend when she involves him in a meretricious murder case.
Video on demand rental
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Non linear story telling, oddball characters and incomprehensible motivations [...]
“And the king, Nebuchadnezzar, answered and said to the Chaldeans, I recall not my dream; if ye will not make known to me my dream, and its interpretation, ye shall be cut in pieces, and of your tents shall be made a dunghill.”–Daniel 2:5, the passage Barton reads when he opens his Gideon’s Bible (Note that [...]
“My response to viewers who are puzzled by the plots is, I don’t think you’re so puzzled as you may think. We all have a certain amount of intuition, and that is something that can be trusted and should be trusted… And so when you see something that’s abstract in a film, and you seem [...]
DIRECTED BY: David Lynch
FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson
PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the
1960s through the 1990s. We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who [...]
DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch
FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne
PLOT: Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west, becomes a wanted man after he
shoots a man in self defense, and, wounded, flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an [...]
DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand
FEATURING: Jeremy Hosbein, Amanda Edington
PLOT: A survivor of the apocalypse is conflicted about his mother, who is addicted to a
black fluid that keeps her eternally young but causes disorientation and scarring.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Scars of Youth is a beautifully lensed film, filled with dreamlike images and montages. [...]
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: 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 [...]
DIRECTED BY: James Felix McKenny
FEATURING: Christine Spencer, Angus Scrimm
PLOT: The lone survivor of a devastated nation lives alone in an underground bunker.
Her only companions are the voice recordings of a long-dead scientist and the robots she sends out to do battle with the enemy on the planet’s poisoned surface.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: [...]
DIRECTED BY: Patrick Epino
FEATURING: Al No’mani, Scott McNairy, Rudy Ramos
PLOT: When he’s scarred in an assassination attempt on the eve of the Kuwait invasion,
a mute Saddam Hussein body double with no skills or interests beyond impersonating the Iraqi dictator loses his job and moves to Los Angeles to start his life over.
WHY IT WON’T [...]
