Screen Anarchy

Every genre, sub-genre, and micro-genre eventually exhausts itself. But genres typically don’t end; they expand, they evolve, and adapt, drawing on new ideas from outside the genre, mixing elements from other genres, and ultimately resurrect themselves, reborn on the ashes of the old. Someone, somewhere, is thinking far too much about the current state of the undead sub-genre. Fresh, bold, new ideas are what the exhausted zombie/undead sub-genre desperately needs. Instead, longtime fans of the sub-genre George Romero reinvented in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead have been subjected to the never-ending Walking Dead spin-offs and the occasional standalone straight-to-streaming, straight-to-the-memory-hole entry made on a micro-budget and D-level actors. Writer-director Lowell Dean (the Wolf Cop series) provides more than a few in his latest…

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Smile 2 picks up right where Smile left off. Well, “six days later,” as onscreen text tells us. It’s a bold move from writer/director Parker Finn that combines with a bravura long-take opening sequence to announce that Smile 2 is going to be a lot. The movie pulls from a variety of sources, from the gaudy pop pageantry of Vox Lux to the sometimes shocking gore of Hollywood’s flirtation with extremity in the 2000s, to deliver an often effective horror film that bites off more than it can chew. Or perhaps it just chews too long? The narrative moves smoothly enough from the first movie to the second, as we follow the trail of the communicable entity at the center of the Smile universe in…

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Starring Nick Frost and Synnøve Karlsen star. A couple who find their jovial cab driver diverts them to a remote, haunted road, revealing disturbing motives and his true intentions.

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Even with all the collective force of human imagination, evidenced by books, scripts and conspiracy theories, nothing can be as wonderfully and sometimes scarily incredible as reality. Some history lessons, even seemingly lesser ones, are so genuinely wild it’s hard to be certain what they teach, if anything at all. One of the stories that fall under this category is the one of Sara Jane Moore, a suburban single mother turned FBI informant after the Patty Hearst kidnapping, who attempted to assassinate US President Gerald Ford in 1975. Her efforts weren’t successful and Moore went to prison for thirty years. Her figure has become almost forgotten, especially next to Charles Manson’s protégé Lynette Fromme, who also attempted to kill Ford, mere weeks prior to Moore….

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A plane crashes in the Amazon jungle leaving a sole survivor, a five-year-old child named Rebecca, who is then saved just in time by an Indigenous Iruaté man. Nine years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) is now widely known as a “miracle” and a faith healer, heavily promoted by her missionary father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido). As the girl eagerly participates in tent revival sermons, two events occur disrupting the long-established routine. First, a new nurse, Denise (Sabine Timoteo), arrives and suddenly starts questioning the details Rebecca knows about her past. Then, there is the pressing matter of rising tensions between the Iruaté tribe and the loggers destroying their land, and both Lawrence and Rebecca insert themselves into this conflict. Transamazonia, which premiered at the 77th…

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Clearly inspired, and having some old timey fun with modern filmmaking tools and more than a touch of self-awareness, Mike Stasko’s goofy homage to Plan 9 From Outer Space! era Ed Wood, Vampire Zombies…From Space! has been working its way through the genre circuit this month and dropped a teaser trailer. A grizzled detective, a skeptical rookie cop, a chain-smoking greaser, and a determined young woman must band together to save the world from Dracula and his scheme to turn the residents of the small town of Marlow into his personal army of vampire zombies.   We are big fans around here of the screenwriters Alex Forman’s & Jakob Skrzypa’s delightfully obsessive short film, You Money’s No Good Here, in which a man stews over the meaning of…

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It’s hard to imagine what any of us would do, if we were driving along a quite road and came across a dead body, let alone the body of a member of our family. For Shula (Susan Chardy), on her way home from a fancy dress party, in her fabulous sparkling mask that highlight her guinea fowl costume, finding the very much dead body of her Uncle Fred, seems to spark little emotion, but the barest sense of familial duty. She makes the necessary phone call to her father, setting off a chain of events that will see her embody the creature whose visage she wears. After several shorts, Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni became more widely known in 2017, with her resounding feature debut I…

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The world has been ravaged by a pandemic. Alone and outside the safety of the forest, Marko faces a shattered world shrouded in silence and danger.

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It seems like election conflicts are the norm right now, or perhaps it’s always been this way, and we just notice it more in the age of constant social media and news. Kip Oebanda’s (Abandoned, Liway) latest film, Balota, addresses election strife in the extreme, having just played the 44th annual Hawaii International Film Festival. Synopsis: A teacher pays an increasingly steep price for defending the democratic process of the election. The teacher in question is Emmy, played by Marian Rivera (My Guardian Alien). There’s a corrupt mayor up for re-election, and some locals are bribing voters with cash. Emmy cannot be bribed. In fact, it’s shown at a local protest that the incumbent, very rich Mayor Hidalgo is responsible for the death of at…

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Hippo examines the coming-of-age of two step-siblings: Hippo, a video-game addicted teenager and Buttercup, a Hungarian Catholic immigrant with a love of classical music and Jesus. Like the Ancient Greek Aphrodite, Buttercup’s love is unrequited by a brother who prefers to indulge the art of war and chaos. The result is a hormone-fueled, tragicomic waking nightmare that must be seen to be believed.   Mark H. Rapaport’s comedy drama, Hippo, is coming the theaters on November 12th. Hippo premiered at Fantasia last Summer, where Josh and I caught it. I couldn’t quite explain what I had witnessed at the time, but Josh could, which is why he reviewed it and has been quoted in the official trailer. Take a look for yourself down below and…

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