Maybe you know about Hope’s latest novel, Killer Pictures (get yourself an autographed copy right here in our store!)
It tells the story of Dez, who should go to bed, but instead, she keeps watching horror movies for the Mayhem & Madness Film Festival. She sees a new one pop up in her to-review queue: Adam. That’s a funny title, she thinks, since there’s another judge named Adam. But instead of watching, she goes to bed, and by the time she wakes up, the judge named Adam has killed his wife and himself, and the film Adam has disappeared from the judging queue.
In its place is a film called Grant — the name of another judge. Is Grant doomed to Adam’s fate? Will Dez see her own name as a film title? If she does, will she dare watch it?
Welcome to the Mayhem & Madness film festival, where the judges are committed and the pictures are killer.
Intrigued? Well, treat yourself to our new short film, Killer Pictures, to watch as Dez falls into a mystery that may end her life.
Behind the Scenes!
Whole gang!Cat McAlpine as DezBrooklyn Ewing captures Blythe and JasonTyrone Russell films Krista Lively Stauffer with Jerry Larew and Hope MaddenGeorge directs the scene
Jan Komasa’s political thriller Anniversary certainly boasts an impressive cast. Diane Lane leads the film as Ellen Taylor, a Georgetown professor celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary to renowned DC chef, Paul (Kyle Chandler).
Their four children will be there: high schooler Birdie (Mckenna Grace), famous comic Anna (Madeline Brewer), environmental lawyer Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and her husband (Daryl McCormack), and beloved son who never made much of himself, Josh (Dylan O’Brien). Plus, Josh brought new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor). That one can’t be trusted.
Komasa crafts a “they have it all” opening to prepare us for the inevitable downfall. Ellen and Paul truly love each other, and their bickering kids love them and each other as well. But there’s an invasive species at their garden party, and no matter how strong Ellen believes her family to be, bad stuff is coming.
To the film’s credit, Lori Rosene-Gambino’s script is no pulpy thriller about a vixen corrupting a family. True to the filmmaker’s previous output (Corpus Cristi, Suicide Room), Anniversary dives into the large scale and intimate damage one persuasive but errant prophet can do.
Liz has a belief system encapsulated in her new book, “The Change.” It advocates that the people, passionate and unified, step beyond this broken democracy and create a single party that will redefine the country’s future. What transpires between Ellen and Paul’s 25th and 30th anniversary parties is a debilitatingly likely image of America’s near future.
The ensemble works wonders with slightly written characters. Komasa and Rosene-Gambino outline the insidious evolution with clarity, but the tale is too superficial to mean much. It’s a very talky script, yet very few questions are answered. Anniversary is entirely vague on the actual philosophy of “The Change”, making it tough know what people cling to and what the Taylors reject.
Worse, character arcs exist exclusively to further the plot. Deutch bears the worst of this, but everything in the film—especially the character development—is tell, don’t show. Aside from O’Brien’s, no arc is character driven. Each is plot driven and some are absurd.
Dynevor fares best, carving out a memorable, broken antagonist, a delicate survivor not to be trusted. She and Lane are formidable as antagonist and protagonist, but Anniversary doesn’t know exactly what to do with them.
Not everyone believes Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece of American filmmaking. I find those people suspicious. Luckily, those are not the people filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe (Memory: The Origins of Alien, 78/52) talks to for his latest documentary, Chain Reactions.
The film is a celebration of 50 years of TCM. The celebrants are five of the film’s biggest fans: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. It’s a good group. Each share intimate and individual reminiscences and theories about the film, its impact on them as artists, and its relevance as a piece of American cinema. What their ruminations have in common is just as fascinating as the ways in which their thoughts differ.
Heller-Nicholas, an Australian film critic and writer, creates a fascinating connection between Hooper’s sunbaked tale of a cannibal family with desert-set Aussie horrors like Wake in Fright and Wolf Creek. Meanwhile, Kusama sees the story as profoundly, almost poignantly American.
And Miike, genre master responsible for some of the most magnificent and difficult films horror has to offer, including Ichi the Killer and Audition, credits The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with inspiring him to become a filmmaker. And all because a Charlie Chaplin retrospective was sold out!
Philippe’s approach is that of a fan and an investigator. When Oswalt compares Hooper scenes to those from silent horror classics, Philippe split screens the images for our consideration. When Kusama digs into the importance of the color red, Chain Reactions shows us. We feel the macabre comedy, the verité horror, the beauty and the grotesque.
It’s fascinating what the different speakers have in common. So many talk about Leatherface, worry about him, pointing out that from Leatherface’s perspective, TCM is a home invasion movie.
What you can’t escape is the film’s influence and its craft. The set design should be studied. Hooper’s use of color, his preoccupation with the sun and the moon, the way he juxtaposes images of genuine beauty with the grimmest sights imaginable.
Each of these artists came to the film from a different perspective—some having seen it early enough in their youth to have been left scarred, others having taken it in as adults and still being left scarred. But each one sees layers and importance—poetry, even—in Hooper’s slice of savage cinema.
Chain Reactions is an absolute treasure of a film for fans of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Charming isn’t usually the first word to spring to mind when describing a movie about a down-on-his-luck hitman. However, that’s the word that comes up when thinking about director Allan Ungar’s film, London Calling.
Tommy Ward (Josh Duhamel) flees London for sunny Los Angeles after a hit goes terribly wrong. He finds similar work with a new employer, Benson (Rick Hoffman). Somehow, Ward also finds himself the unlikely caretaker of Benson’s son, Julian (Jeremy Ray Taylor, It). Tasked with turning Julian into a man, Ward takes him along on a series of hits.
London Calling is suffused with humor, from the opening scenes through several bloody shootouts. Throw in Julian’s interest in LARP-ing and a penchant for Furry porn, and London Calling delivers the right mix for a solidly funny movie.
Ungar’s script, co-written with Omer Levin Menekse and Quinn Wolfe, is very predictable, but Duhamel and Taylor’s chemistry keeps it fun. Their pairing is delightful. Duhamel plays to his strengths as a hitman who could clearly use a pair of glasses but refuses them. Taylor is believable both as a crime lord’s son (with a certain ambivalence toward violence), as well as a LARP-obsessed kid.
The film falters during its climax. Too many threads come together in unsatisfying ways. Worse still, London Calling loses its sense of humor and veers too close to melodrama.
Thankfully, it’s a brief misstep, and the overall effect is a solidly funny, enjoyable film about two charismatic outcasts.
Young wolf Gracie (Gabbi Kosmidis) is put to the test in directors Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro’s Night of the Zoopocalypse.
Gracie’s elder pack leader is insistent that something bad is coming, making the pack run drills and practice maneuvers in preparation. But Gracie is skeptical that anything will ever happen at their zoo. Of course, she quickly learns better once an asteroid crashes nearby.
Thrown together with a mountain lion (David Harbour), an ostrich, and a wily lemur with knowledge of late-night horror movie tropes, Gracie must figure out how to defeat the sudden threat.
The animation is not especially creative, but some creepy creatures help liven things up. Some of the monsters may be a bit scary for young viewers, but older kids might be delighted to see fluffy bunnies turn into sharp-toothed, voracious beasts.
The action kicks off quickly, making it tough to catch the names of all the animals who help Gracie, but also helping to move the film forward.
The ancillary characters tend to be the most interesting and the funniest parts of the film. Because the rapport between Gracie and Dan takes a while to manifest, when the focus shifts to them, the film is less fun.
Night of the Zoopocalypse references classic and contemporary horror, from The Thing to Stranger Things, and while kids might not catch every Easter egg, adults enjoy trying to identify the various influences.
But it’s not quite enough to make the film worth the 90 minute investment. With so many excellent animated films these days, Night of the Zoopocalypse is easy to overlook.
In 1520, Danish King Christian II (aka “Christian the Tyrant”) decided that he just had to have the crown of Sweden and would do anything necessary to snatch it for himself. Up to and including committing a barbaric mass execution that is commonly referred to as the titular “Stockholm Bloodbath”. If that sounds dark, brutal, and deathly serious, it’s because it very much was. Stockholm Bloodbath, however, is anything but serious.
Pitched more in line with bloody historical satires like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Jalmari Helander’s Sisu, or even Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Mikael Hafstrom’s Stockholm Bloodbath attempts to take this violent slice of Swedish history and fashion a wild, zany exploitation film around it. Unfortunately, unlike those cinematic gems, Hafstrom’s work here falls short on almost every level. It’s not that Hafstrom lacks the talent to do it. The man has previously given us perfectly entertaining films like 1408 and Escape Plan. But there’s just too much off about these proceedings for that to matter.
To its credit, the film does have a good cast filled with the likes of Sophie Cookson, Claes Bang, Emily Beecham, and Ulrich Thomsen, all of whom do their best with what they are given amidst the cacophony of odd filmmaking decisions. The script is a tonal rollercoaster in the worst of ways, pitching from serious to slap-happy from scene to scene. The pacing of the edit is no better, with some sequences dragging at a snail’s pace and others blazing by faster than needed. Such cinematic hyperactivity can be an asset if you have a pitch-perfect script and a crackerjack edit. The aforementioned Tarantino and Ritchie have fashioned entire careers out of this. This has neither a masterful screenplay nor expert editing and instead feels like The Swedish Chef himself might have been at the helm for some scenes.
One can see the movie that everyone involved wanted to make, but the end result just doesn’t pass muster. Perhaps it might play better in its home country, as despite being an English-language film, it is indeed a Swedish production. For this writer, however, what should be a biting piece of violence-filled historical satire just ends up being a bad history lesson told by a chaotic storyteller who doesn’t quite know who their intended audience is or how they even want to tell their tale.
When childhood friends reunite for a birthday weekend, they didn’t sign up for this RV road trip of a lifetime—that ends up cutting several short.
Writer/director Andy Fickman (Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2) has a few decent jump scares up his directorial sleeve with Don’t Turn Out the Lights, an early spooky season horror flick.
He shows up to the party with a potentially fun cast of characters, cool sound effects, and a well-used fog machine. But…that’s about it.
The characters are thin and underwritten. It’s established that these people are all deeply connected (except for one critically-underused plus one, a roommate of the core group played by John Bucy). I expected secrets and interesting group dynamics to play into the horror movie set-pieces.
Instead, we get stock characters: Instagram Girl, Jock, Stoner, Rich Bitch, Pick Me, Boyfriend, Rapey Racists…
With such thin characters, it’s difficult to muster up the empathy for any one of them to really care much about their fate. Which would have been fine if the Big Bad had been compelling.
But, it’s not really clear what’s causing all the carnage. Is it an external force or something driving the friends into crazed-self harm/psychopathy? It seems to be made up of a mish-mash of horror tropes that have absolutely nothing to do with each other all kind of deployed on random timers.
The friends theorize about what’s going on in between convenient “waves” of paranormal attack.
In the end, there’s just…no payoff. It’s giving early draft of Cabin in the Woods energy, but on a much lower budget, and with the ending still largely undetermined.
A spare, competent take on the isolating toll of caregiving and grief from first-time feature writer/director Patrick Dickinson, Cottontail explores the beauty in human connection and the ability to find that connection though emotional vulnerability and honesty.
When Japanese widower Kenzaburo (Lily Franky, Shoplifters) receives a last request from his late wife, he embarks on a journey to Lake Windemere in England’s Lake District. He’s been drained by trying to care for Akiko (Tae Kimura, House of Ninjas) alone as she struggled with dementia, attempting to shield his adult son, Toshi, from the more unpleasant (and literally shitty) parts of this work. This only drove the two men apart.
But it’s clear that their estrangement started years earlier. Akiko was the glue that held the family together. Kenzaburo was too focused on his own work to let Toshi into his life. And now, he wants to take this last journey alone, as if he is the only one who lost someone.
Weaving together the main narrative with key flashbacks, Kenzaburo wanders lost—metaphorically, in his own grief and shame, and literally, as he attempts to find Lake Windemere on foot, having gotten on the wrong train.
There’s a brief interlude where Kenzabro asks for help at an English cottage door and finds fellowship with another widower (an underutilized Ciarán Hinds), but otherwise the film keeps its focus on the main family and the drama that pulls them together even as they drift apart.
Simple and straightforward, like the beautifully prepared plate of sushi that appears in the first act of the film, Cottontail lets Franky carry the movie with the strength and confidence of an emotionally nuanced performer.
Is the film predictable? Yes. But so, sadly, is loss and grief and the struggle to stay emotionally available when adulthood means growing old and falling apart.
