REVIEW: Ten Minutes to Midnight [2020]

Just get through the night. It’s pretty straightforward initially. A storm brews outside as Amy Marlowe (Caroline Williams) heads into the studio for the late-night radio show she’s hosted for three decades. She’s cutting it close, though, as the chaotic weather knocked down a utility pole and forced her to walk the rest of the way. While that wouldn’t normally be a problem, “normal” is thrown out the window once something swoops down to bite her on the neck. Now she’s bleeding. Station security guard Ernie (Nicholas Tucci) is talking…

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REVIEW: Hunter Hunter [2020]

It’s back. When Joe (Devon Sawa) and his daughter Renee (Summer H. Howell) find a severed critter leg in one of their traps, the latter seems legitimately afraid. That’s not to say a family living off the grid in the woods (enough where the teen might never have interacted with anyone besides her parents for the entirety of her life) shouldn’t fear a wolf stalking around the same areas they do for food and fur. Something in her voice—and later her mother’s (Camille Sullivan‘s Anne)—simply makes it seem like there’s…

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REVIEW: La Casa Lobo [The Wolf House] [2018]

But he will not catch me. You may need some context before starting Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León‘s dark animated feature La casa lobo [The Wolf House]—namely that of German fugitive Paul Schäfer and the colony he created in Chile known as Colonia Dignidad. There he and other Nazis war criminals committed countless acts of human atrocities upon those they imprisoned behind its walls. We’re talking the sexual abuse of minors, the internment and torture of dissidents on behalf of General Augusto Pinochet, and weapon smuggling. The area’s borders have…

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REVIEW: Anything for Jackson [2020]

No one has more time than a grieving family. The day Audrey (Sheila McCarthy) and Henry Walsh’s (Julian Richings) grandson Jackson died was the day they sold their souls to the Devil—figuratively speaking, of course. It wasn’t until they joined a Satanist church run by a bunch of posers in a community center that the idea to bring him back became more than simply a fantasy. That’s where they learned about an ancient book of dark magic possessing the means to do so and how they might find it. With…

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ANOMALY20 REVIEW: Schlaf [Sleep] [2020]

Am I awake? The nightmares are never-ending for Marlene (Sandra Hüller). One second she’s watching television with her daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) and the next finds her screaming in the dark, desperate to grab hold of a bedside journal with which to draw what she’s seen. It’s a house she can’t recall visiting. It’s a suicide by hanging, a suicide by rifle, and a suicide by blade. Over and over the images flicker upon her eyelids because the drugs offer little reprieve. If not for leafing through an on-board…

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ANOMALY20 REVIEW: De kuthoer [The Columnist] [2019]

Here’s to life. Never read the comments—a universal rule for all writers who publish, share, or create on the internet. No matter what you say or how you say it, there will always be a troll ready to disparage your work or you personally. They don’t need a reason beyond their ability to do so. They don’t need a salient point either. And it’s precisely because they possess neither that they ultimately live rent-free inside the minds of everyone they attack with artificial anonymity. One doesn’t even have to read…

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REVIEW: Freaky [2020]

Do I wipe? After steering two Happy Death Day films marrying slasher and time-loop tropes together for box office success, the question for writer/director Christopher Landon was, “What’s next?” Add Scouts Guide to the Zombies and you’d be right to assume it would be another horror comedy of some kind, but what sub-genre would be injected to give it a unique yet familiar flair? Or better yet: whose script would provide that injection with an overall sensibility he could get behind? Landon didn’t write the first Death Day film after…

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REVIEW: Kindred [2020]

Your not you’re mom. Right from the start of Joe Marcantonio‘s Kindred (co-written by Jason McColgan), we don’t like Margaret (Fiona Shaw). How could we when our two protagonists, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance) and Ben (Edward Holcroft), imbue such fear during every interaction they have with her? She’s the latter’s mother and very much entrenched in the old ways of a wealthy class. She treats her large, remote estate as a living creature that’s been in their family for nine generations and thus can’t fathom why her only son and his…

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REVIEW: Bad Hair [2020]

You always have a choice. It’s 1989 and Anna Bludso (Elle Lorraine) still hasn’t straightened her hair thanks to an ill-fated attempt years previously that left her scalp scarred and sensitive to the touch. She asked her cousin Linda (Chanté Adams) to do it then because her idols all had sleek, shoulder length locks and she knew it would give her a leg up on a career path towards DJ/VJ stardom even before landing a job at the urban arm of RMV known as Culture. As an interviewer tells her…

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NIGHTSTREAM20 REVIEW: Frank & Zed [2020]

It will end in the Orgy of Blood! Centuries ago in a small kingdom ravaged by evil wizard The Moroi, a king made a pact with the God of Death to usher in what he believed was his only chance at peace. By giving them cursed weapons with the power to vanquish their foe, Death also bestowed a prophecy that foretold an orgy of blood fated to take tenfold the blood spilled by the king’s hand the moment his royal line is ended. And it worked. The wizard was destroyed…

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NIGHTSTREAM20 REVIEW: Run [2020]

Will she be okay? The hospital equipment beeps above doctors frantically at work to save a baby in crisis, her mother awaiting news in another room. Then the textual definitions of numerous diseases arrive on-screen one after another to foreshadow the difficult road ahead for both parent and child to beat the odds and persevere. So seeing Diane Sherman’s (Sarah Paulson) smile when asked by the leader of her home schooling parents group if she’s ready to watch eighteen-year-old Chloe (Kiera Allen) head off to college is all we need…

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