Based on James Cullen Bressack’s story, Brandon Slagle directed Frost, and Robert Thompson penned the screenplay.
Vernon Wells and Devanny Pinn are solid in the story about a young pregnant woman and her father fighting for their lives.
After their car swerves off the road, they become stranded on a remote mountainside during a hellacious storm. The story sets up gore and shock here, where the movie takes place in one location. But the screenplay lacks character development, so the audience can care for the young woman trapped in a car about to have a baby.
More detail about the strained relationship between Abby, played by Wells, and her father, played by Pinn, would have given more substance to the story. I would have cared more about the outcome.
Grant, her father, leaves Abby in the car so that he can find help. They make exchanges over walkie-talkies, which is the only father-daughter bonding in the movie.
However, they never discuss Grant’s drinking or her mother’s passing, and they haven’t seen each other in five years. Had these obvious flaws developed more into the screenplay, it might have kept the interest higher.
Because the relationship between Abby and Grant never bonds, there is no emotional tie to build up from the shock at the end.
Thank you, Film Threat, for the additional information.
As a dark comedy of heavy-handed and trashy entertainment, this Christmas horror movie may make you wonder if some of its laughs are intentional or a bit off the rocker. You’ll see buckets of blood, along with bellies full of laughter.
Filmed on location in South Lake Tahoe for just 13 days, the low-budget production comes through with a talented cast that’s stiff and nightmarish.
Written and directed by Sean Nichols, Red Snow follows Olivia Romo, played by Dennice Cisneros, as a struggling vampire romance novelist holed up in South Lake Tahoe. Here, she’s forced to defend herself against real-life vampires during the holidays.
It all starts with an injured bat named Luke, played by Nico Bellamy, who becomes a handsome vampire after slamming into her living room window.
Unbeknownst to Olivia, she takes pity on the wounded animal and places it in her garage. She nurses the bat a bit, and the next day, the little creature transforms into a real-life Edward, a full-size vampire.
Olivia knows when opportunity knocks, so she makes a deal with Luke. Read her unpublished manuscript, and he can stay a few days in the garage to heal from an unpleasant wooden stake injury. She keeps him satisfied with microwaved pig blood in a mug. In return, he gives his feedback on the manuscript.
Luke is your typical vampire, but he takes a liking to Olivia. Their relationship barely flourishes when Olivia’s suspicion of Luke’s true intentions surfaces as his deadly past catches up with him.
The humor takes hold with a rather odd private detective, played by Vernon Wells, who acts more like a voyeur, spying on her and rummaging through her garage.
The evenings become sinister with pale figures dressed in black visiting the cabin, who turn out to be Luke’s vampire friends, played by Laura Kennon and Alan Silva. They want Luke to return to their brood, of course, after they help themselves to the blood of Olivia.
More romance and less terror, sticking with the Edward and Bella theme, might have saved the movie in the long run.
Thank you, The Guardian, for the information about the movie.
Directed by Michael Tyburski, The Sound of Silence impinges into a symphony of almost undetectable sounds that make up a moment of silence.
The story follows Peter Lucian, played by Peter Sarsgaard. He’s determined to catalogue all of the undetectable sounds. Through his job as a New York City “house tuner,” the hyper-methodical Peter works meticulously to diagnose the discordant ambient noises —produced by everything from wind patterns to humming electrical appliances — adversely affecting his clients’ moods. It’s an intriguing premise to speculate or theorize, and I have heard of the government creating “silent sounds” to influence people without being aware of the sound.
When Peter takes on the challenging case of Ellen, played by Rashida Jones, a lonely woman plagued by chronic exhaustion, Peter discovers the mysteries of the soul, maybe even more significant than the mysteries of sound.
The film is a quietly moving portrait of a harmony-obsessed man learning to embrace the dissonances of human emotion. Sarsgaard has a huge list of impressive credits, such as Jarhead, Shattered Glass, Education and a couple of episodic shows: Dopesick and Interrogation.
Jones is the daughter of Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton. She’s starred in Parks & Recreation, The Social Network and several voiceovers: Spies in Disguise, Klaus and Duncanville TV series.
I used to volunteer a lot of my time for the Citizen Commission on Human Rights, documenting, exposing, and disseminating psychiatric abuse. Today, I still volunteer, though not as much. Therefore, I feel qualified to say Killer Therapy into the making of a psycho killer.
Co-written and directed by Barry Jay, Killer Therapy follows a young man named Brain, played skillfully by Jonathan Taylor, who looks for help in his therapists, because he has issues with his father, mother, and adopted sister.
His life becomes lost in the mental health system, bouncing around from therapist after therapist, growing up into a young man, also played skillfully by Skyler Caleb, who is worse off than when he started going to the therapists. He still has anger issues, but it’s all twisted and confused from his psychotherapy.
When his life eventually hits rock bottom and falls apart, he correctly blames his therapists, embarking on the dark revenge of everyone who ever wronged him.
One-by-one, he kills his former therapists, then finally he comes to terms with the fact that that system doesn’t work, and he must accept his shortcomings by helping himself get better.
Killer Therapy is a horror, slasher movie, but not like the usual. Here you get the killers backstory, finding out that his therapists contributed to the making of a psycho slasher. It’s driven but a disjointed view that offers insight into the importance of reforming the mental health system.
The rest of the cast includes Elizabeth Keener, Thom Mathews, PJ Soles, Adrienne King, Daeg Faerch, Javon Johnson, and Ivy George.
Here is the only clip available, interviews with the actors and director.
The movie is based on an epic science-fiction poem.
Written and directed by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja, Aniara is their first feature film. Based on an epic 1956 science fiction poem by Harry Martinson, Kagerman shared the poem with his grandmother while she was in a hospital recovering from a stroke. “Growing up, I was very close to my grandmother. She was extremely playful and interested in literature. We often role-played books we had read, even when I got older,” explains Kagerman. “Together we went to see a theater play of Aniara. The following night she got a stroke. I started to read the book aloud to her at the hospital. As she was getting better, we started to role-play it and pretend that the big hospital was the space ship Aniara. Every doctor and patient its passengers. That’s when the story truly hit me and us, on a very deep level.”
Aniara is the space ship forced off the flight path from Earth to Mars.
Kagerman and Lilja worked with each other for over ten years now. “And since the beginning of our collaboration, we’ve been highly influenced by each other and stolen each other’s interests,” jests Lilja.
The movie is beautiful but heart-wrenching and not a story for the faint of heart because it is sensitively intense. The imagery and story haunt you after the end of the movie because it is intelligent. The movie is not uplifting but more of sociological look at, according to Martinson, where the Earth populace is headed.
The movie introduces one of the many spaceships used for transporting Earth’s fleeing population to their new home-planet Mars. The destruction of Earth occurs, and before the crew and passengers become accustomed to being in space, she collides with space junk and thrown off course. The passengers slowly realize that they’ll never be able to return.
Mimaroben played by Emelie Jonsson.
Mimaroben, played by Emelie Jonsson in her first feature film leading role, runs a room where a sentient computer allows humans to experience near-spiritual memories of the Earth.
As the ship drifts further into the endless void more and more passengers require Mimaroben’s services and stress of the job builds on her as she is the only one who can keep the growing insanity and lethal depression at bay.
In Aniara’s inexorable journey towards destruction, there is a warning that cannot be emphasized enough. There’s only one Earth. It’s time to take responsibility for our actions.
The movie is in Swedish with English subtitles, so finding Aniara in English is not offered. The directors felt the necessity to bring the story to the silver screen. “The apocalypse has already started, hasn’t it? There’s a risk that Aniara might become our future, and the questions the film deals with are extremely relevant today,” adds Kagerman.
Mimaroben has a relationship with another woman.
Though Martinson’s poem is ambiguous on whether the main character is a man or a woman, Kagerman and Lilja felt it essential to focus on a woman while the overall movie centers on females. “It’s not 100% clear what gender the main character has in the book, although it’s probably a man,” explains Lilja. “But we love our female lead and always had her in mind. In the film, she has a relationship with another woman and her best friend, the astronomer, is a woman.”
The movie’s special effects are low-key without extensive CGI or expensive science-fiction sets. Filming occurred on location in shopping malls and Scandinavian Ferries with set design by Linnea Petterson and Maja-Stina Asberg. The directors wanted to create a here and now feeling. “We wanted the ship to feel familiar. If we were to emigrate in large scale to Mars today, we’re pretty sure that the ships will contain both shopping malls, bowling, and spas. But especially shopping malls,” explains Kagerman.
It took the two directors four years to complete the movie with most the time spent in post-production with reshoots to add to the storyline. They shot inserts in their living room and at the farm where Sophie Winqvist Loggins, cinematographer, lives in the south of Sweden.
Aniara won several awards on the film festival circuit including Les Arcs European Film Festival Best Actress for Emelie Jonsson and honorable mention for Kagerman and Lilja. T
Aniara is streaming on Amazon and the usual on-demand platforms available in your region.
Martinson message in his poem is serious as a warning to the people of Earth. The directors want the audience to reflect on the spacecraft they’re already onboard, called Earth and the extremely short period we have on it. “It might sound depressing, but it’s actually the opposite. We are here today. There is still some time,” adds Kagerman and Lilja.
Written and directed by Benedikt Erlingsson, Woman of War follows Halla, played by Halldóra Geirharðsdótti, who seems mild-mannered and friendly to her neighbors. On the contrary, she is a vigilante against the aluminum industry. At night, she crusades to destroy the polluters and causes of climate change.
The newspapers report the vandalism calling her plight as “The Woman of the Mountain.” Halla is scathing mad using a vicious, yet effective, tirade against the Iceland aluminum industry. Her campaign keeps her functioning “normal” but jeopardizes her dream.
A dream of becoming a mother to an orphaned girl from Ukraine, Halla ups the ante, becoming more daring with her antics to stop the aluminum company. She finds herself fighting against time as she questions whether her second life as a notorious eco-terrorist is worth the sacrifice of her impending motherhood.
Filmed with the vivid backdrop of hills in Reykjavik, Iceland, the movie marks another collaboration with Erlingsson and Geirharðsdótti’s long working relationship. I admire Erlingsson’s ability to infuse drama and comedy while Geirharðsdótti’s knack for subtle points of humor drew me into the story. Her vicious tenacity and heart could have gone overboard but pulled back just in time with the introduction of fabled motherhood and discovering what it signifies to be a hero.
Geirharðsdótti carries the story of Halla, a 50-year-old independent woman with a quiet routine, though she leads a double life as a passionate environmental activist. The humor is subtle but effective as the drama builds, and she becomes bolder and bolder from petty vandalism to outright industrial sabotage. She triumphs pausing the negotiations between the Icelandic government and the corporation building a new aluminum smelter in her region.
The story shifts when Halla receives an unexpected letter confirming the adoption of a child. A little girl who waits for her in Ukraine. As Halla prepares to abandon her role as saboteur and savior of the Highlands to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother, she decides to plot one final attack to deliver the aluminum industry a crippling blow.
The final attack is suspenseful because “What if she gets caught?” Her goal to be a mother is no longer achievable. All her efforts are in vain, yet her crusade is for the children like her adopted daughter—securing a livable planet for the generations to come.
Watching the
movie until the end is worth it, though there are subtitles. DVDs are available
in the States with streaming available on the usual outlets.
Written & Directed by Andrew Bujalski, Support the Girls follows Lisa, played by Regina Hall. The story is about her life as a general manager at a highway-side sports bar that resembles called Hooters Double Whammies. Just look at the promotional photos and get the idea – tits and ass.
Yet, Lisa is the last person anyone expected to find this type of establishment. She comes to love the place and its customers. As an intuitive mother, she nurtures and sternly protects her ‘girls’ on the staff.
The straw finally broke her back one day, and her genuine buoyancy was pummeled from every direction.
Lisa learns that fantasy sometimes becomes a reality, and nothing is far from the truth.
In 20014, Bujalski won the “Someone to Watch” Independent Spirit Award for Funny Ha Ha, which is nothing like Support the Girls. He offers his thoughts on establishments like Hooters. “It seems like just about the simplest business concept you could imagine – ‘What if all the waitresses in this restaurant wore tight, cleavage-y halter tops?’– but I couldn’t get over how bizarre it ultimately was. No culture besides present-day America would ever produce mass-scale demand for such a place, a business that seems about 10% strip club and 90% TGI Friday’s/Applebee’s/Chili’s/Cracker Barrel. Strippers are supposed to make men feel like badass transgressors. But these women are just supposed to make you feel normal — the proverbial “red-blooded American male.”
I totally agree with what he says because…Really? How can a woman act normal when she is practically bare-assed?
Hall liked Bujalski’s script and wanted to be in the movie. “From the moment I read it, I just resonated with Lisa. I had seen Andrew’s work and thought he wrote such a beautifully complex yet simplistic script. He was able to find the humanity in this space that we take for granted or don’t necessarily even think about. I just loved the chord that he touched on with this group of people, these women, and girls. I thought Lisa was great: her need to help, her need to fix, her need to save, and her need to be needed. It just resonated on so many levels.”
The movie is receiving accolades from critics. Regina Hall is the first Black woman to win Best Actress in the New York Film Critics Circle’s 83-year history this year for her portrayal of Lisa.
Hall also starred in another strong cultural movie called The Hate U Give. The film is based on a book of the same name, but the power of the situation is nothing compared to Support the Girls. Though, Lisa does nurture the girls in a motherly way. This situation is not racist like The Hate U Give.
The cast is rounded out quite nicely with Haley Lu Richardson, Shayna McHayle, James LeGros, Dylan Gelula, AJ Michalka, Brooklyn Decker, Jana Kramer, John Elvis, and Lea DeLaria.
Co-written and directed by Crystal Moselle as her first narrative feature, Skate Kitchen, follows an introverted teenage skateboarder named Camille, played by Rachelle Vinberg. She is from Long Island and meets and befriends an all-girl skateboarding group. The group is New York City-based called Skate Kitchen.
Moselle mentions in an interview, “I was originally going to do a feature documentary film, but after doing the short, and hanging out with Kim Yutani, who is one of the programmers at Sundance, she was just like, ‘Why don’t you do a feature version of this?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re so right.’ I figured out a writer to work with. That January, we didn’t have a script or anything. We kind of just had a summary of what we wanted it to be. We went to Sundance and just started having meetings and financiers, and got the budget.”
In the movie, Camille becomes part of the in-crowd, and estranges from her mother, and falls for a mysterious skateboarder guy named Devon, played by Jaden Smith. Yet, their relationship proves to be trickier to navigate than mastering her skateboarding tricks.
Smith knew Vinberg before they worked on the movie together. They met on social media because Smith saw that Vinberg was a skateboarder and reached out to her. Moselle explains, “One day he hit Rachelle Vinberg up on Instagram! He just thought she was cool because she skateboards and he skateboards and we were like, ‘Oh, he should be in the movie.’ I randomly know his agent, so I was just like, ‘I have this film idea that Jaden might be into,’ so his agent got me a meeting completely separate from Rachelle. And it was months after that. And then I showed him the short film and he was like, ‘Oh I know that girl.’ We wanted his character to really authentically lead into the subculture of New York City skateboarding.
According to production notes, Moselle immersed herself in the lives of the skater girls and worked closely with them giving authenticity to the movie. “I was on the train and I was listening to them just chat, and they were super interesting and they had skateboards, and I asked them, “Would you guys want to do like a video project, something?” We exchanged numbers and when we met up, we just started hanging out and chatting. I just was super inspired by them. I didn’t really know much about being a female skater and how much intimidation they go through. I gave them the opportunity to do this short film with Miu Miu (That One Day) and I pitched them to do the short film. That went to the Venice Film Festival. From there it started to get a lot of attention and gain a lot of traction.”
The movie is gripping and combines poetic, atmospheric cinematography with spellbinding skating sequences. The movie captured my interest because, though I am not a skateboarder, I follow skateboarding movies. The experience of women in male-dominated sport tells the story of a girl who learns the importance of true friendship, loyalty, and self-discovery.
The rest of the cast members are Dede Lovelace, Nina Moran, Kabrina Adams, Ajani Russell, Jules Lorenzo, Brenn Lorenzo, Hisham Tawfiq, and Elizabeth Rodriguez.
The other screenwriters are Aslihan Unaldi and Jennifer Silverman. Moselle offered some insight on working with Unaldi. “There was a certain point in time where we had to shift the story and simplify it a lot more and Aslihan Unaldi came in and worked on it every day for like three months. We completely re-shifted the whole thing. She was really my collaborator on this, but it was all my ideas, and I wrote a lot of the script. I’ve never written a script before and we had to make this happen so quickly, because we had to shoot this film before these girls grew up, because right now they’re already too old for the film.”
Directed by Ben Lewin, Please Stand By introduces the world of Wendy, played by Dakota Fanning, a confusing place. Wendy is an imaginative and resolutely independent young woman. She is a brilliant young woman with autism.
The autism message is upbeat and supports individualism – accept people for who they are. If you don’t, you take away their freedom.
Wendy yearns to leave the steadfast schedule of her group home. She wants to return to a life she had with her sister’s family. They have a new baby, so she needs to prove she can be responsible first before she can live with her sister again.
Wendy is a staunch fan of anything to do with Star Trek. She even spends a great deal of her free time writing fantasy stories, proving she is a capable person.
The movie starts off tilter but we soon learn that Wendy uses her Star Trek filter to understand people. People are an indecipherable code.
The story takes an interesting turn when Wendy learns about a screenplay competition. She is determined to finish her 500-page Star Trek script, so she can enter the competition. If anyone knows about screenwriting, you know 500 pages are about 390 pages too long.
Wendy needs to get the script to Hollywood. The problem is getting it there by the deadline, Wendy must travel hundreds of miles outside her protected boundaries to submit her script in person. The story becomes a road-trip movie.
Wendy has an adorable little dog named Pete. She carries him in her purse with only a few dollars in her pocket. In her terms, she is boldly going where she has never gone before. Her unconventional therapist, played by Toni Collette, is not far behind in hopes of catching up with her. The same for Wendy’s sister, played by Alice Eve.
On her trip, Wendy meets all sorts of people who help her. These are colorful moments in the movie. They all encourage her to follow her dream and find her place in a world she hopes will accept her. She wants to be accept just like everyone else.
Fanning is great as Wendy, and its refreshing to see her work with Collette and Eve.
