REVIEW: Lake Nowhere [2016]

“My blood is liquid offering” Directors Christopher Phelps and Maxim Van Scoy take a page from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez‘s book by delving into slasher fare of old for their own grindhouse-type homage of Italian blood-letting, maliciously Evil Dead-esque vines, and a murderer in the vein of Leatherface and Jason Voorhees protecting a lake of perished souls. The film is Lake Nowhere, titled after the final 45-minute or so “feature” that follows trailers for the unmade When the River Runs Red and Harvest Man alongside a commercial for fictional…

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REVIEW: Tom à la ferme [Tom at the Farm] [2014]

“Today a part of me has died and I cannot cry” For wunderkind Xavier Dolan, a film unreleased in America two years after completion is hard to believe. But that’s exactly what happened with his adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard‘s play Tom à la ferme [Tom at the Farm]. On the surface it should be his most marketable work to date and yet his fifth, Mommy, found itself on the shortlist for Oscar glory before we were even able to see it. Something gave distributors pause and perhaps that thinking…

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REVIEW: 100 Bloody Acres [2013]

“…We’ll Fertilize Ya!” There is a fine line between horror spoof and horror comedy. The former tries to make fun of the genre while the latter looks to appeal to audiences of both halves. Since most horror generally has a comedic streak anyway, accomplishing this duality above the juvenile humor of a Scary Movie shouldn’t be too hard. But while comedies with horror elements—Beetlejuice, Bubba Ho-Tep, and Ghostbusters—have been a staple through the years, it was 2004’s Shaun of the Dead that gave mainstream audiences a chance to embrace the…

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BNFF12 REVIEW: Fractured Minds [2011]

“Sometimes I want to smash your face into a window” The horror genre has been used to speak on political matters, mask psychological traumas, signify an internal struggle through manifested pain, and to just plain scare audiences with a healthy portion of blood and guts. Frank Battiston‘s Fractured Minds wants to feed into the more than meets the eye mentality, but I’m not sure if the multi-narrative finds the sure-footing to do more than portray the usual backwoods cretins and a quartet of city folk unknowingly walking into their lair.…

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