#nightstream

Your reaction to this film will be based on your personal tolerance for irony, cynicism, and joyless negativity.

The best way I can think of describing “Bloody Oranges (Oranges Sanguines)” is unapologetically French. This will be either a positive or negative characterization based on your personal tolerance for irony, cynicism, and joyless negativity. This twisted tale of mildly (and not so mildly) reprehensible characters (including a crooked politician suspected of tax fraud, an abusive pervert, a…

I’m thrilled to be covering this year’s Nightstream online film festival! Check out my coverage so far here. There are loads of genre feature films, retro screenings, short films, panels, and conversations. Here is my second dispatch from the festival!

In the history of music, there’s one band that is in a category all their own. Gwar burst onto the scene in the late 80s / early 90s and were a weird combination of shock rock stage show (like Alice Cooper and Kiss before them), S&M imagery, horror and monster movie theatrics, and heavy metal sound. The band came onstage as monsters and costumed, so much of the time you didn’t even know what the band members looked like. Over the years, they had a lot of pop culture cameos: appearing in a daydream in Empire Records, becoming favorites of Beavis and Butt-Head, and more. In the new documentary This is Gwar, director Scott Barber (who co-directed last year’s excellent Nickelodeon doc The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story) is doing a deep dive into Gwar. Too bad, news just recently broke about how Dave Grohl almost joined the band when he was a teen, and that news broke too late to find its way into this doc.

Gwar movie poster

The doc started out strong. It showed the band was more than just a rock band, they were like an art collective / garage band / production company. It shows the band’s trajectory and several dramatic points in the band’s history (some members died, some came close). There’s also some interviews with notable fans (Matt Pinfield, Thomas Lennon, Alex Winter, Weird Al Yankovic and Empire Records’ Ethan Embry). While it was intriguing to get up close with a band you never see behind their masks, it felt like this was a bit long at almost 2 hours. It could’ve been a lot stronger as a short feature (under 90 min.) or long short (30-45 min.). It was wildly entertaining to see some of the clips of the band, but as a non-fan, this felt very For Fans Only at a certain point.

Gwar

In early 2019, Shudder premiered their original documentary Horror Noire about the history of black horror films (read my review here). The success of that doc has lead Shudder to produce an original Horror Noire anthology series that is set to premiere this month. To celebrate, I caught the conversation Celebration of Horror Noire presented by Shudder featuring author Tananarive Due (one of the interviewees in the Horror Noire doc) and writer Steven Barnes (one of the writers of the Horror Noire anthology) and moderated by film critic and programmer Sarah-Tai Black. It was a great conversation and I’m looking forward to the anthology!

Horror Noire doc poster

I’m thrilled to be covering this year’s Nightstream online film festival! Check out my coverage so far here. There are loads of genre feature films, retro screenings, short films, panels, and conversations. Here is my second dispatch from the festival!

In addition to feature films, there’s a bunch of panels and discussions. I caught 28 Films Later: What Every Filmmaker Should Know on their First Movie According to Divide/Conquer. D/C producers Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath share some of their bits of wisdom and what each filmmaker should know going into their first feature film productions. This wasn’t some infomercial, but they shared some good bits. I was interested because among their many films they produced included 2017′s Lucky (read my interview with director John Carroll Lynch here). While I, myself, have directed several films and been on quite a few movie sets, I even learned a thing or two from listening to these two talk.

Camille Rowe in Cosmic Dawn

Next I caught the sci-fi thriller Cosmic Dawn. I was interested in catching this because it is about alien abductions and I’ve always been fascinated with alien sightings, Roswell, etc. Lead character Aurora is now a grown up who has spent her whole life searching for her mother who she saw abducted by aliens as a child. At a bookstore, the clerk (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui of Entourage) recruits the woman for a UFO cult. I was into the first half and then it kinda lost me. Something about this just felt like it was straight-to-video or made-for-cable-late-at-night. Maybe it was that I saw this after watching Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, which was one of the highlights of the festival (read my review here). Either way, I was disappointed!

I’ll have more reviews and coverage in the coming days.

I’m thrilled to be covering this year’s Nightstream online film festival! Check out my coverage so far here. There are loads of genre feature films, retro screenings, short films, panels, and conversations. Here is my second dispatch from the festival!

movie poster...from 2 minutes into the future

Every now and again, you check out a movie at a film festival just because the synopsis in the program seems intriguing, not because you know anything about the cast or crew or anything. But when you see it and give it a chance you are so grateful you watched it. There is a sense of discovery that you saw something you discovered at this festival before the film gets wide distribution or any of the talent become famous. For me, that movie at this year’s Nightstream is Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes from Japan. This movie is so wildly and energetically fun and cinematic! It was shot entirely on an iPhone. Its about a cafe owner who discovers that the TV in his cafe suddenly offers a glimpse into the future, two minutes in the future that is. I’m not going to say anything beyond that, because then it would spoil the fun. The elaborate pacing is trying to do the one-shot film approach of Hitchcock’s Rope and Sam Mendes’ 1917. I am still trying to wrap my head around this mind-fuck of a movie. It deals with time travel in a way that’s both funny and clever. This is hands down one of the best movies I’ve seen at a film festival in a long time! Go see it when Indiecan Entertainment releases it!!!

In addition to the film screenings at this festival, there are also various filmmakers and horror experts who comment on films: 

I caught Julia Marchese (a friend of mine who directed the excellent documentary Out of Print, one of the best documentaries of the 2010s) discussing the 1981 slasher flick Final Exam. Now I need to go out and watch that...on VHS.

Gigi Saul Guerrero discusses From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, which turned 25 earlier this year. Cool to hear her speak so enthusiastically about Rodriguez and Tarantino!

I’ll have plenty more reviews and coverage in the coming days.

Last year, after a number of film festivals needed to cancel their planned in-person festivals, four U.S. genre fests Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF), Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, North Bend Film Festival, and Overlook Film Festival joined forces to have one big virtual film festival online, Nightstream. What got my attention about this festival immediately was that one of the partners is BUFF, which I’ve been covering since 2016 (read my coverage here). Earlier this year, BUFF announced they would not be doing a 2021 festival, but hope to be back in March 2022. While that is too bad, I’m thrilled that Nightstream is returning this year from October 7 to 14 all online. 

Nightstream poster

I’m thrilled to be covering this year’s Nightstream. There are loads of genre feature films, retro screenings, short films, panels, and conversations.

One of the Official Selections is Landlocked, which I just got to review for Salem Horror Fest (read my review here). Check it out at Nightstream, you’ll thank me later. 

Another Official Selection is We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which I caught at Independent Film Festival Boston this past May (read my review here).

I’ll have plenty of reviews and coverage in the coming days.