Crowdfunding push - Extinction: Prologue

A new post-apocalyptic short film is looking for crowdfunding help in realizing its vision of a deserted and destroyed planet Earth. The film’s Indiegogo page states:

Twenty-five years after a cataclysmic event killed most life on Earth, a lonesome wanderer discovers an abandoned housing complex in the middle of a forest. There he meets another survivor – a weird old man who constantly talks about a long-lost friend called "Matthew". When the hermit is willing to share his greatest treasure, the wanderer decides to stay for a while. However, there is more to this strange place than meets the eye, since the apocalypse unleashed something that was hidden for a very long time...

Film Review: What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Madman Entertainment

The combination of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi is obviously something that continuous to make pure comedy gold for more than a decade now. Although these guys are obviously multi-talented, things like What We Do in the Shadows underline that their humor skills are simply incredible.

Set in Wellington in New Zealand, this mockumentary follows the lives of four vampires who live there. Every one of them comes from a different era, but Viago, a former German dandy, mainly acts as the camera crew’s host and narrator. His vampire friends/roommates are more focused on other things, mainly drinking blood and finding ways to get into new and hip clubs and bars (they have to be invited in, of course). When a new vampire, a local by the name of Nick enters their small crew, things start to change and get even weirder.

Film Review: Tusk (2014)

Copyright: A24 Films

It is rare to see a film where the crucial moment of failure is clearly visible and easy to identify. For me, Tusk is without a doubt one of these films, which was blessed with big potential, only to see it destroyed by a single miscalculation.

Kevin Smith directed Tusk, partly I believe, as his way of showing everyone that he really doesn’t care about what other people think is a good movie plot. In it, he tried to connect apparently random things which hold absolutely no intrinsic terror in them, like walruses and Canada and mold them into a horror tale.

As his means of delivery, he chose body horror, a genre that is even at the best of times hard to pull off and often in recent history, ended up as disastrous movies. Tusk continues this trend.

Crowdfunding push: Bad Acid

Mixing hard drugs and horror tales already sounds like a good idea, but when you throw a washed-out hypnotist in the mix, you get the basic outline of a very promising short film called Bad Acid. The plot of the film goes like this:

Marvin Maskelyn is a hypnotist and magician whose success has come and gone leaving him a bitter divorcee with nothing in the bank and a penchant for getting stoned. After a performance that went from bad to bloody awful, Marvin acquired a black eye but lost his beloved prop of a genie lamp. Visiting an antique dealer friend who pities him, Marvin is given an antique lamp with a chequered past and a secret stash of LSD blotters within. With nothing left to lose, he takes one.

Review and Interpretation: Maps to the Stars (2014)

Copyright: Entertainment One

David Cronenberg is clearly very smart, but this special kind of intelligence of his allows him to examine both the current and future world. Back in 1983 he envisioned a TV audience glued to the scenes of death and torture, backed up by a weird financial system which provides the same entertainment to the masses for profit and kicks. Today, in the era when burnings and beheadings present the main fuel for global Breaking News segments, Cronenberg emerges as a dark prophet of our own even darker nature.

In Maps to the Stars movie, he gutters the notion of child celebrities and the wider arena of Hollywood showbiz. The story of this truly scary film begins with a young girl arriving in Los Angeles, apparently shielded by total anonymity. In the same town, Benjie Weiss, a child actor and a superstar is on a strict sobriety regime enforced by his team of parents and agents, in spite of the fact that he is only 13 years old. Of course, this doesn’t stop him from being a total egocentric jerk.

Film Review: Wild Card (2015)

Copyright: Lionsgate

Wild Card is one of the films that can be listed under the Neo-Statham movies. In these films, it seems like Jason Statham is trying to slightly get away from his previous batch of action films while he still remains grounded in the action and thriller genres. He tries to make this work by playing action guys who are not into being actions guys, but are into drinking and wasting their life. Redemption is a great example of this trend and it definitely continues with the Wild Card.

In this movie, Statham plays Nick Wild, a washed-out Last Vegas tough guy who works as something between a low-level bodyguard and a private investigator (which he claims he is not). The purpose of these jobs is to allow him to drink and gamble, both of which are going into the red for Nick (although not in a extent of the character Bruce Robertson from the movie Filth).

One day, Holly, one of his friends from the Las Vegas strip nightlife, tells him that she was assaulted and molested by a mobster and his goons and begs him to help her get back at them. Nick is dismissive at first, knowing the connection of the mobster in question, but then reluctantly agrees.