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Posted on December 9, 2015

Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) Review

In the pantheon of sharkploitation films, Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) stands apart as a legitimately interesting take on the shark in horror trope. Unlike its predecessors, the audience isn’t asked to identify with those seeking to wrangle the flesh eating oceanic monsters. Rather, the sharks and their somewhat psychotic human caretaker become the heroes of the piece. Directed by known exploitation auteur William Grefe, the film includes all of the ridiculousness you’d expect of a B film with an underlining message about the importance of protecting the natural world from humans. The end result is a bizarre film that still resonates years later.

Posted on December 2, 2015

The House on Pine Street (2015) Review

Dawn Keetley

The House on Pine Street now ranks in my top 3 independent horror films of 2015, just below Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation and just above Perry Blackshear’s They Look Like People (both reviewed here).

Synopsis: A young couple, Jenny (Emily Goss) and Luke (Taylor Bottles), move from Chicago back to Jenny’s hometown in Kansas. Jenny is seven months pregnant and is recovering from some kind of mental breakdown involving her pregnancy (at least, that’s what her husband and mother think). It becomes increasingly clear that Jenny is not happy—not happy to be back in Kansas, not happy to be in the same town as her overbearing mother, Meredith (Cathy Barnett), not happy to have left her life in Chicago, and not happy about to be pregnant. Soon strange things start happening in the house on Pine Street.

Written by Natalie Jones, with the collaboration of Austin and Aaron Keeling, who also directed, The House on Pine Street is a truly independent production, made by graduates of the University of Kansas and the University of Southern California, all under the age of twenty-four. During the nineteen-day shoot, the cast and crew lived in the “haunted” house in which they were filming, conditions reminiscent of the production of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.[i]

Posted on November 20, 2015

Aimy in a Cage Review (2015)

Elizabeth Erwin

79 mins | Hooroo Jackson | (USA) | 2015

Grade: A+

With lush cinematography and a challenging feminist infused narrative, Aimy in a Cage is unlike any other horror film in recent memory. While there are certainly traditional elements of the genre at play in the film (forced imprisonment, global plague), the narrative is less interested in creating a sense of impending doom and more focused on exploring how perceptions of sanity are dependent upon environment. The end result is a remarkable film that contextualizes adolescent female sexuality in a wholly original way.

Our entry into the story comes courtesy of comic style drawings through which each character is introduced without fanfare. Not only do these drawings set a stylistic tone for the film, but they are an effective callback to the graphic novel upon which the film is based. On the surface, the story is a simple one. Aimy, whose refusal to acquiesce to any of her family’s behavior modification demands, is deemed to be troubled and is forced to undergo a lobotomy of sorts to make her behavior more socially acceptable. Meanwhile, the Apollo Plague, a mysterious and deadly virus, begins to make the national news.

There is an unfair tendency of audiences to equate low budget with low production value but Aimy in a Cage shatters that myth with a visual flair that suggests a Hollywood style budget. Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of works by David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick in that the visuals serve to create a story parallel to the one verbalized on screen. Kubrick, in particular, appears to have been an influence on director Hooroo Jackson, not least in his framing of Aimy’s forced medical procedure: the scene instantly draws comparisons to Alex’s conversion therapy in Kubrick’s famed A Clockwork Orange.

Posted on November 18, 2015

Top Five Films Screened at the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival

Dawn Keetley

I just got back from a weekend at the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival, where some amazing films were in the lineup. Thanks to Hughes Barbier for putting together such a stimulating event.

Here are my top five, all of which you should watch when they become commercially available:

1. The Invitation, directed by Karyn Kusama (USA). Grade: A+

Michael Gingold of Fangoria introduced The Invitation at IIFFF, saying it was one of the best horror films of the last couple of years. I agree (though I still think the standout horror film of 2015 is David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, which I review here).

Gingold also said that the less you know about The Invitation going into it, the better—and I wholeheartedly agree with that too. I (purposefully) hadn’t read any reviews of the film ahead of time, and so I got to experience the disconcerting and disorienting events just as the protagonist did. It’s very difficult to write anything about the film without giving too much away and thus spoiling it, so I guess the two principal things I want to convey here are: (a) see the film (which will apparently get general release in March 2016); and (b) don’t read any reviews of it before you do.

Posted on November 15, 2015

Emelie (2015): Reviews from #IIFFF

Dawn Keetley

Emelie is a strikingly unsettling film for about the first fifty minutes. The plot is fairly simple: parents Dan and Joyce (Chris Beetem and Susan Pourfar) go out to celebrate their anniversary. Their usual babysitter has plans so they hire a girl they don’t know, albeit one vetted by friends. Unbeknownst to them, however, a couple has kidnapped the girl who was supposed to be babysitting for them and the mysterious Emelie (Sarah Bolger) arrives on their doorstep instead. Dan and Joyce go happily out to dinner leaving their three children Jake (11), Sally (9), and Christopher (4) in the tender care of Emelie.

Emelie proceeds to do things no parent would ever want a babysitter to do. The film is brilliant in its slow slide from the arguably “normal” toward the truly perverse. At first, Emelie just seems a vaguely anarchic force, letting the kids eat what they want, telling the two younger children, who want to play dress-up, to be creative in what they wear. She tells them that they don’t “have to be a boy or a girl. You can be anything you want to be. You just have to pretend.” Pushing the boundaries of imagination soon turns into destroying valuable things for costumes and painting on the walls. “Sometimes it’s okay to destroy things for fun,” Emelie says. Then it turns a bit more sinister: there’s a bathroom scene involving Emelie, who has her period, and the emergent adolescent, Jake (Joshua Rush). Then Emelie decides Jake’s pet python needs a treat. And then Emelie declares that it’s movie time: let’s just say no child should have to see what Jake, Sally, and Christopher see.