Three young actresses show up for a horror movie audition. One chickens out and the two that are left (Heather Lee + Leah Nigro) soon find that the director (William Decoff) spills real blood in his films.
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A cheerleader (Danielle Lozeau) gets liquored up while driving home from school and runs over a pedestrian. After dragging the poor schmuck’s body out into the woods and driving home, he starts calling her.
Roadkill is a short film from Timberwolf Entertainment that at 16 minutes long is a drag. The vengeful vehicular manslaughter victim (ala Creepshow 2 and I Know what You Did Last Summer) meets When a Stranger Calls-ish storyline is executed with an unlikable lead in situations lacking any kind of suspense. This is all book-ended by inane conversations between the cheerleader and her boyfriend (writer/director Joe Patnaud). All the while an annoyingly overused organ/choral score thunders over the whole thing.
Technically the film is hit or miss. The camera work by Tim Whitfield is pretty good, offering decent lighting and angles, but overuses red gels when the dead guy shows up. The editing manages a couple of nice visual flourishes but you get the feeling there wasn’t enough coverage for some scenes.
At the end of the day this short offers nothing new or even entertaining to the horror genre but is at least done with a level of competence that some efforts lack. The film can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube at the link below.
Writer/Director: Joe Patnaud
Staring: Danielle Lozeau, Kevin Cirone
Watch Now: http://youtube.com/watch?v=6Llo–9oMCA
Score: * + 1/2 stars.
What’s in the water o’er at The Horror Channel? Their original programming continues to impress me greatly – first with SHADOW FALLS and now even more so with HEARTLAND HORRORS: SEASON ONE, another online series rounded up in its entirety for DVD.
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I don’t know if I would say that the “retro-grindhouse” look is a movement, but certainly there have been some gestures towards it lately with directors like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino and their double-feature experiment. But Scott Phillips’ Gimme Skelter, from its opening shot of a ribbon of two-lane blacktop disappearing into the night, may be the most pitch-perfect rendition to date.
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The best thing about Dorm of the Dead is its title, but don’t expect the movie to fulfill that promise. In fact, don’t expect the movie to seem much like a movie. It’s a hair shy of unwatchable.
Dealing with a zombie outbreak on the campus of Arkham University, very little of it takes place in a dorm. Very little of it actually involves zombies. It’s more like an excuse for several extended, scored-with-bad-techno sex scenes that recall the lurid but boring Cinemax After Dark features, only shot on video. The box plays up the fact that Andrea Ownbey – aka “Miss Howard Stern” – is one of the stars, but this means nothing to me. Besides, none of the girls really look attractive, and that includes B-movie staple Tiffany Shepis.
There are two things the Donald Farmer-directed Dorm does well: 1) Making special effects look homemade, and 2) overdoing it on sequences involving people walking. When your credits feature an actor who calls himself “Dukey Flyswatter,” you know you’re not to take it seriously, but I’d rather not take it at all.
Running Time: 90 Minutes
Director: Donald Farmer
Cast: Tiffany Shepis, Andrea Ownbey, Jackey Hall, Jeff Dylan Graham
Link: Buy it on Amazon
As if the name didn’t suggest such, Shadow Falls is a creepy small town. Located somewhere in the Midwest, it apparently died in the mid-’80s after something terrible happened at its local hospital. Now it appears to be all but deserted, but an evil still populates within its borders. Billed as the first horror TV series made for the Internet, the first eight episodes have made it to DVD as SHADOW FALLS: VOLUME 1.
With many strikes against it from the outset (ultra-low budget, shot on video, no-name cast and crew), I was as skeptical as anyone to check out this Horror Channel show, but it’s surprisingly pretty good. For one thing, it contains a great air of mystery. For another, most episodes are under 10 minutes in length, so they have little chance to bore. Each stands alone, but as becomes evident about midway through, there are threads woven and clues embedded in each that eventually will come to an all-makes-sense end (in episode 32, according to writer/director Kendal Sinn in the extra-feature interviews).
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I got an unexpected surprise when I popped this tune into the DVD player. The Dastoli Brothers are famous in the microcinema scene for their incredible visual effects capabilities and their beautiful cinematography. When it came to their stories though, I felt they always fell a bit short. Much to my surprise, That’s the Name of That Tune is not one of their typical short films.
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They aren’t friends, but they do see each other in the hallways between classes. Occasionally they even say hello. Tracy and Chris, two students at fictional Hillcrest High — which could easily be any high school in America–are the protagonists whose lives unravel in heartbreaking detail throughout the course Maria Petros’ debut film Ascension. Hiding their deeply personal struggles under a thin guise of false smiles and mock indifference, these two corridor acquaintances are, in actuality, trapped in a private hell and nearing the precipice of their own emotional endurance.
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As an independent filmmaker, it is always a pleasure to watch one of your peers accomplish something that blows your mind. Writer/Director Matt Meindl has never ceased to amaze me. I have only had the pleasure of seeing three different works by Meindl (Real Lemonade, Go Barefoot and Lollygagger), but after each film I have always ended up with a smile on my face.
Gritty drama features a professor who becomes attracted to a student with a sordid private life in An Apology to the Dead. Although initially put off by a dark, grainy look that may have been only partially intentional, I was drawn in by strong performances from the leads. Troy Randall-Kilpatrick, albeit boneheaded in some of his character’s decisions, was well-rounded, and I especially liked Jenelle Mazaris’s shaded turn as the strong-willed but wounded student. Jonathan Victor also gives a shot of kinetic energy in an edgy spin as a brutal pimp.