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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“Twilight Zone”-flavored horror-thriller, from New Zealand director Amit Tripuraneni, features five camping friends, and the secrets that are revealed over a long weekend in a remote cabin. Five, Tripuraneni’s follow-up to the admirable, muscular spy thriller Memories of Tomorrow, plumbs a traditional genre, but with a different vibe. Tripuraneni coached naturalistic, almost improvised-seeming performances from his leads, but coupled that with energetic visuals and a crisp pace. The visuals are eye-searing and the editing leaves scenes charged with menace.
After suffering a loss, a young man comes home to the midwest to try and rekindle an old friendship, but quickly learns that the friend he left behind has gravitated towards a new, sinister “family.” Zack Parker’s Quench bills itself as a “modern gothic tragedy,” with perhaps a bit of emphasis on the “gothic” and veined, so to speak, with dark horror undertones. Some explicit sex, and liberal use of blood, startle against the strikingly-shot Indiana landscapes.
I’ve always been a fan of Joe Sherlock’s retro-styled features, marked by funny storytelling and rickety “let’s put on a show” production values, but anyone unfamiliar with his work who wants to watch a horror anthology called Trailer Park Double Wide Trilogy of Terror pretty much will know what they are in for.
Last Rites of the Dead is the best zombie movie I’ve seen since Shaun of Dead, but even more than that, the first hour or so is also the most relevant since George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. It’s a real political allegory that is frighteningly real in this era of Mexican-hating Minutemen, as we’re introduced to a world where the dead come back to life. In a smart twist, they are not flesh-eating mindless monsters, but rotting humans who still retain all their brain functions, memories and mannerisms—they’re just like you and me except they have no heartbeat.