Although already well-established as the director and star of many two-reelers, it was not until 1923 that vaudeville comedian Buster Keaton got to write, direct, produce and star in his first feature film, Three Ages – which, to placate a studio nervous about entrusting a long-form project to a man whose directorial track record did…
Final Days (Alone) first published by VODzilla.co With zombie films, it is often the little differences that count. The fact that Johnny Martin’s Final Days (aka Alone, aka Pandemic) concerns a young man having to survive alone a global pandemic that reduces its victims to flesh-eaters might recall Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007), loosely…
In Gonzalo Calzada‘s Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night (Nocturna – Lado A – La Noche del Hombre Grande, 2021), Alzheimer’s-addled nonagenarian Ulises (played by Pepe Soriano, and by Jenaro Nouet as a child) reconciled himself to half-remembered guilt, regret and loss over one long, dark night of the soul in the…
In Swan View, on the eastern outskirts of Perth where the boundaries between city and bush are ill-defined, the corpse of 18-year-old Tracey Myers has been found. Tracey is the Laura Palmer of Western Australian suburbia – a high school girl who had her whole future ahead of her, but also a junkie on a…
Threshold first published by VODzilla.co At the beginning of Threshold, disgruntled school music teacher Leo (Joey Millin) gets a call from his unseen mother. “We’ve found Virginia,” she is heard to say down the line – and so Leo is dispatched to pick Virginia up and bring her home. Leo has not seen or heard…
The Night first published by VODzilla.co Some way into Kourosh Ahari’s The Night, a painting in the lobby of the Hotel Normandie catches the attention of Babak Naderi (Shahab Hosseini) as he waits for the elevator with his wife Neda (Niousha Noor) and their baby daughter Shabnam (Leah Oganyan). The painting is, paradoxically, an approximate…
In horror, as in Freudian psychoanalysis, it is usually a young child who witnesses – and misunderstands – a primal scene (typically, sex between parents), engendering the perversion of that child’s psychosexual development. The Free Fall certainly opens with a primal scene, as Sara Wright (Andrea Londo) enters the upstairs bedroom of her parents, only…
Broadcast Signal Intrusion first published by Movies On Weekends Broadcast Signal Intrusion opens with a video recording that resolves into a dream. A woman runs happily through a field, and a man pursues her with a camera. Then she stops, swaying in the mist, her face turned away, and we get his, or at least…
“This film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019,” reads the pink-on-black Portuguese text that opens writer/director Iuli Gerbase’s feature debut The Pink Cloud (A Nuvem Rosa). “Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” No further elaboration is required to determine which actual events the film might be imagined to resemble – for…
Sound Of Violence first published by Movies On Weekends Slashers and other kinds of psychodrama typically feature a sequence which, in a phrase borrowed from Sigmund Freud, gets called the ‘primal scene‘ – often opening the film, or shown in flashback, and capturing the formative psychosexual moment of childhood trauma that leads a confused young…
OffSeason first published by Movies On Weekends Aside from an attention-grabbing prologue and the occasional flashback, OffSeason is set entirely on the coastal island of Lone Palm just as the last summer tourists leave. The key word here is ‘off’ – for although this is a pleasure resort whose blue-skied beaches are for half the…