As always, writing falls behind viewing and I’ve missed mentioning some disks that deserved at least a comment – so here are some quick notes on recent releases from Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and some smaller labels covering a wide range of genres from spaghetti westerns to East European animation, from low-budget sci-fi to documentary, from comedy to horror to exploitation.
The latest releases from Cauldron Films are a pair of little-known found-footage horror movies which both have their moments, but suffer from the genre’s frequent shortcomings. Mike Costanza’s The Collingswood Story (2002) was the first movie to use on-line video chat as a storytelling medium, while Victor Dryere’s 1974: La posesión de Altair (2016) goes back to pre-video times, using super-8 home movies to show a young married couple under supernatural attack in rural Mexico.
More brief comments on recent horror viewing.
Continuing my notes on recently watched movies which I haven’t written about in depth …
Very brief comments on several dozen disks viewed over the past few months.
As usual I seem to be out of sync with the current pop culture climate – of the most recent movies I’ve gone out to see, I enjoyed a colossal box office bomb, had serious reservations about the year’s biggest success to date, and most appreciated a low budget genre movie by a first-time director. […]
Not surprisingly, given the amount of time I spend watching movies at home, I came across quite a few worthwhile titles during the year. I’ve already written about many of these in this blog, so will just offer capsule comments here (in no particular order) about ones that I particularly recommend. Dramatic features The World, […]
In light of this week’s post on Matthew J. Avant’s “found footage documentary” Lunopolis, it seems like fortuitous timing that Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant has just passed on a couple of links dealing with Les documents interdits, a series of found-footage shorts by French filmmaker Jean-Teddy Filippe. For anyone who enjoys the form, […]
There are two main types of time travel story. The first treats time as little more than another spatial dimension, with the traveler heading off to see something in the past or future as if going to another country. H.G Wells’ The Time Machine was of this type, the title machine essentially just a device […]
A few years back, Francis Ford Coppola predicted that the future of film was an adolescent girl in the mid-west armed with a cheap camcorder. That hasn’t exactly happened (yet[1]), but ever-evolving video technology has definitely had an effect on the movies we see. While new hi-def equipment is being used more and more frequently […]