I remember walking into my local arcade when I was a kid and first discovering Dragon’s Lair. I couldn’t comprehend how amazing this game looked in comparison to the other offerings at the time, with its bright and colorful hand drawn animation. It
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Paintings from the likes of Monet, Manet and Renoir (to name a few) populate the backgrounds of each still frame, each frame signifying one act of the film’s storyline with 18 acts in total. The actors, themselves, exist primarily in the foreground, in time period aligned garments, over-emoting in the vein of silent films, gravitas pinned to the performances by way of over-exaggeration. Their existences will occasionally blend into the paintings, two art forms bleeding into one as the oil-painted veneer of thickets and overgrowth cloud the stances and footfalls of the actors navigating the artificiality of the surrounding terrain.
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The occupying quirk found in Alison Bagnall’s Funny Bunny is easily recognizable on the surface as more of the same. At first glance, Bagnall’s feature has the familiar appearance of all the other indie comedies strewn about the distribution landscape over the past several years except that Bagnall’s implementation emerges as a more thoughtful interpretation.
UPDATE: The team behind Frank & Zed has relaunched their Kickstarter so this article has been updated to reflect the new changes. Check out the project page here and consider a donation!
This week’s Kickstart Sunday pick comes to
It’s been quite a long hiatus since our last Grindhouse Weekly article, but with Halloween rapidly approaching, I thought it might be fun to exhume this deceased feature and breathe some new life in it.
The film I’ll be looking at this week is Lucio Fulci’s infamous 1982 giallo film, The New York Ripper. It opens with a man playing fetch with his dog along the East River, and when, instead of a stick, the retriever brings back a human hand. Fulci decides this is the best time to start the opening credits (and it totally is). He goes to a close-up freeze frame of the decomposing hand and cues the opening title.
Continuing our Kickstart Sunday Halloween celebration, this week’s pick is the throwback psychedelic slasher Psychotic! from Maxwell Frey and Derek Gibbons. Psychotic! draws influence from Italian horror films of the ’70s, but is a contemporary story taking place in
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Right from the jump, writer/director Christopher Good unloads the viewer into the whirlwind that is Mudjackin’, a brother/sister buddy comedy murder mystery, starting with an I.C.E. raid before even considering introducing context or characters really. From there, the relentlessness continues with the tempo locked-in at high-octane with rapid-fire cuts coming from every possible direction while the brother/sister duo run through an exhaustive overview of their backstories with a swiftness - years flush with dreaming big and big, shattered dreams.
With Halloween just around the corner, I thought it would be fitting to choose a horror film for this week’s Kickstart Sunday pick, so today we’ll be highlighting director Laszlo Illes‘ The Basement. This English-Hungarian indie horror flick tells
Adam takes a look at the newly release Goosebumps: The Game in honor of the Goosebumps movie coming out this weekend.
Thanks for watching! Make sure to like and subscribe and let us know in the comments what movie game you want
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The third installment of UNSUNG INDIES delves into Ian Clark's experimental MMXIII, an exploration into image capturing and creation. Employing a myriad of technologies to present ideas and philosophies, Clark effortlessly weaves his way through the beauty and power of an image and the time-consuming undertaking of searching for the perfect image. Misleading in its simplicity, MMXIII inexplicably accommodates a wealth of ideas, every still and every progression has the ability to spark thought and discussion.
Get ready for Halloween with these 10 horror films released this year that you can watch right now.
Thanks for watching, be sure to like and subscribe and let us know in the comments what your favorite movies are to watch on Halloween!
Adam gets frustrated with Hook on the NES and SNES. This week’s game was chosen in honor of Pan hitting theaters.
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For the second installment of Unsung Indies, I take a look at THE INTERNATIONAL SIGN FOR CHOKING. Written, directed and starring Zach Weintraub, alongside Sophia Takal, about a young man travelling to Buenos Aires looking to regroup while searching for possible documentary subjects, navigating a burgeoning romance, and searching for a woman from his past. All of these activities taking place within the meticulously-composed frames of cinematographer Nandan Rao.
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UNSUNG INDIES is a new feature where we'll highlight the best of the overlooked films to come out of the American Indie scene over the past 10 or so years, mostly dealing with films from the micro budget end of the spectrum. For our first iteration, I take a look at Nandan Rao's HAWAIIAN PUNCH, a docu-fiction concoction displayed in relaxed, sun-drenched frames.
In this episode of Film Pulse Plays, Adam gets spooked out by Hotel Transylvania for the Nintendo DS. Is it the best Adam Sandler-based video game? Probably until they release that Happy Gilmore golf sim I’ve been waiting for.
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Given the current circumstances of the turmoil in Syria, Bell’s tender portraiture is as timely as they come. Although, he refrains from overloading the film with political viewpoints choosing instead to, merely, present a man looking for work. The cinematic equivalent of walking a mile in another man’s shoes, The Winds That Scatter is, unfortunately in this day and age, a necessity.
