Hunter Hunter begins as a simple look at a family living off-the-grid, but quickly develops into a gory thriller that isn’t for the faint of heart. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call the new survival-thriller film Hunter Hunter a bait-and-switch; there’s no twist, exactly,…
Kindred doesn’t achieve much more than powering through a laundry list of tired indie horror film clichés. A studio releasing its seasonal horror offering one week after Halloween is the equivalent of waving a white flag. It’s an admission that not even the spookiest of…
Rent-a-Pal, the debut feature from writer-director-editor Jon Stevenson, is unrelentingly bleak, a 108-minute cringe-fest masquerading as a character study. Not that there is much to glean from the protagonist as presented here, a bespectacled sad sack named David (Brian Landis Folkins) desperate for human…
Centigrade doesn’t do much as a character-driven chamber piece, but it’s served well by an attention to detail and the ability to build genuine tension. In 2012, a man named Peter Skyllberg made headlines for surviving in his car for two months with no food…
Sputnik is competently made but lacks the necessary suspense and horror to elevate it past mere adequacy. Here’s another sci-fi flick that plays like an extended X-Files episode. There will always be room for riffs on familiar scenarios — last year gifted us the superior…
Relic is a nifty work of ambiguous horror built on the duality of destruction and creation. Relic, the debut feature from Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, is a haunted house drama with a thrillingly cerebral core. Edna, the family matriarch (Australian theater veteran Robyn Nevin),…
America has a sickness, and Upright Comedy Brigade alumni Dawn Luebbe and Jocelyn DeBoer have contracted and spread the disease with their absurdist suburbia horror-satire Greener Grass. The feature adaptation of the SXSW award-winning short of the same name sees Luebbe and DeBoer donning…
The Wind marks director Emma Tammi’s first foray into narrative cinema, a step away from her documentarian work and directly into the foreboding wilderness of the horror-western. Already one of the more uncommon examples of the hybrid genre format, screenwriter Teresa Sutherland positions a…