Talking with SXSW Breakout Mallory Everton: Star, Writer, and Director of ‘RECOVERY’

March 23, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Interviews, Mallory Everton, Recovery, Steven Meek, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Talking With..., Whitney Call 1 Comment

Look, just about the last thing on earth that anyone is craving nowadays is more COVID-19 talk. No one wants mask jokes or commentary on toilet paper shortages nor do they want to deep dive into the horrors of having lost 550,000 Americans and counting to a pandemic that quickly became a hot-button political issue. And yet, Mallory Everton has managed to make a pandemic-set COVID comedy that feels rejuvenating and alive, maybe disproving the age-old adage that laughter is the “best” medicine (vaccines still probably have it beat) while underscoring enduring importance of comedy in a time of crisis. Read More

SXSW 2021: ‘SOUND OF VIOLENCE’ Is the Ultra-Campy ASMR Slasher You Didn’t Know You Needed

March 18, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Alex Noyer, Horror, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Lili Simmons, Reviews, Sonya Munro, Sound of Violence, SXSW, SXSW 2021 Leave a comment

There is a scene early on in the absolutely bonkers horror camp-fest Sound of Violence where murderess-musician-mistress Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) kidnaps a homeless man and rigs him up like an electric drum set. Part-hardware, part-flesh, done up as if Kevin Mcalester and Jigsaw were there to help perfect the evil mastermind mechanics. A meat tenderizer dangles above his skull, a mallet aimed at his kneecaps, scalpels bisecting his wrists like cello bows. Alexis nervously puts on her earphones and gets to work. Read More

SXSW 2021: Urgent School Shooter Teen Drama ‘THE FALLOUT’ is the First Defining Movie of Gen-Z

March 18, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Jenna Ortega, John Ortiz, Julie Bowen, Lumi Pollack, Maddie Ziegler, Megan Park, Niles Fitch, Reviews, Shailene Woodley, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Will Ropp) 2 Comments

We’re only minutes into The Fallout before the carefree world of 16-year old Vada (Jenna Ortega in a star-making role) is turned upside down by a school shooting. Up to that point, her biggest concerns were nagging parents, knowing the answers to an upcoming quiz, and which flavor cake-pop to get at the Starbucks drive through. When her doting little sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack) texts her “911” (she’s gotten her first period and needs to be talked off a ledge), Vada goes to the bathroom to provide some much-needed sisterly advice. She’ll remain trapped there, with popular girl Mia (Maddie Ziegler), when gunshots start ripping off in the hall outside, accompanied by piercing screams of abject terror. Read More

SXSW 2021: Goretastic ‘JAKOB’S WIFE’ Is the Most Fun Vampire Movie in Years

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Barbara Crampton, Jakob’s Wife, Kathy Charles, Mark Steenland, Reviews, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Travis Stevens 2 Comments

According to Biblical etymology, the name Jakob as found in Genesis is derived from the word for “heel”. In Jakob’s Wife, the eponymous Jakob (Larry Fessenden) is indeed a heel; an old-fashion minister who looks down his nose at his parishioners and town’s hoi polloi and treats his wife as a subservient inferior. When an old flame comes through town, obedient church mouse spouse Anne (a perfectly cast Barbara Crampton) gives into temptation…and is delivered unto the ultimate evil: a primordial vampire hiding out in the abandoned mill in their small town. Read More

SXSW 2021: Dead in the Water ‘OFFSEASON’ A Bloated, Shambling Corpse of a Seaside Haunter

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Melora Walters, Mickey Keating, Offseason, SXSW, SXSW 2021 Leave a comment

A featherlight folk horror from Mickey Keating (Carnage Park), Offseason fails to conjure much of a reason for its existence, plundering the corpses of similar seaside folklore horror stories but bringing zero new ideas or visual intrigue to the table. At only 83 minutes, the barebones haunted town horror tale still majorly drags, a problem born from its dramatically inert narrative and exacerbated by numerous pacing problems. There are a couple (as in exactly two) memorable visual tableaus that shock the viewer out of a state of near-total apathy but it’s far too little too late to salvage Keating’s creation from sinking to the depths of horror movie irrelevancy. Read More

SXSW 2021: ‘THE FEAST’ Is Scrumptiously Unnerving Folk Horror

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Annes Elwy, Julian Lewis Jones, Lee Haven Jones, Nia Roberts, Roger Williams, SXSW, SXSW 2021, The Feast Leave a comment

High in the Welsh hills, an elemental force awakens. This land is sacred and foreign; a far-flung neverland where verdant hills and the marble-mouthed language both prove striking and ancient. A place where helping neighbors lend a hand and whisper of mythical no-no’s. The first shot of Lee Haven Jones’ gothic folk horror juxtaposes man’s greed and his demise as a ruddy pipe in close up drills muddy oil from the ground. In the distance, a construction site worker flops over and dies. Man takes. Man dies. The cycle begins. Read More

SXSW 2021: ‘WITCH HUNT’ Explores a World Where Witches Are Real and Illegal

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Abigail Cowen, Echo Campbell, Elizabeth Mitchell, Elle Calahan, Gideon Adlon, Horror, SXSW, SXSW 2021, Witch Hunt 1 Comment

America never got past its Salem period in Elle Calahan’s allegorical social horror movie Witch Hunt. The only difference is, in Calahan’s world, witches actually do exist. The United States is a perilous place for those magical few; the practice of witchcraft has been banned and is punishable by death; families of convicted witches are forced into deep-cover and permanent hiding; their only hopes being smuggled south to the Mexican border where freedom from institutionalized prejudice looms. Read More

SXSW 2021: ‘HERE BEFORE’ A Tricky Psychological Thriller That Just Might Awaken the Undead

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Andrea Riseborough, Here Before, Reviews, Stacey Gregg, SXSW, SXSW 2021 Leave a comment

Andrea Riseborough may be our greatest under-appreciated actress working today. Delivering standout turns in indie favorites like Mandy, Possessor, and Birdman as well as leading Amazon’s excellent crime drama ZeroZeroZero, Riseborough has slowly proven herself a transfixing chameleon presence. A la the great Tilda Swinton, with whom she shares vampiric lily white skin and sharp angular features, Riseborough creeps into the skin of her roles, the real persona rarely peeking through. Read More

SXSW 2021: Floral Horror ‘GAIA’ a Nightmarish Reckoning with Nature

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Alex van Dyk, Carel Nel, Gaia, Horror, Jaco Bouwer, Monique Rockman, Reviews, SXSW, SXSW 2021 1 Comment

Eco-horror is having a resurgence of late, as are psilocybin mushrooms as a visual language in film. Jaco Bouwer’s formidable woodland creeper Gaia fits snugly into a recent wave of psychedelic folk horror, a subgenre that binds Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (a recent Sundance release that would make a pitch perfect double feature with Bouwer’s entry) and even Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Sparked by an increasing awareness of humanity’s abusive relationship with nature, eco-horror pits the survival of man and earth against one another and in the light of a global pandemic, those themes have never been as prescient. Read More

SXSW 2021: ALS Activism Documentary ‘NOT GOING QUIETLY’ a Devastating, Inspirational Call to Arms

March 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Ady Barkan, Documentaries, Nicholas Bruckman, Not Going Quietly, Reviews, SXSW, SXSW 2021 Leave a comment

Hope is a hammer, Ady Barkan attempts to say. His tongue, lungs, and the rest of his body devastated by ALS (an incurable degenerative disease that paralyzes and eventually kills its victims), Ady tries again and again but just can’t get the words out to the audience of thousands gathered to hear the American healthcare activist speak. This moment, one of many heartbreaking scenes in Nicholas Bruckman’s not-so-quietly devastating documentary Not Going Quietly, perhaps best encapsulates the ironic paradox of Ady’s emergent and often viral voice: the more his body fails him, the less he is physically able to move and speak, the more he has to say and the more people gather to listen to him. Read More