Armington‘s Hometown News Site

I don't remember the exact moment politics stopped happening around me and started feeling connected to my everyday life, but I can point to the person who helped make that feel relatable at a core level. I’ve known about the ins and outs of politics at different levels for decades. YelloPain didn't reach me through a debate, a campaign commercial, or someone telling me which party had the answers. He reached me through a music video.

I can’t think of any other movie title that does this much heavy lifting before the movie has even started. SURF NAZIS MUST DIE presents us with four words, and then an exclamation point that feels implied whether the title includes one or not, and enough to imagine an entire exploitation movie before Peter George takes control behind the camera.

Full Moon Features was never supposed to look like top-tier studio horror films. That was part of the attraction to the handmade chaos. Charles Band and the filmmakers under his banner built decades of entertainment around figuring out what they could accomplish with little to no money, some cheap rubber monster costumes, buckets of fake blood, miniature sets, puppets, questionable CGI, and enough imagination to cover whatever the budget couldn't.

The murder in DTF ST. LOUIS honestly feels like a trick to get us through the door. Steven Conrad gives us a dead body, two detectives, shifting timelines, unreliable accounts of what happened, and plenty of questions about how everything went wrong, but solving the case gradually becomes less important than understanding why these people were vulnerable to blowing up their lives in the first place.

Calling something “inspired by true events” has become one of horror’s easiest shortcuts. Slap the phrase across a trailer, mention a supposedly haunted building, and suddenly every creaking floorboard carries a little more weight. THE CAGED has a stronger claim to that marketing hook than most, though digging into the history behind Jeffrey Scott Collins’ supernatural horror movie reveals something far more complicated than a simple story about witches haunting an old house.

The most uncomfortable moment in THE WITNESS isn't a confrontation. It's the point when Ramazan understands what's happening and suddenly has to decide what that knowledge requires of him. Emir Kumova builds his short around that gap between recognizing something is wrong and doing something about it, turning a seemingly ordinary wedding into a much more difficult moral space.

Twelve minutes doesn't give a filmmaker much room to hide. RULE, BRITANNIA doesn't try. Max Fisher establishes exactly who these men are, what they believe, and what they've decided to do almost immediately, then removes the comfortable environment where those convictions were formed and drops them somewhere considerably less forgiving.

FRANKENHOOKER is one of those wonderfully rare movies where the title tells you almost everything you need to know, yet somehow fails to prepare you for any of it. Frank Henenlotter takes a joke that should wear itself out in five minutes and keeps finding increasingly ridiculous places to take it, never acting embarrassed by the material and never pretending he's making something more respectable than the movie sitting right in front of us.

Anna Nicole Smith's death became the kind of media event where eventually the people standing around the story became stories themselves. TRUST ME, I'M A DOCTOR turns its attention toward Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, one of Smith's physicians, and finds its most interesting material in what happens when a private person's mistakes, relationships, and personal writings become pieces of public entertainment.

I can still remember sitting in that empty theater and feeling the hair on my arms stand up. There have been scarier movies since THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Even better-made found-footage movies, more polished horror movies, and plenty that offer bigger scares, darker imagery, or more satisfying experiences. None of that changes what it felt like to see this one when it was new, before all of the trickery became public knowledge and before the internet made it nearly impossible for a movie to blur fiction and reality in quite the same way. For me, this was one of the first times a horror movie gave me pure goosebumps in a theater.

I speak from personal experience, but few things can steal your attention like a toothache. It’s the kind of pain that can start small enough to ignore for the most part, then gradually becomes the only thing you can think about. BAD TOOTH takes that experience and asks what happens when the thing you’ve been putting off refuses to stay hidden away any longer.

There are movies I might admire more than HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, but there aren't many I love more. Rob Zombie's feature directorial debut hit me in exactly the right place, and more than twenty years later, its chaotic mixture of horror, grunge Americana, excess, pitch-black humor, and complete disregard for good taste hasn't lost much of its power.

Some movies become cult classics because audiences eventually realize they were misunderstood. REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA became a cult classic because the people who loved it refused to let everybody else kill it, and nearly two decades later, that distinction still feels important.

I wanted to really like this; plenty of bizarre stories from 2016 somehow feel even stranger ten years later (also, how has it been 10 years!), but the appearance of clowns across America remains in a category of its own. CLOWN PANIC goes back to the moment when reports of clowns hiding near the woods in South Carolina grew into police investigations, school lockdowns, viral videos, copycats, false reports, and a nationwide obsession that became increasingly difficult to separate from reality. The memory of those moments works on a deeper level than some of the talking heads presented here.

Alex Cox apparently looked at Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel DEAD SOULS, a story about a man purchasing the names of dead Russian serfs who still existed on government tax records, and decided the natural place to relocate it was the American West. The stranger part is how quickly that decision starts to make sense.