Atlanta‘s Hometown News Site

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.

There’s something strangely appropriate about watching a group of men who built an empire around refusing to act their age finally admit that age has caught up with them. JACKASS: BEST AND LAST still has testicles getting crushed, bodily fluids going places they shouldn’t, and grown adults agreeing to situations that should immediately make any reasonable person leave the room, but underneath all of it sits an unavoidable realization. These guys can’t keep doing this forever.

Some short films spend their entire running time proving how clever they are. RETRIEVING ROADIE spends roughly eight minutes introducing a lonely salesperson and a dog, sends them through an increasingly ridiculous trip home, and somehow lands somewhere much warmer than its simple setup initially suggests.

The most interesting thing about KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO is that its title initially sounds like a documentary about Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO, but the possessive matters. This isn't really another examination of Hitchcock's movie. It's Kim Novak looking back at the version of herself that Hollywood created, the woman underneath that image, and the decades she spent trying to understand the difference between the two.

CONVOY probably shouldn't exist in anything close to the form it does. A hit novelty country song about CB radios and truckers somehow became a major studio production directed by Sam Peckinpah, the man behind THE WILD BUNCH and STRAW DOGS. What could have been little more than a quick attempt to cash in on a late-1970s craze became a strange mix of working-class rebellion, broad comedy, road-movie spectacle, and several hundred thousand pounds of machinery rolling across the American Southwest.

Some movies need twenty minutes before you understand what they’re trying to do. THE HAUNTED COP SHOP needs about that long before you realize understanding probably isn’t the point.

I can’t think of a recent movie that’s come with more warnings before I pressed play. I was told people walked out during a festival screening. I was told people got sick. The publicity materials even promote SLICE as having been banned in Canada for being too graphic. By the time I finally watched it, there was almost no way the movie could match the picture already built in my head. To its credit, SLICE certainly tries, and in more than a few moments it succeeds.

Some movies become important because they were first, and others because they changed what everyone expected afterward. HORROR OF DRACULA belongs firmly in that second category. By 1958, Dracula was already one of horror’s most recognizable figures, with Bela Lugosi’s performance casting an enormous shadow over the character. Hammer Films didn’t try to recreate that version. Instead, director Terence Fisher, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing pushed the material into something faster, bloodier, more physical, and noticeably more dangerous. Even now, it’s easy to understand why that approach landed so hard.

The most intriguing thing about people is that you never can really know what to expect when you ask a stranger a question. Ask someone about work, money, happiness, marriage, or what they want from life, then give them enough space to answer, and eventually they might end up telling you far more than they intended. Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme understand that, throughout LE JOLI MAI, they turn conversations with Parisians in May of 1962 into a portrait that grows more expressive the further it moves from anything resembling a history lesson.

Some mothers pressure their children to get married and have kids. Jacqueline Grayson has enough money, determination, and complete disregard for boundaries to turn that pressure into something far more dangerous. THE RESTORATION AT GRAYSON MANOR takes an already poisonous mother-son relationship, gives one of them experimental prosthetic hands controlled by his subconscious, and waits to see how much worse an awful family can become.

Families can become awfully honest once an inheritance is involved. THE INUGAMI FAMILY begins with an enormous fortune, a dead patriarch, and a will practically designed to make everyone in the room hate everyone else, then spends the next 146 minutes demonstrating just how ugly that combination can become. What starts as a fairly traditional murder mystery slowly opens into something stranger, darker, and far more visually adventurous than expected.

There’s a moment fairly early in SEX AND THE EMPEROR when it becomes clear that trying to predict what kind of movie you’re watching is a losing game. One minute it’s behaving like a period drama about palace politics, the next it’s a broad sex comedy. Before long it’s willing to wander into cruelty that’s genuinely difficult to laugh off. That instability can be exhausting, but it’s also the reason Sherman Wong’s 1994 Category III oddity remains much more interesting than its title might suggest.

There are only so many ways to reinvent a vampire before the creature stops feeling like a vampire at all. VAMPIRE CARNIVAL finds a surprisingly simple way around that problem: its creatures aren't particularly interested in your blood. They're interested in the misery you're carrying around with you, and for Gemma, a grieving young woman already struggling to move forward, that makes her exactly the sort of person they want walking through the gates.

Dolph Lundgren has spent four decades looking like one of the last people on Earth who needed anyone's sympathy. He's six-foot-five, built like someone created specifically to fight Rocky Balboa, holds advanced degrees, speaks multiple languages, practiced martial arts at a championship level, and somehow turned a relatively small role in ROCKY IV into an entire career. DOLPH: UNBREAKABLE gets far more interesting once it begins dismantling the idea that any of those accomplishments made the man underneath them particularly indestructible.

Being fourteen is miserable in ways that become strangely difficult to explain once you're no longer fourteen. You're old enough to recognize the people you want to become, young enough to misunderstand almost everything about how they got there, and desperate enough for acceptance that copying somebody else's clothes, attitude, interests, or sexuality can temporarily seem like the same thing as discovering your own. BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY remembers that uncomfortable middle ground with remarkable clarity, and it doesn't clean up the embarrassing parts just because its protagonist is someone we're meant to care about.

There’s something fundamentally uncomfortable about a room that looks completely ordinary but feels like somewhere you were never supposed to find. BACKROOMS understands that feeling better than most horror movies attempting to turn internet mythology into something feature-length, and director Kane Parsons wisely spends much of the movie trusting the spaces themselves to do the frightening. Yellow walls, fluorescent lights, endless hallways, and rooms that seem designed for a purpose nobody can remember become far more threatening than another monster jumping out of the darkness ever could.

Horror movies spend so much time asking us to watch closely that UNDERTONE immediately feels different by making listening the more dangerous activity. Writer-director Ian Tuason builds his feature debut around something almost embarrassingly simple: a woman puts on headphones and listens to recordings. That it becomes genuinely unnerving is the clearest sign Tuason understands exactly where his movie’s strengths are.

CORRUPTION opens with a young man being told that the life ahead of him should be guided by moral responsibility, then spends the next 82 minutes demonstrating just how difficult that becomes when everyone around him has learned to treat morality as negotiable. Mauro Bolognini’s 1963 drama isn’t especially subtle about the forces pulling Stefano Mattioli in different directions, but something is fascinating about watching his certainty slowly collapse. The movie isn’t really asking whether Stefano can resist one temptation. It’s asking how long anyone can hold onto an ideal when practically every part of the world around them is designed to make surrender easier.

There are bad ideas, and then there’s deciding to walk 49 miles because your car broke down. Doug (Gregory Fung) sees it as an adventure, while his best friend Max (Reece Henderson) reacts the way most reasonable people would. That difference gives 49 MILES MORE plenty of room for comedy. Still, director Oliver Cox eventually reveals that the ridiculous walk is only the excuse needed to put two longtime friends together when they have nowhere else to go.