Atlanta‘s Hometown News Site

MUTANT GENESIS has that type of premise that feels like it should come with a checklist. Artificial intelligence turns against humanity, machines take control of the planet, survivors form a resistance, cities collapse, heavily armed robots hunt the remaining humans, and our heroes prepare for one final attempt to fight back. Qilin Li’s science-fiction action movie spends so much time reminding us of better movies that it never develops much of a personality of its own.

There’s undoubtedly a difference between discovering a forgotten gem and discovering a movie that’s fascinating because it somehow survived at all. RED FLAG DOWN falls much closer to the second category. Christopher P. Smith’s 1992 shot-on-video production, which is somehow not even on IMDb (thank you, Letterboxd!), spent decades buried in the deepest corner of genre filmmaking, and its reappearance on Blu-ray is probably more remarkable than anything actually happening during its sixty-minute runtime. Heck, it doesn’t even have a Letterboxd review yet!

Putting more than nine hours of early Ken Burns documentaries into one box makes something obvious. The style people now associate so strongly with his name didn’t just appear with THE CIVIL WAR. You can watch it becoming structured across KEN BURNS’ AMERICA COLLECTION. Photographs become active parts of the storytelling, letters and firsthand accounts provide emotional detail, narration gives history its shape without turning into a lecture, and monumental moments in time are approached through individual people. The techniques grew more sophisticated as Burns’ career progressed, but the underlying ideas were already there.

There’s a revelation buried inside about making a Christmas ornament out of a piece of wire. It’s simple, delicate, and worth almost nothing on its own, yet in CHRISTMAS ANGELS it becomes a small act of defiance against circumstances that offer very little room for joy. That thought carries most of this thirteen-minute short, which understands that protecting a child doesn’t always mean keeping reality hidden entirely behind lies. Sometimes it means reshaping that reality just enough to make it survivable.

There’s a moment somewhere in FATAL FLYING GUILLOTINE when trying to keep track of everybody’s reasoning becomes considerably less important than accepting that another fight is probably about thirty seconds away. That’s the movie’s survival strategy. Plot threads start to pile up, characters are introduced with varying degrees of importance, loyalties become difficult to follow, and Raymond Lui keeps solving the problem the same way!

There’s something almost ridiculous about watching adults insist they’re fighting for children while repeatedly failing to listen to the children standing right in front of them. That becomes one of the most revealing parts of BUCKS COUNTY, USA, a five-part docuseries about a purple county in Pennsylvania where arguments over schools grow into something much larger, uglier, and increasingly personal.

KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE is one of those documentaries where you know going in that parts of it are going to be difficult to watch. I wasn't prepared for how much of that would come from seeing what happened afterward rather than simply revisiting the attack itself. Rushdie survived being stabbed repeatedly onstage in 2022, but survival was only the beginning of what he and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, had to endure.

If LION FIST had shown up on a video store shelf in the 90s, nobody would have questioned it. The tournament, the training, the rock music, the colorful fighters, and even the ridiculously straightforward motivation all belong to a particular era of martial arts movies. Director Taim M. Adams isn't trying to reinvent any of that, and the movie is probably more enjoyable once you realize he has absolutely no interest in doing so.

There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes from watching people making themselves miserable in the pursuit of companionship, especially when everyone involved seems convinced there must be a better person just one swipe away. FLOATING CAROUSEL understands what exhaustion really is and, instead of trying to make modern dating look appealing, turns it into something increasingly ridiculous, uncomfortable, and eventually just unhinged. It’s funny because so much of what happens feels exaggerated right up until you realize that very little of it seems impossible.

The easiest way to understand the WICKED PRIEST films is to forget about trying to make sense of Shinkai as a respectable Buddhist monk. No, seriously, I know that goes against logic, but hear me out. Tomisaburō Wakayama plays him as a walking contradiction who drinks, gambles, chases women, picks fights, and regularly behaves in ways that should have him thrown out of any order willing to claim him. Then somebody vulnerable needs help, corruption starts hurting ordinary people, and Shinkai suddenly becomes the most principled person in the room.

There’s no point in going into STOP! THAT! TRAIN! And thinking you’re going to ask it to calm down. Adam Shankman’s disaster comedy feels as though somebody locked the volume at eleven, cut the brake lines, and then dared the cast to see who could deliver the most ridiculous joke without blinking. That approach gives you some genuinely funny stretches, plenty of groaners, and a movie that is probably much easier to enjoy once you accept that restraint was never invited aboard.

When you think about all of the names in this film, YOU HAD TO BE THERE almost sounds unbelievable. Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Dave Thomas, Paul Shaffer, and several others somehow converged around the same 1972 Toronto production of GODSPELL before most of the world had any idea who they were. Director Nick Davis doesn’t treat that as some trivia question with an unusually impressive answer; he wants to understand what happened when all of those people found each other before fame complicated any of it. In the end, there really isn’t an answer for what made the stars align, literally, for this event.

Sarah seems to be the only one who knows this is a bad idea before anything actually goes wrong. GOODY GOODY doesn’t begin by asking us to wonder whether the secluded home birth is risky. Midwife Sarah has already done that, voiced her concerns, and reluctantly shown up anyway because the alternative may be leaving an expectant mother to attempt it without someone qualified. Horror usually gets a lot of mileage out of people ignoring obvious warning signs. However, writyer/director Raymond Creamer’s film is more interesting when it concentrates on the person who recognizes every warning sign and still feels morally obligated to stay.

There’s a lightness to an action movie that doesn’t try to desperately convince us it cost ten times as much as it did. KNIGHTFALL has all the recognizable limitations of an indie production, occasionally wears them right on its sleeve, and then gets on with the business of spies, double-crosses, mercenaries, guns, a stolen bio-weapon, and an old house that becomes considerably less peaceful once everyone starts shooting at it. Ben Fortune’s film works best when it embraces that stripped-down identity instead of reaching for a version of James Bond it could never realistically afford.

TEQUILA SUNRISE is almost unfairly appealing, and I mean that beyond having Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kurt Russell sharing the screen at the height of their movie-star prowess. Conrad Hall photographs Southern California as though every sunset (and sunrise), restaurant window, beach, and late-night street has been waiting specifically for these people to walk through it. There are stretches where the story becomes needlessly difficult to follow, but the movie always knows exactly how it wants to look.

PASSENGER had me more interested in Tyler and Maddie’s van-life experiment than I expected, which is probably why I found myself wishing the movie had spent a little more time making them feel like real people before everything around them went bad. They’ve walked away from New York and the routine of just getting by, trading apartments and stability for a customized van and the promise of seeing where the road takes them. Six weeks later, some of that is already wearing thin, and the small fractures in their relationship give director André Øvredal more interesting ideas to work with than just two disposable characters driving toward an inevitable bad decision.

Vince Vaughn’s Ricky is one of those characters who can make you laugh and want to kick him out of the room at the same time. That reaction isn’t an accident in MADE, because Jon Favreau, seven years before his take on IRON MAN would make him a near-household name, creates almost the entire movie around the exhausting experience of being friends with someone who never knows when to stop talking. Ricky isn’t simply loud or obnoxious; he has a remarkable ability to identify the worst possible thing to say in any situation and then keep going until everyone around him is uncomfortable, angry, or in danger.

At 142 minutes, THE FIX has the odd and unexpected problem of feeling both too packed and too underdeveloped where it matters most. Director/co-writer Guy Moshe has assembled a large group of former CIA operators, a failed mission hanging over them, an excursion into Tehran, a rescue operation, histories for all involved, questions of loyalty, and enough moving parts for a much larger espionage story. The movie is rarely lacking something to do, but all that activity doesn’t automatically give the people carrying it enough depth.

The question behind REANIMATOR ACADEMY isn’t whether it deserves to be rediscovered. It’s how this homemade, knowingly dumb, and completely ’90s video-store era film survived long enough to be rediscovered at all. Visual Vengeance pulling Bret McCormick’s shot-on-video oddity out of obscurity feels less like rescuing some forgotten classic and more like opening a time capsule full of cheap props, terrible jokes, questionable decisions, and people who clearly wanted to make a movie whether they had the resources for it or not.

SORORITY ROW has absolutely no interest in introducing us to sensible people. Ironically, that’s what lets it work. The entire movie depends on a group of college students making one terrible decision after another. Once you accept that these characters are capable of turning an already catastrophic situation into something unimaginably worse, Stewart Hendler’s 2009 slasher becomes a lot easier to enjoy. This came out on the heels of the college slasher-genre reboot craze and added yet another intriguing twist to a genre we thought had run its course.

Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen make LEVITICUS work before the horror really has a chance to. Their chemistry as Naim and Ryan is quiet, awkward, physical, and completely believable, which becomes incredibly important once writer/director Adrian Chiarella starts twisting their attraction into the very thing they’re supposed to fear.

GATOR FACE is covered in sweat, swamp water, rust, blood, and whatever else might be growing in the corners of an abandoned Florida building, with writer/director Padraig Reynolds embracing the kind of physical horror that used to make low-budget genre movies feel dangerous long before everything could be fixed or created digitally. There’s something here, though; some people have mentioned a lack of charm or humor, but I think there’s something important about that. The film isn’t meant to be so bad it’s funny; this is an indie horror that wants to make you feel like you’re there.

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE has always been easier to admire in pieces than as a complete movie. Nearly forty years later, those pieces are often more interesting than the story holding them together, especially when you can see just how much craftsmanship went into putting Eternia on a movie screen in 1987. There are massive sets, elaborate costumes, incredible makeup work, practical effects, weapons, and a Castle Grayskull that feels like somebody genuinely tried to build the place rather than simply create a backdrop. Whatever else went wrong along the way, this wasn't made without ambition.

There’s a beautiful irony about how little Herbert West learns from his own experience. Corpses can tear through buildings, experiments can end in complete disaster, people can die all around him, and somehow his conclusion is always that the science was still sound. He just needs another opportunity to prove it. Jeffrey Combs understood that so well in BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR that watching West walk toward another terrible idea with absolute confidence becomes half the reason to return.

GRADUATION DAY announces its personality before anyone has even been murdered. Herb Freed cuts the opening track meet into a barrage of runners, screaming spectators, pounding music, stopwatches, and increasingly frantic close-ups as Laura Ramstead pushes herself toward the finish line. She wins the race and promptly dies, establishing both the motive behind everything that follows and the movie's strange fascination with turning athletic competition into something threatening. The editing is excessive, occasionally ridiculous, and immediately more interesting than the straightforward slasher movie that could have been made from the same story.