Danvers‘s Hometown News Site

Léo’s journey through ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT spends much of the time looking backward at his life, although writer/director Nicolas Pariser is far less interested in whether he likes what he finds than in questioning why he assumes his self-examination should matter so much to everyone else. At 49, facing the end of a relationship and learning that the biological father he never knew has died, Léo has every reason to start taking inventory of his life. What sounds like another middle-aged man confronting his regrets becomes a movie about realizing that even your reckoning with yourself can become another form of self-absorption.

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.

Other people’s homes tell Kasia things that their owners never intended to share. She makes her living breaking into apartments, entering spaces where photographs, furniture, bills, medicine, half-finished meals, and belongings reveal pieces of lives she has no right to know about. WHAT BELONGS TO OTHERS takes that violation of privacy and turns it in an unexpected direction, asking whether stepping into someone else’s life can make a person recognize what is missing from their own.

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.

Harry Da Souza spends a lot of his time in MOBLAND walking into rooms where everyone else has already made the worst possible decision. Tom Hardy plays him like a man who has accepted that this is his life, calmly surveying whatever disaster the Harrigan family has created and figuring out how many threats, favors, lies, or bodies will be required to make it disappear. This isn’t to be confused with the 2023 John Travolta and Stephen Dorff film MOB LAND (although, yes, this is confusing.)

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.

LAST SEEN has the kind of premise that could become ridiculous almost instantly if that emotional foundation isn't there. Eleven years after Ian Ridley's young daughter Maggie disappeared, the former detective is working as a police dispatcher when a terrified teenage girl calls for help. Ian hears something nobody else can hear with the same certainty.

There’s something uniquely unsettling about a place created to make people beautiful becoming somewhere they go to die. SALÓN DE BELLEZA never needs to underline that contradiction because Director/co-writer Nathalia Acevedo builds the entire film around it, allowing beauty, illness, memory, loneliness, and mortality to exist beside one another without forcing them into a clearly defined statement. The result is a film that asks for patience and offers very little conventional comfort in return. However, the longer its strangeness settles in, the harder it becomes to shake its images and ideas.

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.

The word "return" carries a different weight when the place waiting for you is somewhere you've spent years trying to erase from your mind. Vyan escaped the war, rebuilt some version of a life away from it, and learned to survive by shutting down any emotions that might force her to confront what had happened. NO PARADISE IF YOU ARE KILLED BY A WOMAN sends her back to Mosul with a rifle in her hands and the possibility that the younger sister she believed was gone may still be alive.

Some subjects become uncomfortable almost as soon as they're spoken aloud, and CHILDREN OF THE MONKEY deliberately chooses one of them. Dario is the father of a disabled child whom he loves and cares for, only to discover something about himself when he grows increasingly close to his teenage nephew. This boy represents the son Dario once imagined having, and some part of him prefers that imagined version of fatherhood to the life he actually has.

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.