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I knew going into KATSEYE: WILD HEARTS that objectivity was going to be a little harder than usual because I’ve become a pretty big KATSEYE fan. Putting Sophia, Daniela, Lara, Megan, Yoonchae and Manon on screen together for 80 minutes already gives this documentary an enormous head start with me.

There's a point where sincerity has to stop doing the screenplay's work for it. ELIJAH PEEL comes frustratingly close to crossing that line because Kevin D. Sepe's story clearly means something deeply personal to him, and that emotional investment is visible throughout the film. Its ideas about addiction, second chances, and faith aren't cynical pieces of inspirational filmmaking assembled around a message. The problem is that the movie believes so strongly in Elijah's transformation that it sometimes skips the difficult steps required to make us believe it as much.

The smartest thing FUTUREWORLD does is refuse to make WESTWORLD again, simply. The original had such a clean premise that repeating it would've been easy. Reopen Delos, something goes wrong with the robots, and let another unstoppable machine start hunting people. Richard T. Heffron's sequel instead asks a more unsettling question. What if the technology is working exactly the way somebody wants it to?

The most effective thing YOU CAN'T LEAVE does is contained right there in its title. Once James and his friends enter the woods looking for answers about his missing sister, the question isn't simply what's hiding out there with them. It's whether the place itself has already decided they're not going anywhere.

THE LAST BOY SCOUT wastes almost no time explaining what kind of movie it wants to be. A professional football game turns into a rain-soaked nightmare involving drugs, a gun, and one of the most ridiculous acts ever committed in an end zone, and somehow that opening still feels perfectly suited to everything that follows. Tony Scott isn't interested in easing us into this world. He throws us into the gutter and assumes we'll figure out how to keep up.

Watching LOOKY-LOO and LOOKY-LOO: PART II back-to-back for my first experience with Jason Zink's strange little nightmare made the difference between them immediately clear. The first movie almost dares you to lose patience, locking the audience behind the eyes of a voyeur whose camera gradually becomes less of a hobby and more of a weapon. PART II doesn't abandon that uncomfortable simplicity, but it finally gives the idea somewhere bigger to go.

MAGICK MTN. is the kind of movie where you see something else every few minutes that could have turned into something amazing. A face appears out of the darkness, an occult image appears, a song gives a sequence more energy than anything around it, or Hana Mae Lee and Hal Satin suddenly lock into a visual style that makes the movie feel uniquely its own. Then that moment passes, another idea arrives, and the film starts chasing something else before the previous idea had a chance to take hold. That cycle becomes the experience of watching it. There’s potential around almost every corner, but MAGICK MTN. rarely stays anywhere long enough to turn that potential into something complete.

I love films that tell familiar stories in unique ways. It’s probably why I love the Czechoslovakian film ALICE (NĚCO Z ALENKY) so much. There's something so wonderfully unusual about watching fairy tales that are recognizable yet don't quite resemble the versions most of us grew up with. BENEATH THE TREES: FOLKTALES AT DEFA II collects five productions from East Germany's DEFA studio, spanning nearly three decades of filmmaking and an even wider range of approaches to fantasy. Some are colorful and playful, others feel eerie in their own way, and one carries considerably more political weight than you might expect from a collection built around stories involving princesses, witches, and magical animals.

Full transparency here, there’s a different kind of anticipation that comes with finally getting to watch a movie you helped back on Kickstarter (to be clear, I only did the Blu-ray level backing, so I wasn’t a producer or anything, but I still like to be transparent). You’ve watched the updates roll in, seen the project hit milestones, and spent months hoping the finished movie resembles what convinced you to back it in the first place. SLAY made that wait so much easier because everything about Kyra Elise Gardner’s feature screamed that the people making it genuinely loved what they were doing, not just how popular they are. That love is obvious almost immediately. And let me be clear! This production has a lot of notable names involved! Obviously, Kyra carries expectations with her family connections and previous projects. But then you walk into the writers' room and see names like Jimmi Simpson, Catherine Clark, and arguably the film's star, Zoey Luna. Beyond that, the cast is stacked with recognizable faces and plenty of new names.

HALLOWARRIOR has such an appealing idea that I spent much of its 80 minutes wishing it would stop adding things to it. A girl who believes she may be the last person alive still celebrates Halloween every year, surrounding herself with decorations and holiday traditions while living alone in the remains of civilization. That alone gives writer-director Ben Sottak enough material for a strange, sad, violent little horror movie. Instead, his feature debut keeps reaching for another genre, another character, another piece of mythology, and another shift until some of its best ideas start getting crowded out.

At a certain point, while watching GHOULS GONE WILD, you keep trying to categorize what you’re watching, and that just becomes completely useless. One minute there’s comedy, the next there’s a murder investigation, then vampires, martial arts, dreams come to life, flying bodies, monsters, the supernatural, or some practical effect that seems to have been created simply because somebody wondered whether they could get it onto the screen. That refusal to behave may be the best reason for Eureka Classics to put SCARED STIFF, THE HAUNTED COP SHOP, and MAGIC OF SPELL together.

I love production stuff, especially when it means we get a $30,000 film that acts like nobody bothered to tell it that $30,000 isn’t a lot of money in filmmaking. BUNKER HEIGHTS doesn’t seem interested in staying within the little independent-horror box tjat ot was assigned. Drew Fortier throws cops, criminals, corrupt politicians, a botched robbery, an assassination, gloomy comedy, practical monster effects, and an entire decaying city into the same story, then lets everything run into everything else.

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.

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.