Tremont‘s Hometown News Site

The late 1980s were a fascinating moment for Hong Kong fantasy cinema. Filmmakers were experimenting with wild swings that could jump from comedy to martial-arts action to tragic romance without warning. That era produced one of the genre’s most beloved films, A CHINESE GHOST STORY. Once that film exploded in popularity, it didn’t take long for similar supernatural romances to appear. PICTURE OF A NYMPH is one of the most obvious examples. Rather than feeling like a cheap imitation, though, it plays more like a companion piece built from the same creative DNA.

The zombie you think you know isn’t even the beginning. That iconic imagery, cemented by Hollywood over decades, is only a drop in the bucket of the larger history that has, as per usual, been whitewashed and torn to pieces, becoming a shadow of its origins. The zombie doesn’t, and never has, belonged to Hollywood. That’s the quiet but powerful thesis at the heart of BLACK ZOMBIE, and Maya Annik Bedward wastes no time making that clear. This isn’t a nostalgic genre retrospective. It isn’t a love letter to gore. It’s a cultural excavation. And it digs deep.

ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT drops us into absence. There’s no dramatic reenactment. No archival bombshell. No grieving family framed in soft focus. Instead, Charlie Shackleton narrates a film that never got made. And somehow, that very documentation becomes the film. The premise is unpretentious. Shackleton had the makings of a traditional true crime documentary, centered around a highway patrolman’s obsessive theory about the Zodiac Killer. He gathered interviews. He shot moody California B-roll of freeways and parking lots where violence once lingered. Then the rights fell through. The project collapsed. What remains is what we see, with a twist, a reconstruction of an unrealized documentary and a dissection of the genre that might have contained it. That concept alone could’ve turned into an indulgent exercise in self-worth, but it doesn’t.

The road to stardom is full of obstacles, egos, and opportunists. In STALKER JANE, the most dangerous obstacle doesn’t come from rival bands or industry gatekeepers. It comes from the person who believes in the band the most. Roger Glenn Hill’s low-budget horror thriller leans into a simple yet effective premise, looking at what happens when fandom turns into ruthless ambition. The film may operate within the boundaries of indie horror, but its central performance gives the story a spark that elevates it beyond its modest production.

There’s something uniquely unsettling about watching belief unravel in real time. And possibly even more so in watching that belief being wrapped into something that makes you trust in it, just to have it pulled out from under you while you’re still grasping for that trust. TWISTED YOGA isn’t interested in sensationalism. It’s interested in seduction. How does a global tantric yoga movement promise empowerment and belonging, then slowly morph into something coercive, secretive, and allegedly criminal? The series doesn’t rush to answer that. It slowly reconstructs the path and lets you see what broke.

There’s a version of this story that could have left permanent bruises on your heart. REGRETTING YOU flirts with that version, but unfortunately never commits to it. Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel and directed by Josh Boone, the film centers on Morgan Grant and her teenage daughter, Clara, after a devastating accident exposes not just loss, but betrayal. The premise promises emotional chaos. What we get instead is something far more controlled.

There’s something bold about creating a film around a writer who isn’t stuck because she lacks talent, but because she doesn’t know who she is when she isn’t borrowing from someone else. HER SONG opens in a French village that feels untouched and yet layered with ghosts of the past. Olivia, played by Kalki Koechlin, returns to her grandmother’s ancestral home hoping that closeness will unlock the novel she’s been struggling to finish. What she finds instead is inspiration that feels uncomfortably alive.

VICKY WAKES UP understands something crucial about the idea of creative frustration; seldom does it feel dramatic from the outside. It looks like fluorescent lighting, awkward small talk, and a calendar invite you don’t care about. Victoria Blade’s indie comedy pilot starts in that exact space, with the focus on a dead-end office job where ambition has quietly dulled into routine. Then it takes that and explodes into an experience you won’t forget.

The easiest way to parody giallo is to mock it directly. Black gloves. Bright red colored blood. Aggressive camerawork. Hysterical, frantic music. The harder task is understanding why those elements work in the first place. THE SEEING EYE DOG WHO SAW TOO MUCH succeeds because it clearly loves the genre it’s skewering.

A slow-burning psychoanalysis that works, GROUP: THE SCHOPENHAUER EFFECT doesn’t rely on chaos. It doesn’t change locations to manufacture drama. It doesn’t escalate through plot twists or external threats. It plants you in a room with eight people and a real-life psychoanalyst (Dr. Elliot Zeisel) and dares you to sit with the discomfort. Sure, there are unexpected moments throughout the conversation, struggles within the moments shared, but as a whole, the focus is on people exploring what makes them tick.

BODYCAM doesn’t ease you in, and that works in its favor. It puts you in the passenger seat of a patrol car and lets the tension simmer from there. Two officers. A routine response to a call. Some remarks that reveal more than they should. You know something’s going to go wrong. The film knows it too. It’s just waiting for the exact second to pull the pin.

MARIINKA doesn’t open with the expected invasion footage or tragic headlines. It begins in the quiet before the world started paying attention. Pieter-Jan De Pue’s documentary looks at Eastern Ukraine not from the vantage point of geopolitics, but from the ground level of adolescence. Before the full-scale invasion dominated global coverage, there were already young lives being shaped, fractured, and hardened by a war that refused to end.

A farm passed down through generations becomes a graveyard of obligation in THE MONSTER WITHIN, a psychological horror that understands the most dangerous monsters aren’t always the ones with claws. Garrett doesn’t inherit wealth. He inherits responsibility. Beneath the soil of his family’s hundred-acre farm lives something ancient and hungry, and according to tradition, it must be fed. What makes this premise effective isn’t just the creature lurking underground. It’s the quiet horror of a man who believes obedience is virtue.

There’s a raw simplicity to PLAY DEAD that almost works in its favor. A woman wakes up, finding out she’s injured and stuck in a basement surrounded by corpses. Her captor is a masked killer moving in and out of the house above. Her only chance at survival is to lie among the bodies and convince him she’s already dead. That premise is pretty simple, brutal, and built for tension.