Waynesville‘s Hometown News Site

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?

Five seasons is usually where a sitcom starts revealing exactly how much gas is left in the tank. Familiar character combinations get paired up again, old conflicts return in slightly different clothes, and the same locations start to feel more like sets than places where these people actually live and work. ABBOTT ELEMENTARY shows a few signs of reaching that stage during its fifth season, but what's impressive is how quickly Quinta Brunson and her writers seem to recognize the danger and start messing with their own formula. They literally move the school into a mall.

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.

I thought a lot about how I wanted to approach this review. FRIDAY THE 13TH is my favorite horror franchise; I love the lore, the cheesiness, and the brutality. There was point while watching CRYSTAL LAKE, I realized my problem wasn’t that the series wasn’t giving me enough Pamela Voorhees. It was most definitely giving me the version I wanted to see, including her grief, deterioration, and gradual evolution toward the woman we know she becomes. The problem is that every time that part of the story starts becoming really interesting, the series seems determined to build something else around it.

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 miss Taylor Sheridan making movies. That thought followed me through almost all of THE MADISON, which probably isn't fair to a television series that largely succeeds at what it sets out to do. Sheridan has become one of television's most prolific creators, but before THE MADISON, I somehow hadn't watched any of his many series. My connection to him comes from the movies, particularly the three films he has called his thematic American Frontier trilogy: SICARIO, HELL OR HIGH WATER, and WIND RIVER. Taken together, they're phenomenal.

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.