Screen Anarchy

In the very near-future of husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Miriam Louise Arens and Mitchell Arens’ impressively realized feature-length debut, Heartworm, it could be the day after tomorrow.   A family of three, Avena (Amber Gray), Mark (Juan Riedinger), and Zamira (Ellie Reine), suddenly becomes a family of two, leaving Avena, a concert pianist from a family of concert pianists, and her husband, Mark, positively shatttered, lost, and unmoored.   That same near-future, however, has led to a technological leap, NeuraLife, that allows for instant entry and departure into a fully realized virtual world resembling our own. It also allows both Avena and Mark an escape from the life-distorting grief that haunts their days and invades their dreams, turning them into nightmares of loss. But it’s also…

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Our guide to genre fare opening this week in movie theaters includes a straight ahead horror thriller, a comic horror movie, a different type of thriller, and four strong indies. Read on for more information about each film. They Will Kill You The film is now playing, only in movie theaters, via Warner Bros. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes. Our review by J Hurtado: “Kirill Sokolov has stepped into the Hollywood spotlight and made a big statement here, and horror fans are definitely going to respond. They Will Kill You is a big, bloody blast of energy, and isn’t that the stuff big screen dreams are made of?” Official synopsis: “The film unleashes a blood-soaked, high-octane horror-action-comedy in which a young woman…

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Plus: ‘The Mortuary Assistant,’ ‘Pretty Lethal,’ and much more.

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A fine vertical teaser is this, the key art for the long awaited return of David Robert Mitchell. After the instant cult success of It Follows, he failed to connect with a mass audience with the sprawling neo-noir conspiracy oriented Under The Silver Lake. Now, 8 years later, and teaming up with J.J. Abrams Bad Robot and Warner Brothers comes a science fiction survival picture with A list stars, and a high concept.   But let us talk about the poster, shall we? An overhead, drone-ish shot of neat and tidy suburbia, mangled by what appears to be a giant lizard or dinosaur. Like a modern urban protest, the title card is painted vertically on the street that divides the neat and ticky-tacky homes (“little boxes…

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Weird and wild, Speed or Perish, directed by the French duo known as Seth Ickerman, captures immediate attention in its first frame and keeps transforming into something truly distinctive. The 8-minute short film, made for the artist Carpenter Brut, is described in its official verbiage thusly: “Conceived as a genuine genre film disguised as a music video, the film plunges the viewer into a dystopian megalopolis where speed is the only religion. A death race pits hybrid man/machine vehicles against each other in a fight to the death, at the heart of an urban environment oversaturated with metal, flesh and pixel. Somewhere between Mad Max and Battle Angel Alita, through a steroid-fuelled 80s aesthetic. “The film is part of an ongoing approach to treating the…

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The Criterion Collection captures Lynne Littman’s 1983 post-apocalyptic horror-drama.

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Western Canada’s largest genre film festival, The Calgary Underground Film Festival (or CUFF), just dropped its entire lineup for the 23rd edition. Existing in a kind of liminal season where the city could be the piled under snow, or T-shirt patio weather, the festival obliges with an equally unpredictable mixture of prestige horror, indie comedies, quirky satire, under the radar Canadian drama, and oddball documentaries.  The festival opens with Damian McCarthy’s supernatural horror, Hokum, which stars Adam Scott (Severance, Party Down). Our own J Hurtado noted that the film puts “McCarthy into the upper echelon of contemporary horror filmmakers alongside people like Ari Aster and Oz Perkins.” The festival closes with I Love Boosters, the latest from Boots Riley (Sorry To Bother You) featuring a superb ensemble,…

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Biopics aren’t my favorite kind of film. The things a person has done are often more interesting than the person himself, and it is not often that you need to know the background story of the person, what motivated him. Often you’re just shown talent, or necessity, or opportunity. Or what happened. So for me it wasn’t without irony that I noticed that one of my favorite films this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam was I Swear, a biopic. It even won the audience award, as if to rub it in. And it wasn’t even the only biopic I liked at the festival: master animator Sylvain Chomet, of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist fame, had made a nice one too. His…

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Marama, the Maori gothic-horror from writer-director Taratoa Stappard, will arrive in theaters on April 17th. Distributed by Dark Sky FIlms and Watermelon Pictures, Marama is wrapping up its festival run in the coming weeks at festivals across the U.S. The new trailer and poster premiered the other day. Catch up with the trailer below the announcement.    Dark Sky Films together with Watermelon Pictures proudly announce the April 17th theatrical release of festival favorite MÃRAMA, a new genre-bending gothic horror feature from Indigenous Māori writer-director Taratoa Stappard (Taumanu, Emkhatsini). MÃRAMA had its world premiere at TIFF and went on to numerous prestigious festivals including Palm Springs, AFI Fest, Sitges and others. MÃRAMA will be in select theaters on April 17th.   Anchored by a powerful…

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The second wave of titles in this year’s Overlook Film Festival were announced today, now completing the full lineup.    An all new section has been added to the festival program, Side Shows. Highlighting films that are not neccessarily horror flicks but occupy the genre space in their own way, the three flicks chosen for this section are exceptional choices: Over Your Dead Body, Normal and The Furious.    Other additions include Canadian oddity Buffet Infinity, French stuck-in-a-toilet horror Flush, SXSW anthology Grind, and Kiwi gothic horror, Mārama.    Make your way through the massive announcement that follows to find more titles, events and programs at this year’s Overlook Film Festival.    THE OVERLOOK FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES SECOND WAVE LINEUP AS FULL FESTIVAL IS UNVEILED   …

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