#microbudget horror

[barbaragenova]

“Oscar Moreno is a Mexican-born screenwriter and director who just had his first feature released on Tubi. It’s called ENTE. It’s a creepy movie. The goal of this conversation is to make you click on Tubi real fast, so here’s another link to ENTE, free to stream now on Tubi.

Topics include: a working definition of “border horror”, going back and forth between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, real-looking people on a movie screen, the reality of being a fully bilingual writer in 2023, the great screenwriter strike of 2023, shooting on a micro-budget, the film Nuevo Orden and “being judged in the court of public opinion”, composer Carolyn Koch, “letting real life touch your own work”, “trying to figure out the smallest scale version of your ideas possible and from there, any additions that may seem extravagant are placed on the story because the story actually needs them”, fictional projects getting shelved because similar stories end up happening in real life with grim consequences, and the satisfaction of accomplishing your goals despite the odds.

ENJOY.” 

[ribremoval]

watching milk & serial with my cat ❤ he loves horror movies just like meee

[transgenderfrankenstein]

It's Transgender Day of Visibility, and I'd like to share this passion project of mine! Filming begins on Saturday! Dead Name is a Transgender Body Horror film about a college age trans girl who dies deep in the closet. When she wakes up in her casket and crawls out of her grave. She can't feel anything but the most extreme pain, and has a bit of a taste for flesh, but her mind is just as sharp as it ever was. Her return is treated like a miracle.

Having died without ever living as woman, she modifies her body, reshaping it. As her body changes and she begins to live the life she wants for herself, those who saw her return as an act of God turn on her.

[cipheramnesia]

I'm trying to wrap my head around this shit based horror movie, because I've never seen anything like it.

I've seen poop used for shock value or as a joke or even as a set piece but I haven't really come across someone who made shit the center of the film. The whole premise hinges on the idea that the protagonist had some kind of gut biome disease, which drives people around her into a state of murderous rage. The condition gets worse over the course of the film both in terms of how rapidly the violence begins, and also how much pain the protagonist is from the stomach disease.

What I find striking is how seriously it plays things out, from the on-going and escalating paranoia of the protagonist, who is also constantly falling in and out of reality-questioning delirium, to the veracity of reactions excrement. It's difficult to put into words, but the shit scenes manage to convey the bone deep exhaustion that comes with wanting to use the bathroom easily, and not being able to. It's not a movie trying to express shit as "ew gross" but instead as this essential part of the human body which can go wrong in genuinely upsetting and awful ways.

It suffers a bit from budget issues - the acting isn't great, sets are obviously people's homes in many cases - but it manages to succeed thanks to taking material that could have easily become juvenile and ironic, and treating it seriously (also a solid lead actress). It's a movie that ends up being about how openly hostile the world can become when you have a disability, especially one which crosses social taboos as much as bowel issues does. About how quickly friends and strangers can turn on you when they discover your problems are related to excrement, and they might have to deal with that. And of course about what people who are disabled are expected to endure just to be treated like a human.

It's still muddled. It's a B- movie that's taking A-level swings and hitting most of the time. And in some ways I almost wonder if the small production value and budget actors are why it succeeds. I don't think even a low but not microbudget production would have been allowed to be so unflinching and get away with shooting as something that can be a source of genuine terror and unhappiness.

Anyway it's called GoodBi (2022, bi as in biome, sorry bisexuals), and it's on Tubi. Obviously this one is not for the weak of stomach, but there isn't much gore.

[mysteryspotcast]

To answer a question from this latest ep: the season you’re on now actually starts in with the digital cameras!! They’re flipping between an Arriflex D-21, a Panasonic AG-HVX200, and a Red One Camera (im assuming in addition to their film camera (usually an Arricam)? A quick search didn’t immediately turn up what specific episodes used with cameras, and I feel like spending more time than what I already have violates the spirit if not the letter of “dont watch supernatural bc of this podcast”). All of those are digital cameras in some capacity: a camcorder and two of the earlier digital camera models for film production. Also looking for the answer to this brought me face to face with the fact that the camera they use for parts of s6&7 (Canon 5D II) is actually one model down from the one I have.

There is a chance. A SMALL CHANCE. that the microbudget horror short I shot with friends, would look INDISTINGUISHABLE from an spn ep.

I—don’t know what to do with this information, so it’s going in this ask like a church confession.

i am literally obsessed with the level of research that you did for this. thank you for your service. and this information is harrowing.

[fivecharactersinsearchofanexit]

what are your favorite horror movies/movies that you'd rec?

Yayyyyy okay this is a preddy long list all off the top of my head so I might reblog later with more lol. Some of these aren't exactly horror but everything on here is at least a thriller which for my money counts

Screenlife, faux broadcast, & found footage

Host (There's a couple pictures with this title, look for the COVID era film it's about an hour long. I believe it's on Shudder)

The Collingswood Story

The Blair Witch Project

The Last Broadcast

Creep & its sequel

Milk & Serial (recent microbudget horror, full film is on youtube)

This House Has People In It (technically not a Movie but look for the full version on youtube and you can watch it like one)

Lake Mungo (!)

Ghostwatch

The Bay

Give Me Pity!

We're All Going to the World's Fair

Sorry everything else is gonna be by decade instead of genre 😔

50s/60s

Look up anything produced by Roger Corman

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Seconds

Village of the Damned

Rosemary's Baby although I really prefer the novel and recommend that with a little more enthusiasm

Night of the Hunter

The Bad Seed

Really anything with Vincent Price is going to be a good time

Persona

70s

Obviously Night of the Living Dead is a classic for a reason but Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite movies of all time. Watch this movie.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The Brood

Don't Look Now

Carrie

Alien

PLEASE double feature Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Robert Altman's Images

Deliverance

Jaws

Eraserhead

80s

Sole Survivor

Pick a Cronenberg. Any Cronenberg. My favorites are Scanners, the Dead Zone (good option if you're not into body horror), and Dead Ringers!

Poltergeist

The Changeling

Possession (!)

The Vanishing/Spoorloos (!!!!!!!)

Please double feature Blue Velvet and River's Edge in any order for an upsetting night in with Dennis Hopper

Reanimator

The Child's Play franchise gets worse with every installment but is always really, really fun

The Shining

The Thing

Blow Out

The Seventh Continent

90s

Benny's Video

Funny Games

IT (the miniseries)

Misery

Candyman

Jacob's Ladder

In the Mouth of Madness

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (great even if you don't like Nightmare on Elm Street)

Lost Highway

The Silence of the Lambs

Night Breed

Cure

Ring (original Japanese version)

The Sixth Sense

Se7en

Fire in the Sky

Stir of Echoes

2000s

Mulholland Drive

Inland Empire

A Tale of Two Sisters (remade in America as the Uninvited, also pretty good!)

Pulse

May

Ginger Snaps

The Descent

Signs

Dead End

The War of the Worlds

The Others

One Hour Photo

2010s

Get Out

Us

Midsommar

The Witch

The Lighthouse

Suspiria

Mandy

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Climax

The Wailing

Possum

Luz

2020s

Trap

Possessor

Nope

M3GAN

Malignant

Barbarian

The Night House

The Beast

Talk to Me

Watcher

The First Omen

I Saw the TV Glow

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Cuckoo

Crimes of the Future

Nightmare Alley (the original is also very good!)

[starplanes]

A friend of mine is producing a short queer horror film! It's about a first date in the woods, and it's currently funding on Crowdfundr. Check it out, share it, and support it if you can!

(This project is a personal, independent short film falling under the SAG-AFTRA microbudget agreement.)

[krirebr]

Obligatory 🐕 (Because we all need more of Her Majesty, Princess Lou).

📽 - I'm hoping to get into more scary stuff, but I need it to have a sense of humor (i.e. Tremors, Bubba Ho-Tep). Do you have any recommendations?

Congrats, again, on the 700!!!

-Zombie

@thezombieprostitute I love this! I can definitely be a bit of a scaredy-cat for the harder stuff, so horror-comedy is my jam! I've got some recommendations below, but I'm sure I'll keep thinking of more too!

If you like Tremors, then you should absolutely try Nope. It's got that same adventure-movie vibe and is so much fun. There are definitely some scary sequences and a little gore, but I really think the fun outweighs the rest of it.

Ok, in my opinion, the ultimate horror-comedy is Scream. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd definitely put it at the top of your list. This was my entry point to slashers, and it's still my all-time favorite. So 90s and a really fun whodunnit.

This next one is a little riskier, but I'm such a big fan of You're Next. A terrible, wealthy family has a reunion which is crashed by a group of intruders in animal masks. Little do they know that the new fiance of one of the sons has a survivalist background and is determined to get as many people as she can through the night. Probably the goriest on this list, but I feel like it's all telegraphed pretty well and avoidable if that's something you need to do. Just a really good time.

And ok, here is the most obscure pick on this list. Housebound is a microbudget movie out of New Zealand from about ten years ago. A disagreeable young woman has to move back in with her mom when she's put on house arrest. But her mom's house might be haunted. Probably the broadest comedy here, and if you can find it, pretty fun.

Please let me know if you watch any of these! I hope you have fun!

And here you go!

Kris's 700 Celebration

[whoiwanttoday]

Well guys, the Oscars are upon us. The coming days will no doubt be full of pre-party pictures, Oscars red carpet pictures, Oscars viewing party pictures, after party pictures, and so on all revolving around Hollywood's biggest award. It is a cultural event that continues to drop in the ratings and overall esteem but has an out-sized importance on the culture and the film world. It's hard to explain how something has gone from the average person going, "These are the best movies!" when I was a kid, even though they were not, to "The Oscars are a joke!" when nothing about the Oscars has much changed. It more about the pop culture landscape, as the film world narrows and grows more top heavy but also now that the internet gives more voices. It is still important in the sense that it is a bellwether of what is considered most important by the most mainstream of the film industry. It tends to always be looking back but then most things are. Anyway, the Oscars are most decidedly not the best movies of the year in my mind, as a matter of fact some of the Best Picture nominees are kind of bad actually. Not in the microbudget horror DVDs I own bad, they are competently made by professionals but also forgettable tripe that will largely just be forgotten in a decade. So here are some movies that I think are worth your time from 2022, a year that people bemoan for not being that great but that's a weird way to look at it, there were great things in this year, just not the sort of great things people are going to give a gold statue to. This list is not exhaustive nor is it ranked. I feel like ranking art is a stupid thing for stupid people. I apologize if you really like this but it strikes me as completely destructive and counter intuitive to actually enjoying art, it exists to create drama online and drive "engagement". There is a reason listicles are one of the internets most common piece of journalism in the era of click bait, they are arbitrary, a monkey can do it, and they make everyone upset so they tweet about it, thus bringing in more eyeballs and that sweet, sweet ad money. I also am not great at favorites because I find the art I like best in this moment is the one that speaks to my current mindset, that's the joy of great art, it grows with you and what you bring to it matters a great deal, it's why things shift over your lifetime. If you like listing your favorite whatever though that's great, my weird commitment issues are not your problem nor an indictment of your taste. There's a different between favorite and best I am saying. Final caveat is that I haven't seen every movie this year. I tried to see a lot, I did see a lot but you know, some stuff falls through the cracks. Or I know it's not for me so why bother? I knew I wouldn't like the Fablemens but got pressured into seeing it because it was important and you know what? It kind of sucked. A totally mediocre movie made by a great director. Who cares. So that said, the movies I saw this year that I think are of real value are as follows: Aftersun, After Yang, the Banshees of Inisherin, RRR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Pearl, And X. Honestly, it was a strong year for horror in general and Pearl and X might not even be the best horror movies of last year but they are the most interesting and most compelling to me. Aftersun was probably my favorite movie of the year and really was magnificent top to bottom. Two strong performances and an examination of both depression and memory and how our relationships with our parents shift over our life as we can see things differently and understand them in a different light as an adult. After Yang also has a lot to do with memory and how we remember and what makes us. RRR is an amazingly fun action movie that is pure joy if you can ignore all the Hindu Nationalism and let's be honest, most of you are Americans so I bet you can. The Banshees of Inisherin is a difficult movie about a lot of things that I still think about. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a wonderfully joyful and emotional movie that manages to be hilarious, action packed, and beautiful and in a just world will win the Oscar tonight. Luckily, win or lose it's also a movie that makes us realize being a loser isn't so bad if you keep trying. So those are mine, feel free to make recommendations my direction if you want, or to talk to me about any movie you saw this year. I probably have thoughts, I am very opinionated. Anyway, getting on to my opinions, let's talk about who I want to fuck today, the main opinion that drives this blog. I am posting Mia Goth for lots of reasons but the big reason she's in my brain is we may not see her anywhere this weekend and that's a real shame because she should have been nominated for an Oscar. I will preface this by saying I don't have the same issues with a lot of the acting nominees that I do with the movies, in that it's rare to see a truly terrible performance get nominated (though there are quite a few life time achievement nominations I spy this time out) but they are often safe and predictable ones. Performances that seem to have been created to win awards rather than to illuminate and empower in the way only art can. Mia Goth hands down gave the best performance I saw last year of any woman. Her role in X was very good and you know, she played two parts and that could be seen as gimmicky. Much more of a "give me awards" sort of thing if that was the performance I wanted to talk about. It was very good, most telling to me is we are told early on in the movie her character is someone with an extra something. That is often a curse because if we don't feel it from the character then it's tell don't show and can hurt the entire thing. But by the end I got it, her character, when the spotlight is on, lights up in a way that you could just feel. So she was good in X. I am not here to talk about her in X. I am here to talk about her in Pearl which would have been an astounding character piece no matter what. It's basically all her, the movie is her and the pieces the come in and out of her orbit. They are people but for her character they are accessories. Obstacles or facilitators to her own happiness. Mia Goth played someone with some very serious mental issues and managed to make that person sympathetic and monstrous. She was a monster and I knew it but the performance was so good and so powerful you could still feel her sadness, her desperation, her need for whatever it was that was missing inside her that she just could not seem to fill with anything. That alone would have made this a really good performance. It's just that I also saw X, where she was someone so radically different if I didn't know it was the same actress I never would have guessed. Which is why Mia Goth's performance really should have gotten her award nominations but these aren't the kind of movies that get awards because these aren't the kind of movies you can brag about yourself with nearly as easily. The movie where Mia Goth fucks a scarecrow doesn't quite signal the prestige and bring about self congratulatory masturbation the way giving an award to a movie about say deaf people would. So the world is what it is but I am going to recognize her today. She is amazingly talented, I hope to watch Infinity Pool soon and I am very excited for what she has coming down the line. Oh, she also helped write Pearl, feels important to explain what a complete artist she is, she really did built the character from the ground up. Today I want to fuck Mia Goth.

[sumeria]

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) IS A MICROBUDGET HORROR FILM WITH THEMES OF INDUSTRIALIZATION, OSTRACIZATION, POVERTY, DISABILITY, THE ILLUSION OF THE PROPER AMERICAN NUCLEAR FAMILY, DEHUMANIZATION OF WOMEN, AND TREATMENT OF THE PROLETARIAT LIKE CATTLE AND IM NOT JOKING BITCH

[tlbodine]

Vampire Double Feature

Our newest film challenge puts us at the mercy of a random number generator -- which is a fun way to find stuff I might not otherwise know about and try watching things that may be outside our comfort zone. And because randomness is fun. (Yes I stole this idea from a podcast and no I'm not sorry)

Anyway, I previously posted a list of vampire movies we shortlisted for our first roll, "pure-horror vampires." Below are the two we settled on.

Afflicted (2013) is the directorial debut of Canadian filmmakers Derek Lee and Clif Prowse, who also play the main characters. It's a found-footage style low-budget film following a pair of dudes on a Eurotrip that goes horribly awry when one of them comes down with a slight case of vampirism.

Sensing a path to viral fame, they initially document and upload his transformation, but things soon take a dark turn. What follows is a lot of body horror (achieved often with some neat practical effects and camera tricks, which I appreciate)

This is a perfectly solid film and deserves a lot more attention than it got. It's doing something clever with vampirism, the characters are reasonably genre savvy, and while the plot doesn't really tread any new ground or uncover any brilliant wisdom, it's a perfectly fine showcase for some cool effects. I have certainly seen significantly worse found footage movies.

We joked (but it's totally true) that this movie and What We Do in the Shadows should be essential viewing for newbie Vampire: The Masquerade players -- the "what you think the game will be like" vs "what the game is actually like" experiences.

My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020) was written and directed by Jonathan Cuartas. It's about two siblings struggling to care for the, uh, special needs of their younger brother. Needs that involve, among other things, not exposing him to sunlight and routinely killing people so he can drink their blood.

Let me just get this part out of the way: this is not a "true horror" type movie. For that part of the dice roll, it fails. I did really like it, though. It's the sort of film I enjoy a lot -- a tiny cast, minimal settings, microbudget indie film with a primary focus on character interaction, dialogue-driven storytelling, rich atmosphere and compelling, messy themes that get explored without a clear resolution.

I think most of those type of movies fall under the "mumblecore" genre. Around here we just call them Tiana Movies, and I fucking love them.

Anyway. So the central conflict of this film is that vampirism is a chronic, debilitating disease, and however tragic and sweet their baby brother is, being his full-time caretakers has begun to take a tremendous toll on the older siblings. Caring for him is an unreasonable ask -- they have to find new victims all the time, run a perpetual risk of being caught or injured in the process, and their lifestyle forces them into social isolation and poverty. It's not fair that they have to do this. But if they don't, who will? There is no security net in place to protect baby vampires.

The movie lingers on the painful realities of this "unmovable object, unstoppable force" conundrum, winding its way toward an inevitable tragic conclusion. But in painting the situation as hopeless, I think the film actually shines a light on all the many ways their situation could have been better -- which is, I think, the function of a really good tragedy.

I'm curious to hear people's reads on this movie through a lens of ableism, because on the one hand it is bleak in its resolutions...but on the other hand, I think the question it asks is a valid one. It's a movie that leaves you with a lot to think about, if you let yourself engage with the material.

I think it would make an excellent double feature with Lamb, for reasons that are difficult to articulate but which feel very accurate. If anybody has seen this movie, please come talk to me about it.

[swampflix]

Skinamarink (2023)

For anyone disappointed that Jane Schoenbrun’s microbudget darling We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a somber teen-crisis drama instead of the low-fi creepypasta horror it was mismarketed as, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink might be the salve for your year-old wounds.  Curiously, the next project on Schoenbrun’s docket is titled I Saw the TV Glow, which is the closest thing to a coherent…

[tri-punisher]

moans a lil bitt

[cipheramnesia]

Something I suspect, but don't know for sure about most current microbudget horror is that they are all saving costs by using AirBnB rentals for their sets. This isn't in a negative, if I'm even right. But if my guess is good, that represents an interesting kind of adaptation in the extremely low budget movie process.

[anhed-nia]

NOT BLOGTOBER 10/20/2022: ZO IN EXILE

When I read the description of Dylan O’Keefe’s compact, low budget indie project ZO IN EXILE, I developed a certain image of it in my mind:

“Zo and friends venture off for a weekend getaway to a cabin in the quiet town of Exile, New York. But a bucolic vacation turns grim when Zo's friends, fueled by debauchery and excess, plunge her into a fantasy world of frenzy where her only escape is to come to terms with her own destructive nature. Or else face the music of eternal madness.”

Between this summary and the movie’s poster, featuring lead actress Shiho Matsuoka’s pained expression as she gazes into the void, I came to expect a grim, agonal psychodrama about the sadomasochism inherent in human nature. I had set myself up for a big surprise. ZO IN EXILE defied my expectations several times from being to end, the experience of which is so pleasing that I hesitate to describe what happens in it to others. It would be better to go in knowing as little as I did. But, if you insist on coming prepared, I’ll do my best to explain it.

The first seed of ZO IN EXILE was sown when filmmaker Dylan O’Keefe and his fiancee and producer Jennifir Nicholich started joking about the prodigious mop Dylan had grown during the pandemic, aping the end of THE WIZARD OF OZ: “And you were there, and you were there, and you were there, and you were—HAIR?!’” The gag eventually evolved into one of ZO’s central villains, a sentient, man-sized, blade-wielding wig that pursues Zo through her own version of Oz. In saying this much, I’ve already given you a taste of how bonkers ZO IN EXILE is, but like THE WIZARD OF OZ, it begins in a very familiar place.

Zo (Shiho Matsuoka) joins her friend Jack (Adrián Burke) and horny couple Jacob (John DiMino) and Judy (Madeleine Ours) for a getaway at a cabin in the woods. The shy, sensitive protagonist’s unease with her companions’ hard partying seems to forecast an EVIL DEAD-like fate for them all—and let’s face it, EVIL DEAD is a popular thing to imitate for young filmmakers on a microbudget. So, if you’ve seen any amount of homemade horror movies, you might feel like you know what you’re in for. O’Keefe is counting on it: “It’s been done a hundred thousand times, it’s very easy to shoot… So I kind of wanted to follow that cliché, and then trail off into Alice In Wonderland.” Initially, Zo is more threatened by her so-called friends than the cosmic horror that haunts the cabin, as “nice guy” Jack joins the group effort to get her hammered so she’ll be more vulnerable to him, and Jacob physically isolates her, knocking her out. Zo doesn’t consciously experience what so obviously happens next, as she plunges into a dream state that at first resembles a karaoke video.

This “follow the bouncing ball” musical sequence is the first hint we have that the world of Exile is collaged out of various forms of popular media that make up our collective subconscious; some viewers have noted similarities to HAUSU, TOO MANY COOKS, and Wonder Showzen, but O'Keefe's influences are more mundane. In her dream state, Zo meets the otherworldly Landlord (Tee Sudderth), a deceptively maternal woman with a malicious wig, who sends our heroine winking in and out of parallel universes resembling early silent films, TV commercials, sitcoms, and YouTube tutorials as she tries to find her way home. After inducing a false sense of familiarity with its EVIL DEAD pastiche, the insanity of EXILE escalates rapidly, and against all expectations, it becomes extremely funny. In its most startling episode, a Tiktok influencer has her phone stolen mid-video, and we join the phone on a breakneck race through the subway system where it meets a grim fate. The best special effect in the movie is really O’Keefe’s editing, which creates a rhythm that suits both horror and comedy.

“I want to do something I didn’t have to really care about, that I could try to not be such a perfectionist with,” the filmmaker says of a film that he is careful to insist was made just for fun. ZO IN EXILE was shot and assembled over two years of the pandemic more or less as a diversion, but as zany as it is, there remains something personal and quietly intense simmering beneath its surface. A particularly hilarious scene involves a predatory telemarketer (Noam Harary) from Great Northern Wellness and Insurance, Innovative Products, Brokers & Adjusters who tries to scam an isolated old lady named Helen, but she’s seen so much shit in her time that there is no beating her. The scene goes from comical to oddly sobering, before transitioning to a scene of Zo wandering through a seemingly endless graveyard that blends perfectly into the Manhattan skyline, giving the impression that the city and the cemetery are part of the same continuum. O’Keefe explains this sequence: “The whole idea was, my mother is a hospice worker, and unfortunately the elderly are very disposable (in our society). The telemarketer is trying to grift this person at the end of her life; if there’s a dollar to be made, it will be.”

Dylan O’Keefe credits his bright, hardworking mother as a major influence on him, which makes it unsurprising that ZO IN EXILE is dotted with potent female characters. The Landlord finds a parallel in the caretaker Biandbi (Debra Toscano), an amusingly passive-aggressive Italian-American lady who ropes Zo into the film’s most dreamlike scenario. She entices Zo to help her tend to a beehive inside an antique trunk, explaining, “If the hive has a violent queen, the hive is violent. If the hive has a gentle queen, the hive is gentle. I have a violent queen…you must be the gentle queen.” Besides being excitingly weird, the scene also puns on Zo’s longed-for home in Queens, and also the multiple queen-like figures in the story. As our heroine, Shiho Matsuoka plays it deadly straight, which has the effect of making the funny scenes even funnier, and the moving moments more affecting. If there were even a whiff of sarcasm or irony about her, ZO IN EXILE wouldn’t work the way it does, with its strange undercurrent of sincerity.

The strong, independent women aren’t the only abstractly autobiographical element in the movie; perhaps its most striking image is of a burning piano (with incredible live sound), which happens to be the exact instrument on which the filmmaker learned to play as a youth. O’Keefe laughs off this strangely poignant inclusion by noting, “During the pandemic when work was slow, I became a volunteer firefighter. I’m a bit of a pyro, I like to light shit on fire—sorry, Chief! But I’m lapsed now, I haven’t volunteered for six months.” The real thing to learn from this beat is that you don’t need to be spoiled for resources in order to make a really surreal and visually striking movie; you just need an open mind and a little gumption. OK, maybe a lot of gumption, especially if you’re trying to make something unusual that people don’t yet know they'll want to see.

What I’m trying to say is, you DO want to see it, because there’s no other way you’ll believe it. Check it out tonight (10/27) at 10pm, and this Saturday (10/29) at midnight at the Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint. If your friends are foolish enough to miss it but you don’t know how to describe it, point them to this review and maybe that’ll help. Maybe.