SUGAR
Golden, Jolley, Reynolds

by Jeff McCoy

Your outer breath stops and you experience stark reality;
   your immaculate naked awareness clear.
At that instant you must recognize it as yourself. – The Bardo Thodol

With a quote as enigmatic as its title, SUGAR opens with its silent, nameless protagonist (Samara Golden) cowering in a refrigerator. Venturing out into her squalid, debris-strewn apartment, she removes the grating from a crawlspace and drags out a corpse which may belong to the former tenant Anthony. Answering machine messages from concerned individuals – mother, landlord, creditors – indicate that Anthony was on a downward spiral before his (apparent) disappearance. As the apartment’s new occupant clears out detritus, she begins to uncover disturbing clues that Anthony’s spirit may be lingering. Is Anthony dead, and if so, did the young woman kill him? Is she insane? Or has Anthony’s own insanity seeped into the apartment itself, infecting its new tenant?

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ROCKET SCIENCE
Duly Noted, Inc./B&W Films

by L. Rob Hubbard

A confession upfront – high school coming-of-age stories are not my favorite film genre. ROCKET SCIENCE is such a film, despite a title that infers something along the lines of OCTOBER SKY or other NASA-related subjects. Instead, it concentrates on the suffering of a young misfit with a stuttering problem (Reece Daniel Thompson) who is recruited by a pushy student (Anna Kendrick) into joining the school’s debate team, seeming to commit a good amount of the sins of the genre and of “hip” indie comedy at first glance.

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EVILMAKER DOUBLE FEATURE
Pipedreams Entertainment

by Jason Pankoke

Poverty-row programmers of the contemporary sort, John Bowker’s THE EVILMAKER and ABOMINATION: THE EVILMAKER II appeared amidst the early flood of shot-on-video, no budget horror movies a while back, landing on labels that didn’t give them much of a push. The fine B-movie folks at Tempe Video have elected to hustle this mildly entertaining duo back into the marketplace with a spruced-up double-feature DVD, which the undemanding will find packs enough old-fashioned titillation and thrills to make it worth the peek.

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JANE WHITE IS SICK & TWISTED
D & K Enterprises

by Damian Duffy

There is a scene towards the end of JANE WHITE IS SICK & TWISTED in which the eponymous heroine attempts suicide. The brief hope that this shrieking caricature of a human being may come to a merciful end is the one shining moment in this otherwise execrable … thing.

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SUFFERING THE LEGITIMACY OF AESTHETICS
J.M. Magrini

by L. Rob Hubbard

SUFFERING THE LEGITIMACY OF AESTHETICS is an experimental film which its filmmaker synopsizes as “a film that explores art as a legitimate species of autonomous knowledge.” Um, yeah.

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PREMUTOS: LORD OF THE LIVING DEAD
IMAS Filmproduction

by Dr. Squid 

If you’re picking up something that A. sports LORD OF THE LIVING DEAD as its subtitle, B. is from Germany, and C. is made by a director with a name like Olaf Ittenbach, you’re betting it’s going to be chock full of blood and gore. To illustrate how proudly this horror flick delivers the goods, just before the end credits roll the total body count is displayed: 139. Damn!

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Tripod Films’ Journey from Comedy to Horror
The making of DRAWING BLOOD and WITCHCRAFT 13

by Michael Wolinski and Jeffrey Wolinski

Ever since a young age, we’ve had a passion to shoot films, create art, and express our deepest emotions and thoughts through cinema. We both attended film school, Michael at Southern Illinois University and Jeffrey at the University of Illinois, and although some say that film school is a waste, we learned a great deal. We were influenced by films shown to us in class that we would have never seen otherwise. We also learned what type of filmmakers we wanted to be by the time we finished school. We did not want to end up like the teachers who had only shot exercises for their classes, or the many arrogant students who acted like they knew everything and should already be in Hollywood, eating with Mr. Spielberg at The Ivy and adopting kids.

The thrill of being an independent filmmaker is that you are able to go out and shoot any type of film you want. When we started planning to shoot our first production, we went for what we thought came naturally – comedy – and dove right into THE AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL, in which we took chances with sight gags, language, and uncomfortable high school situations, turning them all upside down. From an artistic standpoint we were fulfilled, and the project went on to play dozens of domestic and international film festivals.

Since THE AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL played all these events and won numerous awards, we thought that was all that it took. In no time, we were going to be making bigger films with name actors and actually raising and earning money for what we loved to do. We were on such a high from all the adulations that we went out and made a second comedy feature, MY BROTHER’S LIGHT, which did not have as much of an impact even though it was also an incredibly fulfilling piece. Now, we just had to wait for the calls to come in.

Needless to say, this did not happen. Eight years later, neither one of these award-winning, critically acclaimed independent features have seen distribution. Why? How could this be? Well, as all distribution companies will say, “A comedy is a tough sell if you don’t have a big ‘name’ in it. Do you have anything else?” You can believe in a project all you want but, if no one sees it, what is the point?

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THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS VS. A MUMMY
Illini Film & Video

by Jeff McCoy

Please click here to read the review on our sister site, C-U Blogfidential!

BRAINWARP
THE REMOVERS
King Robot Films

by Tim Mitchell

A person really has to love comic books to make fun of them. That certainly seems to be the case with Jon Schnepp and Eric Hoffman in their masterpiece, BRAINWARP. The title character, played with a twinkle in his eye by screenwriter Hoffman, is billed as the dumbest super-villain. For example, Brainwarp briefly considers cutting off his own hand so he won’t leave any fingerprints. He trudges through life messing up crime after crime, usually accompanied by his even dumber sidekick, LaFoot (Bill Chott). Apparently a born-again Christian, LaFoot dreams of the Virgin Mary and believes he can assist Brainwarp by quoting scripture.

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PUEBLO SIN SUERTE
Boomshadow Pictures, Inc.

by L. Rob Hubbard
and Jason Pankoke

1  Set in an unnamed west Texas town, PUEBLO SIN SUERTE is a moody, low-budget noir that ultimately promises far more than it actually delivers, just like all of the characters that inhabit this town. The film is set into motion by the murder of two women drifters, attracting the attention of numerous unsavory characters – basically, most of the town’s population – including one Sheriff Ross Sullivan (Webb Wilder), a disgraced lawman who sees this case as his big chance to make his name.

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DEAD & BREAKFAST
Ambush Entertainment

by Jeff McCoy

Of all the mixed genres, the true horror-comedy is one of the hardest to pull off well. As opposed to a horror parody like SCARY MOVIE, a horror-comedy usually follows the familiar plots and unwritten rules of the horror genre, tweaking things just so and giving viewers the unique experience of both laughing and cringing at the same time. While clearly influenced by the work of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, and Stuart Gordon, yet not in the same league as SHAUN OF THE DEAD and other cult classics, DEAD & BREAKFAST is still the funniest movie I’ve seen in quite a while – even with its own, shall we say, special sense of humor – and that’s good enough for me.

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THE KILLING ZONE
Rada Film Group

by Damian Duffy

An unsuccessful Harlem psychiatrist named Malcolm Ojewcu (Isaach De Bankolé) begins moonlighting for the Brooklyn County Hospital at the behest of his mentor, Dr. Atong Stevens (Peter Francis James), the physician who rescued him from a Nigerian refugee camp and brought him to America two decades ago. While making a house call to a shut-in patient, the duo comes across a pair of 11-year-olds mugging an old woman. A struggle culminates with one of the kids shooting Stevens dead. Haunted by memories of his youth in West Africa, Malcolm begins stalking the Brooklyn slums for his friend’s young killer with whom he can’t help but identify.

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SHERMAN’S MARCH
BRIGHT LEAVES
Homemade Movies, Inc.

by Erin Anadkat

General William Tecumseh Sherman led his Union army on a march that concluded the Civil War in 1864 and left a mostly civilian population devastated in its wake. Initially, Ross McElwee’s film SHERMAN’S MARCH was going to be concerned with the effects of this devastation upon the “New South,” as he was borne from the rolling hills of Charlotte, North Carolina. McElwee’s girlfriend then broke up with him before production began, starting things off on a shaky note. Nevertheless, he returned home where his family reassured him that, if he found a “nice Southern girl,” everything would turn out fine.

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THE STINK OF FLESH
Exhilarated Despair Productions

by Jason Pankoke

Sniff. Sniff. Aaaaahh. Yes indeed, everything in New Mexico is coming up roses even as the living dead push up daisies (and cacti, presumably) in THE STINK OF FLESH, a loopy horror-comedy directed by Scott Phillips of SCIENCE BASTARD and DRIVE infamy. An unidentified occurrence has reanimated those at rest, and knuckle-padded drifter Matool (Kurly Tlapoyawa) has his hands full beating down the ghouls and rescuing a red-headed hottie (Tanith Fielder), after which they barge in on bitchy Dr. Rainville (Bob Vardeman) and two juveniles when seeking shelter. The self-centered Matool bolts after failing to hold off a zombie swarm and is knocked unconscious, eventually awakening in the back of a pickup truck that stops at an isolated, half-finished ranch home. Square-jawed Nathan (Ross Kelly) drags the fighter inside to give his wife Dexy (Diva) a good look, and then returns with the younger Rainville boy (Bryan Gallegos) with the really spooky eyes.

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PRISON-A-GO-GO
WiP Studios

by L. Rob Hubbard

A parody of women-in-prison films from the early Seventies, PRISON-A-GO-GO is an attempt by filmmaker Barak Epstein (CORNMAN: AMERICAN VEGETABLE HERO) to be the KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, if not the AIRPLANE!, of the genre, but the results are closer to one of the TOXIC AVENGER sequels. When a girl-next-door type named Callista (Lauren Graham, not the Lauren Graham of GILMORE GIRLS and BAD SANTA) is kidnapped by mad scientist Dr. Hurtrider (Travis Willingham), it’s up to her naïve sister Janie (Laurie Walton) to rescue her. This takes Janie to a hellhole prison in the Philippines where she encounters desperate women, weird experiments, mud wrestling, snake attacks, ninjas … and, of course, lots and lots of showers.

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