'Lloyd the Conqueror' Movie Review

It’s about damn time that LARPers get their day in the sun. Their pasty skin could use some rays. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, LARPing stands for Live Action Role Playing. Think “Dungeons & Dragons”, but instead of gathering in a dank, dark basement, the players take to parks and other public spaces in order to whack each other about the head and torso with foam swords, and to throw tinfoil balls at each other in lieu of lightning bolts and spells. This is the world explored by “Lloyd the Conqueror”.

MIFFF Review: The Short Films

One of the coolest things about the Maelstrom International Fantastic Movie Festival is the shorts program. There were an absurd number of them, almost fifty, broken up into genre-specific chunks—a fantasy, animation, horror, and science fiction block. These are films that you’re not likely to see many other places. In a general sense shorts are wildly hit and miss—there are some great ones, but to get to them you have to sift through a crap load of garbage.

MIFFF Review: 'Boy Wonder'

Do yourself a favor, go out and find a way to watch “Boy Wonder”. It’ll be totally worth it, promise. A near perfect combination of grim revenge movie and dark super hero origin story, it is good enough to make you completely forgive a questionable choice of title. To lump it in with the likes of “Kick-Ass”, “Defendor”, and “Super”, may be a natural inclination, but at the same time it does the film a great disservice because it is markedly different from all of those films. “Boy Wonder” doesn’t aspire to be the first chapter in an ongoing saga, it doesn’t directly reference comic book lore and culture, and the main character doesn’t try to become an iconic superhero or mimic heroic acts from the funny books. He wants revenge, plain, simple, brutal revenge, and this is the grim, gritty, ultraviolent story of how he goes about his quest.

MIFFF Review: 'The Selling'

A big problem with films that present themselves as horror-comedies is that, all too often, they are neither frightening nor funny. In direct opposition to this trend, Emily Lou’s new film “The Selling” succeeds on both of these fronts—it is strong low-budget comedy and strong low-budget horror. There are consistent, legitimate laughs throughout, and, especially as the movie builds and progresses towards the climax, some solid ghost story action in the midst of all the humor.

MIFFF Review: 'Midnight Son'

Almost immediately director Scott Leberecht’s new horror film “Midnight Son” calls to mind George Romero’s 1976 movie “Martin”. Both are ostensibly vampire movies, but vampire movies that tweak the formula and refuse to follow conventions. Gone are the gothic, overdramatic affectations that have permeated the genre for years, and let’s put it this way, this vampire certainly doesn’t sparkle or glint like a diamond in the sun.