I'm a sucker for any movie that's going along fine but then is all... "and now there are wolves." (Insert any variety of killer animal.) The hook here, in Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves, is the wolves, but that’s not really the point. The eponymous predators don’t show up until relatively late in the game—you know it’s coming, it’s right there in the title and prominently featured in all the marketing—but things are already harrowing and conflict-riddled enough by the time our furry pals appear.
If it looks like an Alien movie, walks like an Alien movie, and murders you in space with a giant armor-plated extraterrestrial killing machine, then it’s probably an Alien movie. And by god, Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is an Alien movie. We’ve got xenomorphs, we’ve got face-huggers, there’s a chest-burster, corporate malfeasance, capitalistic overreach, acid blood, synthetics up to no good, and all the expected bells and baubles.
Birds sure are creepy little fuckers, aren’t they? Dinosaur-looking sons of bitches. At least that’s what Cuckoo would have you believe. Though Luz writer/director Tilman Singer’s latest off-kilter horror offering definitely keeps you guessing as to the why of the lingering avian motif, it ultimately pays off in wild ways, taking unusual paths to get there.
Do people still like movies where Elijah Wood walks around the New Zealand wilderness? Because there’s a great deal of that in Bookworm, the latest directorial effort from Ant Timpson (Come to Daddy). It may not be quite as epic as the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s impossible for that landscape to not look incredible, and there’s plenty of adventure on this sweet, earnest journey of reconciliation between a long-estranged father and daughter, a journey that also happens to be something of a cryptid hunt.
When you hear about a DIY Estonian horror-musical that took the filmmaker (Sander Maran served as director, writer, editor, cinematographer, songwriter, and probably more roles) a decade to make, you can’t help but be curious. And Chainsaws Were Singing is all of that and so, so much more. This is a bizarre, wild time that goes way, way out in the wilderness and is something fans of movies like Cannibals: The Musical and Hundreds of Beavers need to check out.
19-year-old Australian dynamo Alice Maio Mackay already has a hell of a roster of low-to-no-budget horror movies under her belt with the likes of T-Blockers, So Vam, and Bad Girl Boogey, among others. And now she’s back to throw her hat in the holiday horror ring with Carnage for Christmas, a bloody fun yuletide romp that’s definitely going into my regular seasonal rotation.
Well, it’s that time again, time for the Fantasia Film Festival in ye olde Montreal. That’s in Canada for the geographically challenged. It runs from July 18 through August 4.
