Mitchell Altieri & Lee Cummings' STAR LIGHT proves a pretty strange 'n scary genre jumper

A rock star, her hunky/sweet fan, and his several good friends come together oddly and violently in the new slow-burn (for awhile), what's-going-on-here? survival thriller, STAR LIGHT.

As genre jumpers/genre mashers go, this one proves quite watchable, thanks to smart co-direction (on a tight but well-used budget), decent writing and nice performances all around.

The film's two directors (Mitchell Altieri, below, who also co-wrote) and Lee Cummings (shown at right) have clearly watched and learned from a whole mess of movies. Still, what they juggle and rearrange in Star Light is clever and different enough, TrustMovies surmises, to keep fans of survival thrillers, slasher movies, and extraterrestrial/ otherworldly motifs at least semi-on their toes.

We open at a rock concert of a famous and quite popular singer named Bebe, and then we're watching her through the eyes of that

heavy-duty, handsome young fan -- who, though he's smitten beyond belief, has no hope or expectations of ever meeting this woman. Funny how things work out.

How they work out is put together with enough skill and pizzazz by Altieri and his co-writers (Jamal M. Jennings and Adam Weis), then brought to fruition via the relatively swift and nicely focused direction and performances that combine to bring the fairly clichéd characters (with the exception of the rock star, her "handler," and her number-one fan) to brisk, if utilitarian, life -- so far as this tale's immediate needs are concerned.

Bebe, the star singer, is played by Scout Taylor-Compton (above, right), and that fan by Cameron Johnson (above, left). Mr. Johnson gets the juicier role, and he handles it with aplomb, while that very queasy-making handler, played by Bret Roberts (below), delivers the film's villainous role equally well.

The movie gets plenty gory (hence my inclusion of the slasher genre) but certainly not beyond the pale, and its consistent and near constant mashing of genres creates its own interesting and thankfully not over-explanatory little sub-genre.

So if  you're in the mood to try something a bit different, remember the name Star Light -- from 1091 and running 90 minutes -- when you're combing the streaming sites for the evening's (what the hell, afternoon's or morning's, too) entertainment. It becomes available this Tuesday, August 4 -- for purchase and/or rental.

Thrills, chills and tired tropes abound in Matthew Currie Holmes' halting horror debut, THE CURSE OF BUCKOUT ROAD

Evidently a hit at some of what we might call second-tier film fests -- the Pasadena International Film Festival the Hot Springs Horror Film Festival --  this new-to-cinemas-and-VOD scary movie, THE CURSE OF BUCKOUT ROAD proves an oddball mix, for sure.

The film begins most auspiciously, with moments of impending horror alternating with a college classroom scene in which a professor challenges her students with the question of why we need -- and then need to destroy -- our myths. Soon, the first corpse (of many to follow) appears, and we are off to the races once again.

As directed and co-written by Canadian actor-turned-filmmaker, Matthew Currie Holmes, shown at left, abetted by good cinematography (Rudolf Blahacek) and excellent editing (Lindsay Ljungkull), the movie takes place in the supposedly urban-legends-and-scary-stories capital of the entire USA, where a particular avenue called Buckout Road is clearly the worst place of all.

It sho' nuff' is. As soon as a character gets near the road (or even if they simply dream about it, for goodness sake), you can bet they're about to be dead. You might think that the town's police department would be just a little concerned, but the police chief (the always reliable Henry Czerny, below, right) seems more interested in badgering witnesses than in putting two and two together to arrive at... something supernatural!

Soon the town's eminent psychologist (Danny Glover, below, right) becomes involved, along with his estranged grandson (Evan Ross, below, left) and his about-to-be girlfriend, that police chief's daughter (Dominique Provost-Chalkley, above, left).

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There is also a pair of goofy fraternal twins who dream about Buckout Road (Kyle Mac and Jim Watson, shown seated below, left and right respectively). Mr. Mac gets the movie's funniest low-key line, "They're coming back, right?," more of which would have done a world of good.

The Curse of Buckout Road certainly is not an awful film. It has some decent-if-typical suspense (what's behind that door that just opened by itself?), surprise and shock (a supremely well-edited scene involving an apparition and a bathroom sink, below), clever flashbacks to the 1970s using grainy, handheld footage and, as expected given the cast, some decent performances.

But its insistence on tossing so much into its mix -- witches, albino zombies, and been-there/done-that/would-be scary/creepy things (as below) -- and then returning to each of these again and again eventually wears us viewers down. (Really now, do you have to show us more than once the same set of characters killing themselves?)

The plot, such as it is, does offer one nice surprise toward the end, and young Ross does well in his would-be "hero" role. Mr. Holmes and his movie seem to want to take us back to the former glory days of scary cinema, while using a number of more recent, modern additions to the genre. It works, I guess, off and on, and just might be enough to please horror aficionados.

From Vertical and Trimuse Entertainment, The Curse of Buckout Road opens theatrically this Friday, September 27, in Brooklyn, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Tampa and Riverside, California -- and will simultaneously be available via VOD.

"Dreck" the halls: Craig Anderson's "nut"meg eggnog, RED CHRISTMAS, hits a few theaters

Can you make a decent slasher movie while tossing in themes of religion, pregnancy, parenting and abortion, among other things? Yes, if your film is as good as, say, She Who Must Burn. But a big, fat "no," if the new RED CHRISTMAS, written and directed by Australian filmmaker Craig Anderson, serves as a more recent indication. Once the killing starts -- among family members gathered to celebrate here -- these characters begin acting stupider and stupider, breaking even the cardinal rule of this kind of film: When under siege, you idiots, stick the fuck together!

Mr. Anderson, pictured at right, proves pretty good when he keeps his gore effects on the subtle side, as in the "offing" of his first victim (below, left), a nasty Outback outlier who makes quite unnecessary fun of the movie's Michael Myers/Jason/Fred Krueger stand-in, a poor cobbled-together creature named Cletus, who arrives unbidden but hell-bent for revenge at the family gathering mentioned above.  The second killing (but the first, so far as this family is concerned) is also handled with exquisite tact/taste.

Following that, however, the bigtime stupidity sets it, and the movie, as well as all its further killings, never recovers. Characters begin doing things for either no discernible reason that makes any sense -- other than merely separating them from the pack so that each can be "offed" more easily -- or to give the filmmaker another opportunity to grace us with further tiresome past history/exposition.

The cast is mostly Australian, with the exception of Dee Wallace (below), who plays the family matriarch with appropriate fear and ferocity, though even she finally joins the full-out nonsense on parade here. If you're a fan of Ms Wallace, better to revisit The Howling (does she not make the cutest werewolf in film history?), or even E.T., than waste your time with this one.

Other cast members meet either grizzly ends, via very unbelievable-looking "special effects," as below, or find themselves on the wrong end of various lethal objects. Either way, you'll probably be drumming your fingers in something like boredom, waiting for the final body count, as it piles up with tiresome regularity.

What's particularly grueling about Red Christmas is the highly unlikable group of characters thrust upon us by Mr. Anderson. They argue incessantly, while they're not doing dumb things, and as the increasingly obvious chunks of wholesale exposition come plotzing out, you'll find yourself more than ready for this overlong-even-at-82-minutes movie to end.

The film opens with demonstrations pro and con regarding abortion, above, and with a flashback sequence on which a lot of what happens later depends (below), but whatever the filmmaker might imagine he's trying to say here

gets quickly and thoroughly lost within the extreme idiocy of his poorly concocted characters. As my spouse remarked wearily, post- viewing, "What should have been aborted was this movie."

From Artsploitation Films (great moniker, by the way!) and arriving in a Los Angeles theater (Laemmle's Music Hall 3) this Friday, August 25 (just four month prior to the holiday!) for a once-daily showing at 9:55 pm, Red Christmas will then expand to San Francisco, Denver, Dallas and other cities over the weeks to come. 

God vs humanity--round 2,439--in Larry Kent's unnerving slash-n-shock SHE WHO MUST BURN

Opening simultaneously with the beginning of Yom Kippur, this new fundamentalist-Christians-against-the-humanists movie by South-African-born Canadian filmmaker Larry Kent (below) is super-unsettling in so many ways. It refuses to soften the kind of punches pulled by most other movies in this genre (it pretty much creates its own sub-genre by its finale), while managing to combine a treatise on the ever-present subject of right-to-life vs right-to-choice with some good, old-fashioned tropes mostly found in those horror/ slasher/thriller films.

SHE WHO MUST BURN takes place in a community that may seem just a little too god-fearing for some tastes, with the local (and only, it seems) church run by a crazy zealot with even crazier parishioners who do, well, the darndest things.

The film begins with the murder, very well filmed, of a doctor in the local women's clinic, for which the murderer is immediately jailed. Then we cut to an early morning love scene interrupted by some unpleasant protesters. Soon we witness a still-born birth by a woman, with her husband in tow, who have already been told by their doctor that the fetus will not survive. (They choose to have it anyway, 'cause it's, ummm, god's will.)

Oh -- but there are problems with the environment here, too, due to hazards the local mining company is creating (fracking, perhaps?), so lots of the populace are growing sick and dying. But so stuck in their god-knows-it-all routine, served up by the wacky minister, that most of the community is willing to go farther and farther afield to punish those they consider to be the sinful.

How far? You will see. Among the good guys are the local sheriff's deputy (Andrew Moxham, above) and his girl friend (Sarah Smyth, below) -- who worked in that clinic, which has now been shut down, so she's helping out the needy from her and her boyfriend's home.

In the press release for this film, Mr. Kent is called a "cult" filmmaker, though TrustMovies has not managed to see or even hear of any of his work until now. Still, She Who Must Burn is in some ways a surprisingly impressive film. The look and tone of foreboding is caught and held very well throughout, and while the performances are just fine individually, the actors also appear to form a kind of ensemble in which each is in sync with the others. You can image these characters all living in the same community, one that has become more and more fractured over time.

The subject matter, too, is handled well. It is taken as a given that, where the subjects of god, religion, patriarchy and women's "rights" (including especially abortion) are concerned, there can be no middle ground. As directed and co-writer (with Shane Twerdun, above, who also plays the very righteous and nasty local minister), Mr. Kent lays all this out quite strongly and effectively. But it is in some of its details that the movie begin to come apart.

The murderer of that abortion doctor (played by James Wilson, below) is brought to heel quickly, presumably by the town's sheriff (Jim Francis, above). Yet later, when another woman is killed, with her daughter as witness, that same sheriff seems to want to cool his heels. And when the beleaguered threesome -- daughter, deputy and his girlfriend -- need desperately to escape but the fundamentalist crowd attempts to stop them, would they, instead of driving the hell away, simply get out of the car to present themselves as compliant victims? Perhaps chase and/or action scenes, along with a little simple logic, are not in Mr. Kent's repertoire.

Still, there is enough genuine horror here -- the idea and presentation of fundamentalists in total control and gone nutcracker wild should throw the fear of the lord (or of something more rational) into sane audiences everywhere -- to turn She Who Must Burn into a possible current cult hit for this filmmaker. (That's Missy Cross, below, center, who's particularly nutty/scary as one in the good minister's family.)

One big question, however: Why -- unless he wants to give a "balanced, non-partisan" view -- does Kent decide to bring an act of god into the picture to "muddy" up the proceedings at the finale? And, as ever, why does God, since he's so omniscient, wait until the bad guys have done their worst before showering his wrath upon them. Oh, well: Ours is not to question the big sky in the sky. Ours is simply... to get the hell out. Fast.

The movie, from White Buffalo Films via Midnight Releasing, makes its debut on Tuesday. October 11, on Cable VOD, Digital HD and DVD. Look for it on Dish Network, Cox, Charter, Verizon Fios, DirecTV, iTunes, Amazon Instant, Google Play, Vudu, XBox and elsewhere. The DVD itself can be purchased exclusively via Amazon. Rental? Well, you can add it to your Netflix quene now, but the company claims that the film's availability date is still "unknown."

Joe Begos (Almost Human) is back with a funnier/tighter/smarter/bloodier MIND'S EYE

Oh, yeah -- and it's a lot campier, too. TrustMovies was not much a fan of Joe Begos' earlier work, Almost Human, released in winter 2014 and dealing with an extraterrestrial kidnapping/returning that leads to a near-continuous slasher-movie massacre, so he is happy to report that he enjoyed Begos' latest film a lot more. THE MIND'S EYE involves telekinesis, which appears to be a subject that this writer/director (shown below) can have some fun with, while being a bit more creative and still get to those juicy/bloody/gory parts he clearly loves so much.

Our hero (this time, as last) is played by Graham Skipper (shown below, right), an actor of somewhat protuberant eyes, who pops them and bugs them almost consistently throughout the film. He undoubtedly was asked to do so by his director, as was his leading lady, Lauren Ashley Carter (below, left) because this eye-bugging is how all the telekinesis takes place. Time and again throughout the film, actors bug their eyes and pop their neck veins as their characters attempt to levitate and/or move everything from guns and furniture to hypodermic needles and a very nasty ax.

Trust me: you will not have seen so much eye-rolling and -popping since the last time you watched a silent movie -- and I think you'll agree that, even then, The Mind's Eye beats out those "silents" by a mile. And because it turns out that just about every character in the film is capable of this telekinesis, there is an awful lot of eye-popping going on.

Our hero (above), however, turns out to be almost the best of the bunch (think of him as a kind of hairy Carrie), although his girlfriend (below) nearly matches him by exploding a bad guy's head. Of course, all this take so much pain and intensity that you can expect to see lots of blood oozing from the telekinetics' various orifices.

Mr. Begos has managed to provide a more interesting screenplay, plot and even better dialog this time around, and so ropes us into his tale of a supposedly government-sponsored "home" for telekinetics run by a power-hungry nut case (John Speredakos, below) who goes from a cajoling nice-guy to a Freddy Krueger-style villain in no time flat. Also in the cast is the always-game Larry Fessenden, playing our hero's helpful police-officer father.

As the eyes pop and the blood flows, so, too, do the laughs grow louder and more frequent. I would like to think that this was part of Mr Begos' initial plan, and that he does not take himself or his movie all that seriously. The Mind's Eye is finally good, silly, noisy, campy fun. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

From RLJ Entertainment and running a blessedly short 87 minutes, the movie opens this coming Friday, August 5, simultaneously in theaters (a very limited release, I would assume), on iTunes and via VOD -- with a Blu-ray disc release scheduled for Tuesday, October 4, 

BASKIN: Can Evrenol's Turkish horror film (in more ways than one) makes theatrical debut

Your first question -- once you calm down your vomit response and slide back into normalcy as this very ghastly, ghoulish horror/slasher/fantasy frolic ends -- might be, "So who is BASKIN, the person, place, thing or idea for which this new Turkish movie was presumably christened? Tell you one thing: It sure as hell ain't Baskin Robbins. Directed (and co-written along with three other screenwriters) by Can Evrenol, who is shown below, the film begins with that evergreen scene in which a young child, in this case a pretty little boy, hears his parents going at it in the bedroom and of course can't help but wonder what is taking place. Before he can find out, the scene turns into something out of a horror movie.

Cut to a coffee-house/restaurant in which a bunch of Turkish cops are bantering and making with the faggot jokes and generally behaving so very badly that you quickly realize you're not going to care what awful stuff happens to these creeps. It does end up as pretty awful, and yes, you don't care much -- even though one of those cops turns out to be the adult version of that pretty little boy. The first sign that something is amiss takes place in the restroom, as one cop, below, sees a frog and goes a little "off."

Frogs turn out to be a continuing motif here, so of course we think biblical plagues and such. Later other worse things also point a bit toward the Bible or maybe the Quran, or simply something mythic and not very nice. However, if your are someone who wants explanation with his horror, give it up now. You're mostly going to get circularity, hand-held camerawork that makes you think you've seen something scary, little actual "plot," and finally a whole bunch of torture, gore and glop.

Our cop buddies go out on a call, or maybe it's a mission, or anyway something that takes them into the "old dark house." Along the way they meet some odd gypsy types (frog hunters!), a few "service" people, and our pretty boy cop and his older mentor have some flashbacks that explain little but serve to connect the movie enough so that we don't throw up our hands and say "fuck you."

Along the way there is a lot of atmosphere, a little up-chucking now and again and some very interesting special effects, the best of which seems original and has to do with a little man drowning and being rescued by a huge pair of hands. There is also much sleight-of-hand visual stuff that lets our imagination do the work.

What's it all about? Well, sex and death and sex and violence. (Will we ever again see some sex and fun?) Beyond that there is some mumbo-jumbo from a fellow identified in the credits as "Baba/The Father (played by one, Mehmet Cerrahoglu, making a memorable debut). I found myself wondering if maybe the movie might stand for the state of the Turkish nation today? Or could it be some nasty karmic payback for the Armenian genocide? Or could this be the Turkish idea of hell? ("You carry hell with you at all times," that Baba guy intones at one point.)

Your guess, should you see this movie, will be as good as mine. Maybe it's all just a dream. Oh, wait: It's actually real. Or, as one cop tell another, "Not everything has a clear answer."  Baskin does have a certain creepy, all-stops-out craziness. And also a lot of slo-mo that extends the movie well past its sell-by point. Finally it seems as much an endurance test as anything else. The end credits, however, are artful and beautifully rendered.

From IFC Midnight and running a too-long 97 minutes, Baskin opens theatrically tomorrow, Friday, March 25, in New York City at the IFC Center (for midnight showings only). In Los Angeles, look for it at the Arena Cinema come Friday, April 1. For those of you not living on either coast, the movie is also simultaneously being made available via VOD.

Digital & DVDebut: Madellaine Paxson's creepy, frisky, funny genre piece BLOOD PUNCH

What might you get should you shake together Groundhog Day, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Time Crimes, Scarface, Edge of Tomorrow and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit? That's some range of styles and genres, I know, and I doubt very much whether all those movies (and one play) were on director Madellaine Paxson's and writer Eddie Guzelian's conscious minds as they came up with the funny, frisky and occasionally ferocious BLOOD PUNCH, the award-winning-at-festivals genre piece currently making its DVD and digital debuts this month. But you've got to hand it to them: the duo has turned out a nifty little movie that would probably make all those other movie-makers, along with that famous French philosopher, duly pleased.

Paxson (shown above) and Guzelian begin their film as our brainiac hero, Milton (Milo  Cawthorn, below, right), awakens into, yes, a nightmare. Then we flash back a bit to the drug rehab center and a support group in which the stories told by the members are about to bore us to death when a new girl named Skyler (Olivia Tennet, below, left) suddenly opens up and changes everything.

We're then whisked off to a mountainside retreat where we meet Skyler's original boyfriend, Russell (the very hot Ari Boyland, below), and all sorts of weird things begin to happen. If M. Sartre insisted that hell was other people, and Groundhog Day indicated that it might consist of constant repetition, Blood Punch combines the two, along with some other ideas, to offer up a quite original little hell of it own.

What distinguishes the movie, in addition to its smart and tingly story, are the especially good performances Ms Paxson draws from her excellent cast.  Cawthorne's nerdiness works well for the humor, but the actor also possesses enough sex appeal and strength to work as the films more-or-less hero, while Tennet is full of sass and naughtiness and enough mystery to keep us guessing.  Boyland -- with his goofy grin, gorgeous body and face, and loose-canon menace -- is a cringe-worthy delight. I wish he'd been given a little more to do.

The movie -- a combo of sci-fi, fantasy, horror and scientific mystery -- is basically a three-hander (which for a time, moves up to five characters). What holds us in thrall most of the way along is the simple question of what is happening here, and why. That the filmmakers manage to pull this off for a full 107 minutes (that's long for this genre) should give you some sense of how special this particular movie is.

From a technical standpoint Blood Punch is well done, too. What special effects there are tend toward the bloody variety, though much of this is used for humor rather than ugliness. And the filmmaker's choice of music is smart and original, as well.

From Midnight Releasing, the film hit DVD and Digital venues as of September 1.