Ben Nagy reviews ‘Murder Party’: The Brown Knight tries to survive a Halloween bash and artistic torturers
I was so inspired by Murder Party, the Halloween-themed flick I’m reviewing in this column that I even came up with a song… Ain’t no party / Like a Murder Party / Cause a Murder Party / Is a party with a murder (repeat x3) But before you get all hyped up that Murder Party […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘ShriekShow’: Anthology Features a Bunch of Clowning in the Woods
Director Brad Twigg, the guy behind Killer Campout about the slasherguy who makes his deadly axe out of street signs (see the review here)and who’s working on getting the finishing touches completed for Killer Campout 2, emailed me over the summer telling me that he had a flick he wanted me to check out. And while it’s taken […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Time Loop’: If You Could Turn Back Time, Like an Hour, Would it Be Worth it?
There’s that whole saying about a person being ahead of their time, which isn’t such a rousing compliment when you REALLY think about it. Anyone who is saying that about somebody else is looking back into the past from the present. Usually they are also nodding their head sadly because whoever this ahead-of-their-time genius is, […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘All Your Friends are Dead’: Campout Reunion Saves a Life, Loses a Bunch of Others
Ricky Glore, a standup comedian by trade, decided he was going to make the first “middle-aged slasher flick,” so he pulled together about $6,000, wrote a script and then went on to star AND co-direct it with Nicholas Hiance. Not necessarily in that order. The result, All Your Friends are Dead, is scheduled to make […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Fall of Usher’: Hubbie-winning director gets all Poe-tic on us
The one sure trait that can be used to identify the truly great writers is the flexibility of their work to be understood and adapted by the skilled and the unskilled alike. Great writing is like one of those six-cylinder Mopar engines from the early 1970s. You could be driving down the road going about […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Wolves’: Lonely Teen Wolf Just Looking for a Place to Call Home
Eight or so years ago, writer/director David Hayter tried to do for lycanthropy what the Twilight series did for vampires in this week’s flick, Wolves. Our troubled romantic lead, a senior high school quarterback named Cayden Slaughter (Lucas Till) starts punching through this smack-talking opponent’s helmet after a late hit during a game, so he […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘American Beast’: Long-Term Family Land Investment Harbors a Monstrous Curse
You can be really smart, but also be genetically pre-disposed to stink at real estate. This is one of the premises of this week’s flick, the somewhat awkwardly titled American Beast, which deals with a creature created after a dispute between two Indigenous tribes about a century and a half before the establishment of the […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Bloody Summer Camp’: Get a bunch of counselors, throw em in a cabin, kill, repeat
Summer’s starting, classes are finit-o, teachers can kick up their heels and not cry as much in the evenings five days a week and parents now have to meet the great challenge of finding places where they can dump off their kids so they can continue to work while school’s out. The big questions for […]
Ben Nagy reviews “Feaster Sunday:” When It Comes to Performing, There’s a Method to the Madness
For the last Easter-related flick on this most bunny-filled holiday, filmmaker Brian Papandrea, the undisputed independent film King of Shrimp Cocktail (check out my review of The Big F during Bigfoot Month last November to know what I’m talking about), suggested I check out his holiday-themed psychological-slasher comedy horror flick that has a sharpened carrot […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter’: Son of God Learns Lucha, Saves Ottawa
After the disappointment I felt from the last flick I reviewed in which an Easter Bunny-headed killer was supposed to chain-saw people and collect eyeballs of his victims in the basket he was carrying, (if the dang DVD cover hadn’t been LYING to me), there was a gaping maw, nay, a yearning for something inside […]