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 […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Easter Bunny Massacre’: Deceived by Cover Expectations, Yolk’s on Him
Do NOT judge a DVD by its cover. I’m old enough to know that, but I did it anyway, even at my advancing age. There it was, sitting on the third shelf at the local Wally World for $9.96 on the end cap. A weird bunny-headed killer WITH a chainsaw on the front of the […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘The Devil’s Tomb’: It’s not Satan, but it’s pretty close
I can tell that I’m getting old because I got a late start on celebrating Henry Rollins Day this year, and so this review is more than a week late to mark the holiday proper, but since I’ve been a fan for something like 30 years back when Beavis and Butthead said he looked like […]
Ben Nagy reviews ‘Carnivorous’: New widower draws crummy pictures with voodoo Sharpie to unleash serpent of vengeance
This week, I checked out a rapper-fighting-a-giant-snake flick, and no … it was not Anaconda or any of its four sequels. But before I get into the flick I watched, let’s process something. The 1997 flick starring J.Lo (then known by her Christian name of Jennifer Lopez), Ice Cube, Angelina Jolie’s dad (who, as all […]