Month: June 2022
Have you ever had a heart-to-heart with a bartender? I’ve often heard peers joke about how bartenders are basically therapists with a license to sell alcohol, and although I haven’t expressed my inner turmoil to any drink-serving strangers, the phenomenon is pretty widespread across the globe. What is it about bartenders that make people want
What should be a fresh start for Laura (Christina Ricci) and her son Cody (Santini Barnard) soon becomes a trap. With the past they are running from catching up, and a strange force emerging at night to torment them, there’s nowhere left to run in this tale of trauma and regrets. Monstrous is a disarming
After a hard day of work, 36-year-old Yuko Sawamatsu returns to her apartment for an evening to unwind. However, her memories of a recent affair with a married man keep coming back to her in the form of flashbacks. Although these memories are painful, Yuko is resolved in her choice to have ended the relationship.
Covering all things scatological, Unco Film Festival is back with its twelfth installment of excreta exploration. Hosted by legendary mangaka Shintaro Kago, the festival displays the work of independent filmmakers and animators whose work covers the taboo subject of bodily waste. Live-streamed on YouTube, the two-hour-long festival contains the work of 28 artists in hopes
Sorority sisters have been staples of the horror genre for almost half a century. Between Black Christmas in 1974 and 2020’s Sorority Secrets, we have enjoyed countless peculiar pledges, salacious secrets, and scores of gorgeous girls meeting gruesome ends. In 1978, we received The Initiation of Sarah: sorority horror by way of Stephen King’s Carrie.
Edge of Sanity is a 1989 American slasher horror, directed by French director Gérard Kikoïne in one of his last films in the director’s chair. The story combines elements from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 original novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together with the tales of the infamous English serial killer, Jack
After contributing to periodical manga magazines such as Manga OK from the mid-60s, the ever-ambitious Taro Bonten would decide to create his own bespoke gekiga magazine in 1969 named Black Ace. However, this wouldn’t be just any normal magazine and would seek to recreate the mystery genre started by kasutori magazines in the late 1940s.
Caged Heat is a 1974 American women-in-prison exploitation film, written and directed by Jonathan Demme and released under Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Though the film would be his directorial debut, Demme had already helped produce two other women in prison films for the company. Nevertheless, Corman was uneasy about providing the budget, believing the genre
Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly by Kyoko Okazaki defaults to a simplistic style similar to older, nostalgic manga. Yet the style still works for high-impact, fashion-heavy scenes where it effectively conveys the emotional, stylistic world that Liliko inhabits. The bonus full-color illustrations included in the edition released by Vertical, an imprint of Kodansha, are simply breathtaking.
An Anthology That Explores the Personal Horrors of Five Aspiring Writers Scare Us (2022) is an anthology of five horror stories that range from great ideas that could have been done better to truly creepy cinematic excellence. It’s an odd experience for the viewer who chooses to sit through the rough spots only to find