Sometimes I get worried when I am writing about a favorite movie of mine, as I have a habit of trying to convince the reader that it is as good as I think it is. I worry that I will hype the film so much, that if anyone reads what I wrote about it, they will be sorely disappointed once they sit down to watch the film as it had no chance in hell of ever living up to the viewing pleasure I had promised. This is especially true for films that I may have watched as a kid, when things like nostalgia can give my figurative glasses a rosy tint. So I will try to contain my fanboism over the film I want to discuss: James Foley‘s 1986 film, ‘At Close Range’
I had many films to choose from to kick off this new column, but in the end I decided to jump-start Crime Screen with one of my all-time favorite true crime films, Peter Jackson‘s Heavenly Creatures. After making his mark on the horror community with two splatter classics, Bad Taste
In the future, the world’s energy problems have almost been completely solved with Earth no longer suffering from the cost of electricity and the environmental pratfalls associated with fossil fuels. 70 percent of all power needs are now being handled by Helium 3, a clean burning fuel harvested from rocks on the moon. Lunar Industries is a corporation that places massive, automated harvesters on the moon’s surface to gather the Helium 3, using a lone employee to oversee the operations from within the Selene moon base. This employee honors a 3-year contract before a replacement is sent to the moon and he then returns to Earth. In Moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is one of these Lunar Industry employees with only two weeks left on his contract. He is anxious to get back home to his wife and young daughter and it couldn’t happen at a better time, as lately he has been experiencing hallucinations and deteriorating health. Things get a bit more complicated while on a routine patrol to check on a harvester, when he is involved in an accident that has him waking up in the stations infirmary with his new replacement – an identical version of himself.…
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A young girl named Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) is found running half-naked down a country road after having been missing for over a year. During this time she had been held captive and subjected to a steady regimen of torture, both mental and physical, before she was able to to make her escape. Officials are able to locate the abandoned slaughter house she had been imprisoned in, but aside from evidence to support her claims, the building had been evacuated and her abusers were never apprehended. Lucie is placed in an orphanage where she eventually forms a bond with another young girl who resides there, the persistent Anna (Morjana Alaoui). Fifteen years later Lucie and Anna have remained together and Lucie thinks she has located two of her initial captors via a picture in a newspaper. With Anna warily in tow, Lucie pays a visit to the couples home with a loaded shotgun. She hopes by exacting some revenge that she will be exorcising a creature that plagues her, a creature in the form of a girl she left behind at the slaughterhouse and who takes delight in cutting Lucie to shreds at any opportune moment.…
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Hector is a a simple guy enjoying a quiet afternoon at his country home doing a little bird watching. While doing so, he spies upon a young woman undressing in the nearby woods. His curiosity gets the better of him and he decides to take a trek into the forest to get a closer look. Once in the woods, he is attacked from behind by a masked man sending Hector fleeing deeper into the woods. With the man in hot pursuit, Hector finds refuge at a closed research facility and comes across a lone technician (played by the director, Nacho Vigalondo). He helps Hector by letting him to hide inside a peculiar looking container. When Hector emerges a few seconds later, he finds that the container was actually a beta time-machine, and that he is now a few hours in the past. Having effectivel alluded the man chasing him, Hector finds he now exists with a past version of himself. He is informed by the technician that he must not interact with that version or there will be dire consequences.…
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After exiting a train in London’s Russell Square underground, Alex Campbell (David Ladd) and Patricia (Sharon Gurney) come across James Manfred OBE (James Cossins), a Ministry of Defense official, lying unconscious on the platform. Even though Alex does not want to get involved, as he thinks the man is just drunk, Patricia convinces him to alert an authority. When the return with a policeman, the body has disappeared. When this case reaches Scotland Yard Inspector Calhoun’s (Donald Pleasance) desk, he uncovers a series of missing people cases who were all last seen in tube station platforms. He also learns that a group of workers, male and female, had become trapped while building London’s subway lines over 80 years ago, the company that employed them abandoning them in their new tomb. Rumors are these trapped workers had resorted to eating their dead and have been living in the darkness among the plague-infested rats all these years. What Inspector Calhoun and the rest of London’s rail riders don’t know is that these are not rumors and one of the last descendants of this rumored cannibalistic clan has found a way out.…
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As a lover of horror movies, in particular, the zombie movie, I have to sit through a lot of dreck in my pursuit to find any good, B-grade zombie films. When you fist here the premise behind this film, a zombie outbreak on a plane, you will either roll your eyes at the stupidity, immediately think Snakes on a Plane cash-in, or both. But if you are a zombie movie lover, you really owe it to yourself to check this movie out. While it is low-budget, the cast and crew hide it well and have created an extremely entertaining, gory movie full of everything you would expect from a film of this title. In other words, it will not let you down.…
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Fortress is an Australian made-for-tv movie that is probably most remembered when it made the rounds on HBO in the mid to late ’80s. Directed by Arch Nicholson and based off a novel of the same name written by Gabrielle Lord, which in turn was loosely based off the Faraday School Kidnapping. It details the adventure had by a small group of school kids from Sunny Flat, a small town in New South Wales, when they, along with their teacher (Rachel Ward), are kidnapped from their one-room schoolhouse by a group of men wearing masks and carrying guns. The motive of the armed men is ransom, but eventually the class of kids ranging from kindergarten to 10th grade, comes to the realization that in order to survive this ordeal, it will take ingenuity, bravery and the ability to work together as a team.…
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A film from Czechoslovakia and based off the 1932 novel by Vítezslav Nezval, a story detailing the dream a 13 year old girl named Valerie is having at the same time she is going through her first menstruation. Director Jaromil Jires delivers a surreal, dream-like movie with amazing sound and vivid, lasting visuals. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is Alice in Wonderland meets Emmanuelle; a sensory feast detailing a young woman’s sexual awakening.…
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Dead End Drive-In takes place when society is at the brink of a complete upheaval akin to the society seen in another Australian film, Mad Max. A society that has just about collapsed but still being held together – barely – by government officials and law enforcement. Prospects look bleak for the youth, as more and more are choosing to become part of the problem rather than part of a solution. One particular avenue some of these kids decide to travel is to join roving gangs called Car Boys. These gangs stalk the cityscape, fighting law enforcement and tow truck drivers all in the desire to steal all the usable parts from cars to build their own, including stripping cars immediately after they have been involved in an accident. With society at the brink of anarchy and crime escalating out of control, the government has initiated a rather unusual program to battle the phenomena.…
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H.P. Lovecraft fans have always lamented at the absence of any faithful, good adaptations of Lovecraft’s work. Sure, there have been notable films that were inspired by Lovecraft’s writings, but there has yet to be a film that accurately and faithfully took an H.P. Lovecraft story from the page to the screen. That is until now. With The Call of Cthulhu, The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society have created a film that any other H.P. Lovecraft films should be judged. What is even more amazing is that the film was painstakingly created to look as if it had been made in the 1920s. It is black and white and silent (complete with title cards). It is also the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptation to date.…
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A likable, long-haired antiques dealer named George (Ray Lovelock) takes his motorcycle and heads out of the crowded city to do some business in Windermere. Along the way, he has an accident with Edna (Cristina Galbó), another traveler who has inadvertently backed her car into his motorcycle while at a gas station. While not serious, the accident does leave the motorcycle temporarily disabled. Feeling guilty and obligated, Edna agrees to take George to Windermere herself. She just needs to stop by the village of South Gate to visit her sister, Katie (Jeannine Mestre). Once there they find that Katie is delirious and her husband (José Lifante) has just been murdered moments earlier. To top things off, Katie has become the prime suspect but she adamantly denies having anything to do with her husband’s murder but rather a walking dead man (Fernando Hilbeck) committed the horrible act.…
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After completing final exams a group of college students head to Daytona Beach to celebrate Spring Break, with visions of sex and alcohol dancing in their heads. While crossing through Georgia, they are met with a crude detour that does not lead them to the land of beach, boobs and beer, but rather to the small town of Pleasant Valley. This little town seems to be frozen in time as there are no televisions, phones, running water or any other technological advances seen over the last 100 years. Even the inhabitants seem to be straight from a casting call of “Deliverance” with more inbred, racist hicks than you can shake a stick at. When they are informed that they are now the guests of honor at the annual Guts and Glory Jubilee celebration, complete with free room and board, food, extremely curvaceous females and more importantly, beer…how could they pass it up? What could possibly go wrong?…
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The city of New York is experiencing a rash of disappearances. These started within the homeless population, in particular, the homeless that dwell in the underground network of tunnels, subway lines and sewers that lie beneath the city. This is noticed by ex-con and soup kitchen worker, A.J. Shepherd (Daniel Stern), who notices that fewer and fewer of his regulars are coming up for air. A.J. reports this to deaf ears and cannot get anyone to take notice…but hell, these people are ignored when around, forgotten when they are not. But when reports start coming in of people being attacked and dragged into the sewers by monsters, the authorities can no longer ignore the problem.…
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1986 was a year of historically notable events. It was in 1986 that the world saw the tragic Challenger Disaster, the partial meltdown of the Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl and the year the Statue of Liberty got a much needed face lift. It was also the year that the Sherman Oaks Galleria of California played host to yet another movie. A movie that involved teenagers and killer mall robots. Yes, I am talking about the notorious film that a lot of us old folk will remembers sitting on the local video store shelf, Chopping Mall (aka Killbots).…
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Two newlyweds, Mak (Siwat Chotchaicharin) and Nak (Pataratida Pacharawirapong), inadvertently awaken the ghost of Mae Nak (Porntip Papanai), a woman who, 100 years earlier, terrorized her local village after dying and coming back as an extremely vengeful ghost. After dispatching anyone she felt was standing between her and her living husband, Mak, the local religious leaders performed a ceremony that was to keep the ghost of Mae Nak at rest. Now she is awake again and not too happy that she cannot find any peace after death. …
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