Goldbeater

The Last Stop in Yuma County is practically a mix of the best of Tarantino and the Coen brothers in an intimate, minimalist fashion. And I mean that in a good way. Heated situations are interspersed with fatal misunderstandings, distinctly specific and interestingly outlined characters get a solid and indiscriminate beating, and the film definitely has more than a few plot surprises in store, too. It's kind of a small, playful, fun festival flick.

Grindhouse Releasing's iconic theme song lures you into an unpretentious, trashy horror film in the first seconds, but despite initial expectations, Insanity is not really about that and fans hungry for blood and violence will be disappointed, even though it's a restrained prototype of William Lustig's Maniac. The film is more drama than horror. An underground drama that shows how Hollywood's dream factory sweeps up ambitious young people who come to Los Angeles with big plans and find themselves chewed up, broken and alone. It's practically exploitation in the most romantic sense, because it works on multiple levels. The film is fascinating for its footage of Hollywood in the early 1970s, where the characters are drawn to the scenery, the culture in the streets, the street art, or even the architecture of the old buildings that will soon be torn down, so the film also functions as a kind of time capsule of that era. In terms of plot, it's slow and literally mind-numbing, but a patient and perceptive viewer with a sense of ambitious low-budget genre production can immerse themselves in it, and then be rewarded by the final scene, which combines a rather abrupt and shocking conclusion to the story with a perfect tight camera shot from a helicopter across Hollywood, in addition to several thought-provoking themes.

Of the B-movie fullow-ups to the successful Jaws, the Mexican Tintorera: Killer Shark is one of the more interesting pieces. This is mainly due to the fact that they dared to shoot the action with real sharks, and therefore the underwater sequences and the tiger shark attack scenes look really impressive. However, there is a dark side to this, as the underwater creatures were actually hunted on camera and these scenes are definitely not pleasant to watch. The real and guileless fun is offered by the rather overdone romantic storyline, which is practically reminiscent of a sexploitation with its intricacy, erotic charge and constant nudity, and which, in combination with the charmingly awkward acting of Hugo Stiglitz, is really, really hilarious.

A very simple mystery premise like from a Twilight Zone episode, worthy of a forty-minute short, is stretched to a lengthy hour and a half. And the few effective horror scenes and one bizarrely filmed car crash unfortunately don't save the plot's fuzziness and stasis.

Fishmonger is a very entertaining and wacky comedy short produced by the American Film Institute (AFI) in which the main character, a poor Irish fisherman, embarks on a journey to save the soul of his dying mother. A journey that includes, among other things, a forced engagement, suicide attempts, a romantic musical number and tentacle-sex with a mermaid. It's a witty sailor's tale whose dramatic line works better in its 26-minute running time than other films perhaps three times longer.

Rather than a meaningful short with a point, it's a showreel by a famous make-up artist who wanted to add some solid monster make-up to his portfolio. Too bad it's all so dark, so you can't see most of the time.

A mostly ordinary family drama from Pakistan. The horror scenes are somehow superfluous and detract from the story rather than support it. Some of the characters' decisions and their subsequent repercussions are depicted in a strange manner with no apparent point. In Flames is an inoffensive but rather unnecessary affair that overstays its welcome in many scenes.

The apocalyptic premise of the planet being engulfed by extreme acid rain (practically equivalent to highly concentrated acid raining down from the heavens) is a loaded idea, and makes for a decidedly very cheerless and physically unpleasant film. It's a shame they didn't come up with anything much cleverer to go with it than the characters' constant chaotic flight from recurring danger. Once it gets going, Acid is a fairly intense thriller and you certainly won't be bored with it. But it also suffers from the common affliction of disaster movies where characters in crisis situations either behave strangely, completely stupidly, or deal with things that are utterly irrelevant at the time, which is quite annoying at some points in the story.

A Canadian slasher flick about teenagers who decide to spend the night in a mall after closing time, only to be chased by dysfunctional night watchmen. Thematically, it's nothing new under the sun, giving a nod to classics from the 1980s like Chopping Mall, but Wake Up is very dynamically shot, and the RKSS creative collective behind retro throw-back flicks like Turbo Kid and Summer of '84 are able to stylize the action in neon colours and ride the wave of genre clichés without being annoying. It's simple and not revelatory by any means, but importantly, it's also entertaining and quite brutal.

It's not my cup of tea. I can appreciate the truly admirable animation and imaginative world-building, but I'd be lying if I said it satisfied me as a viewer. The one-dimensional, soft-spoken protagonist is a dull and uninteresting link between Hayao Miyazaki's many fantastic dream sequences. Emotionally, it completely passed me by and, especially in the last third, I found it quite annoying. Not a fan, sorry.