Savageland (now on video)

[SAVAGELAND is now available on home video.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Sorry Marvel fans, SAVAGELAND isn't a surprise entry in the MCU bringing Kazar and Shanna the She Devil to cinematic life. Rather it is a horror film presented in faux documentary format about Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes), an illegal immigrant laborer and amateur photographer accused of committing a mass murder spree in a small Arizona border town. The evidence for his guilt is weak, but thanks to anti-immigrant prejudice and the desire to find a scapegoat, Salazar gets convicted. On his appeal, however, new and disturbing evidence seems to indicate that not only is he innocent, but the real culprits represent an unimaginable horror.

Not a bad premise, to be sure, and throwing a little social commentary about current attitudes towards illegal immigrants into the mix gives the film some added thematic weight. SAVAGELAND was conceived before Donald Trump's presidential run and talk of wall building, but there is a character clearly modeled after Sheriff Joe Arpao (Sheriff Parano, played by George Lionel Savage), and the general attitudes expressed by this character and others are in line with things Trump and his supporters have said and done with regards to immigration. Through this subtext, the film does a good job of conveying the dangers that a more aggressive policy towards illegal immigrants can have unintended negative consequences.

Kate Plays Christine (October 21st at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE screens Friday October 21st at 9:15 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

The story of local newscaster and talk show host Christine Chubbuck, who committed suicide on air, has provided fodder for movies in the past. Usually it's the Paddy Chayesfsky-penned/Sidney Lumet directed NETWORK that gets mentioned, but as KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE points out early on, that film in many ways subverts its inspiration, turning the depressed and tragic Christine into the manic male newscaster Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a role played more for black comedy and satire than pathos. Ironically, it is Joe Dante's werewolf film THE HOWLING (from a script by the always sharp John Sayles) that gives more accurate voice to its inspiration.

But this year, in one of those cases of serendipity that occasionally happen in Hollywood, two new films aim to tell the story of Christine without burying it in allegory. Opening next month, CHRISTINE promises to be a fairly straightforward docudrama starring Rebecca Hall in the title role. First, however, comes Robert Greene's not-quite-a-documentary KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE.

31 Days of Halloween 2015: Devil's Backbone, Texas (on Netflix Instant and VOD)

[31 Days of Halloween 2015: DEVIL’S BACKBONE, TEXAS now available on Netflix Instant, VOD, and other streaming platforms.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Burt Wall, a horror writer living alone on a secluded ranch, may have supernatural inspiration for his stories, or he may just be a gigantic bullshit artist. After his death, his family investigates his homestead hoping to find out just which one it was. The new found footage film DEVIL’S BACKBONE, TEXAS being in the horror genre, you just know they’re going to regret their curiosity. It's just an awful long (and awfully dull) journey getting to that regret.

Following the THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT playbook to a “T”, DEVIL’S BACKBONE, TEXAS starts out with more polished documentary footage setting the stage by interviewing friends, associates, and family members of Wall’s, and even including a bit of an “Unsolved Mysteries” segment on the real Devil’s Backbone, which is one of those areas some folks claim is haunted by numerous spirits. So far, so good, but if you thought the hikers wandering around aimlessly in the woods in BLAIR was boring, you’re really gonna’ need some NoDoz to get through this one.

Local college student uncovers global conspiracy in 'Billie Bob Joe' screening August 16th at the Cedar Lee Theatre

[Press release from the filmmakers.]

Do you remember reading about the Joeolution and Bobolution back in elementary school? Surely you remember the centuries-old battle between the people named Joe and the people named Bob; both fighting to decide who is in control of world culture and history?

Don’t remember that? That’s because it’s a fictional conflict 20-year-old movie director Joe Kowalski (One Day: A Musical) invented for his new film Billie Bob Joe. Although the premise is undeniably silly, (Did you know the terms ‘sloppy Joe’ and ‘average Joe’ were invented by the Bobs to slander the Joes? Or that ‘bobbing for apples’ derives from when Joes used to drown Bobs underwater?) Kowalski says that the topic is actually utilized as a family-friendly satire of prejudice, intending to humorously show the ridiculousness of warring groups of people, not unlike the Dr. Seuss 1984 classic The Butter Battle Book.

The House With 100 Eyes (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Want to watch something more painful than the last couple Cavaliers games? Okay, pointless question; the upcoming Indians and Browns games will contribute effectively to NE Ohio's unending agony (and then there's always the local economy for added knife twists). But for those of you masochists not interested in the variety of discomfort Cleveland sports, the 2013 torture-porn mockumentary HOUSE OF 100 EYES will do.

Filmmakers Jay Lee and actor/co-director/writer Jim Roof pull it off using that tiresome old BLAIR WITCH come-on that this is edited feature highlights of a mass of anonymous video material received via messenger. The conceit is that what you are watching was the ultimate project by husband-and-wife filmmakers and serial murderers Ed (Roof) and Susan (the pretty-in-a-scary-way Shannon Malone).

He's a longtime psychopath and pretentious filmmaker-type (same deal), while she's a former nurse. Together in a tightly locked house outfitted with dungeon rooms, they do "snuff" movies for the underground market on the seedy side of Los Angeles.

All-Stars (March 19th at Chagrin Cinemas and March 20th and 21st at Tower City Cinemas as part of the 39th Cleveland International Film Festival)

[ALL-STARS screens Thursday March 19th at 7:00 pm at Chagrin Cinemas, Friday March 20th at 5:00 pm, and Saturday March 21st at 2:45 pm at Tower City Cinemas as part of the 39th Cleveland International Film Festival.]

See all posts about the 39th Cleveland International Film Festival

Review by Bob Ignizio

With his debut feature as director, veteran character actor Lance Kinsey (perhaps best known as Proctor in POLICE ACADEMY 2 through 6) opts to follow in the mockumentary footsteps of Christopher Guest's WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, BEST IN SHOW, and A MIGHTY WIND . ALL-STARS may not be reinventing the wheel, but it's a consistently funny film about a girl's softball team, their often obnoxious parents, and the put-upon coaches and officials trying to achieve the impossible task of making everyone happy while still finding a way for the kids to have a good time.

Le Fear 2: Le Sequel (now on video)

Review by Bob Ignizio

Jason Croot has acted in, produced, written, and directed a good number of low budget films, most of which I have never heard of (I did see and enjoy DONKEY PUNCH, which he had a role in). That experience pays off in his latest film, LE FEAR 2: LE SEQUEL. The film is a comedy/mockumentary set in the world of low budget filmmaking. Of course certain things are exaggerated for comic effect, and the film-within-a-film here has a whole other level of problems attached to it thanks to the involvement of a shady foreign investor. But more or less, this is a fair approximation of by-the-seat-of-your-pants filmmaking.

Propaganda (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

It's a few years late and a dollar (lots of dollars, really) short for another one of those trendy lefty documentaries bashing big corporations and the government-industrial complex - but offering no other alternatives or solutions, other than maybe legalizing pot, giving Mumia the Nobel Prize, and having a big jam-band festival.

You remember them, right? Those documentaries, I mean. Let's see, there was INSIDE JOB, THE CORPORATION, virtually Michael Moore's  entire canon but especially CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY, Eugene Jarecki's WHY WE FIGHT, the YES MEN films, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, HEIST, WE'RE NOT BROKE, THE FLAW etc. Not to mention the many Iraq movies in which Bush-Cheney-Halliburton Inc. were guest villains.

The Connection (June 13th and 14th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE CONNECTION screens Friday June 13th at 7:15 pm and Saturday June 14th at 9:00 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I'm sure we whose hearts have been broken by movies for so long have undergone this experience: finally getting around to seeing some "masterpiece" of world cinema only to find it lacking. Primitive, inert, perhaps ahead of its time, sure, but only a little bit interesting and unduly hyped. In my POV that's often - not always, but often - happened with pics in the "experimental" and foreign realm. The big heartbreaker for me was Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS. Some Godard titles I have found quite diverting. And you'll get no argument from me that Jean-Paul Belmondo is an icon (he outgrossed E.T. - THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL when those two went head to head in France) but that grainy talkfest (BREATHLESS, I mean) just bored me silly. This is the masterwork that ignited the French New Wave and changed cinema forever? I don't get it!

Impaled: Painfully Blunt

Review by Matt Finley

The year is 2008. Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey is a conservative Luciferian vampire politician with an evil eye on the White House. Richard Mullenax is a local filmmaker with a devilish scheme of his own: stage a documentary about Sharkey in which a variety of actors, shills and unwitting locals relentlessly prank the unknowing and bottomlessly precocious Presidential hopeful from behind a façade of legitimate film journalism.  Kind of a reverse BORAT… or tantric Punk’d.

The result, IMPALED: PAINFULLY BLUNT, winner of Best Full Length Feature at the 2009 Geauga Film Festival, is amateurish, uneven and compulsively watchable. Whether that watchability owes more to Mullenax’s goading monkey shines or Sharkey’s concerted, indomitable eccentricity… that’s a tougher call to make.

Janeane From Des Moines (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

There are a lot of things I meant to do but never got around to it. Like having a gainful career and healthy relationships. But one of the more attainable of my missed goals was an aspiration to see filmmaker Grace Lee's AMERICAN ZOMBIE. A direct-to-DVD curio about which I've heard some very good things, it seems to be a sardonic mockumentary takeoff on zombie lifestyles, as seen from the POV of a TV camera crew who present the walking dead as an unfairly maligned minority group outside of the US mainstream.

But no, I haven't yet seen AMERICAN ZOMBIE. Maybe someday. But I have watched Lee's latest, JANEANE FROM DES MOINES, which could be considered sort of a followup to AMERICAN ZOMBIE. It also plays tricks with film fact and fiction, and it confronts another type of supernatural creature that was once human, now a flesh-eating predator: conservative Republican politicians.

Oh, now that's just mean, a cheap shot. Meaner and more unfair than anything in the movie itself, I think. I dunno. Maybe you make the call.

Jesus People (opens in the Cleveland area April 11th exclusively at the Great Lakes Stadium 16 Theatre.)

[JESUS PEOPLE opens in Cleveland on Friday April 11th exclusively at The Great Lakes Stadium 16 Theatre.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

As JESUS PEOPLE begins, Pastor Jerry (Joel McCrary) learns from his doctor that he is dying. So he does what anyone in such a situation would do: he keeps the information from his wife and decides to start a Christian rock band to rescue his son from the influence of secular music. All this is conveyed using the mockumentary format made popular by Christopher Guest's films lke WAITING FOR GUFFMAN and BEST IN SHOW.

The characters are portrayed as nice but clueless, and the film seems to be unsure whether to really go for the throat or just softball it. The opening scene where Pastor Jerry is dressed down by his doctor inclines one to think the film will pursue the former path, but most of what follows lacks the appetite for such biting satire. Thankfully the film does deliver a fair number of mild laughs, and as with the casts of Guest's films, the actors do a good job of inhabiting their roles. 2 ½ out of 4 stars.

The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I have one less amazing fun fact with which to fascinate and enthrall potential employers on my job interviews (yeah, right). The one that Ken Burns, beloved household-name documentary filmmaker, long eschewed having his own website. For much of his career the famous man's online presence was only featured as a sub-section of the website of Florentine Films, the production company he formed at the outset with his college colleagues. Now that's humility - something in tragic short supply in the movie racket.

But no more. KenBurns.com has gone live and will take you now to a Ken Burns app and Ken Burns presences on YouTube. At least it doesn't smack of the vanity job that a lot of other celeb/showbiz sites are, but it nonetheless leaves me short one surfire conversation-starter.

Okay, how about this as a substitute: the definitive Ken Burns parody feature is now available on video.

Yes, a feature-length spoof of the Florentine Films/Ken Burns-school of historical documentary that now seems to be the PBS standard, with its reliance on old historical photos, recitation of vintage letters, and talking-head interviews. What an utterly brilliant notion, and why didn't somebody think of doing it while Leslie Nielsen was still alive? 

Europa Report (October 19th and 20th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[EUROPA REPORT screens Saturday October 19th at 9:55 pm and Sunday October 20th at 8:15 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]


Review by Bob Ignizio

A privately funded space mission sends six astronauts to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter in EUROPA REPORT. The film is uses a mockumentary/found footage approach to tell the story of what happened. Dr. Unger (Embeth Davidtz), the CEO of the company that funded the mission, serves to narrate and put the footage into context with another scientist (Dan Fogler) occasionally chiming in with tidbits of information. Most of what we see, however, is the footage shot by the various cameras on board the spacecraft and attached to the space suits of the crew. As the tale unfolds in a not entirely linear fashion, the film does a fine job at conveying the romance, the terror, and the boredom of space travel, and most importantly, the reasons why the incredible risks are worth it.

31 Days of Halloween 2012: Incident at Loch Ness

An appreciation by Bob Ignizio

INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS appears on its surface to be a documentary within a documentary. Famous director Werner Herzog (AGUIRRE THE WRATH OF GOD', FITZCARALDO, etc.) has been hired by Hollywood producer/screenwriter Zach Penn (writer of X-2: X MEN UNITED among others) to film a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. In typical Herzog fashion, Werner isn't so much interested in the monster as why people seem to need to believe in such a creature. At the same time, another crew of filmmakers is making a documentary on Herzog's career, and follow the filmmaker to Scotland as he begins shooting his documentary.

Brother's Justice (now on video)

[BROTHER'S JUSTICE is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Even though meta-satire TV comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage, Extras etc. have done the idea to death, BROTHER'S JUSTICE is another one of those mockumentary-type deals in which real-life movie-industry folk portray themselves, generally as ego-swollen jerkwads. Just kidding, right. Uh, right? 

In a setup that seems to be a takeoff on Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre career turnabouts, comic actor Dax Shepard (Dax Shepard, portraying himself as a borderline racist/homophobe with a soupcon of substance-abuse issues) announces he's going to forsake funny business and become a dead-serious martial-arts action star, a la Chuck Norris, in something called "Brother's Justice." There isn't even a script, just a vague Dax-centric scenario pitch about drug-dealing biker gangs and a kidnapped brother. Shepard doesn't even know any martial-arts skills. But he bulldozes ahead with the thing and brings aboard his lifelong buddy Nate Tuck (Nate Tuck), normally a Kinko's manager, to produce. There's a funny between-the-lines subtext that Shepard's been mooching off Tuck in one form or another for ages, including pooling their finances to buy Shepard a cool car for a racetrack documentary that never got underway.