Author: Jean Jentilet
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Light a candle, dial a number, and ask for a ride. And whatever happens after that, don’t panic. This is the ritual game that The Mid-Night Driver (dir. Alex Cherney) offers, a dread-filled, atmospheric film that follows Claire (Devan Delugo), after she and her friends dare to call the Driver. The premise sounds familiar, but…
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A quiet exploration of the difficult choices that must be made when the doctor has bad news, Lesions— Wait, no. That’s not what Lesions is at all, though one might be forgiven for thinking that it was going there for the first chunk of the movie (even with a titillating yet still somehow restrained opening…
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Released into the crowded horror landscape of the early 1970s, the original Black Christmas was a signal of what was to come, the subgenre that would dominate the next two decades: the slasher. Black Christmas helped codify many familiar tropes that would be used for years (and are still used today), but its treatment of…
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The day’s feature film, Baby Fever (dir Nupur Chitalia, Pascale Potvin) encompass all the themes of the day, at least tangentially. After moving to a new community with her husband, James, and finding herself pregnant, Lila interviews with the local mothers’ group, a prestigious club led by mommy influencer Trish (in a tooth-for-tooth performance by…
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Strong themes (from grief to motherhood, self-doubt to self-preservation) wrapped in elegant storytelling ruled the day at the tenth Sick Chicks Film Festival. Grief is such a ubiquitous topic in so many films that it seems impossible that there can be anything else to say, but there is. In Aunque no esté contigo (Even If…
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The second half of SCFF resumes with a convincing nod to Art Bell-type radio shows in Distant Signals (Dir. Marielle Brinda), about a paranormal radio host whose childhood experience with a strange man (whom he believes to be an extraterrestrial) in the woods becomes the defining moment in his life, to the point where he…
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The name alone—Sick Chick Flicks—creates a set of expectations, which the festival’s offerings met and confounded all at once. The day opened strong with Hannah Franklin’s The Sitters, a fun animated short with the vibe of an old-school Saturday morning cartoon from Hell about a hapless cat sitter getting unexpected help. There is a bit…
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Monolith opens with a single enticing line spoken over a black screen, “I want to tell you a story.” Over the next moments, a narrative unfolds into lunacy. The screen pulls back to an extreme close-up of a microphone, then to a home office, in the same space where viewers will spend all but a…
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David Lynch’s 1997 noir film, Lost Highway, featuring an embarrassing amount of Marylin Manson, is at least Wikipedially about jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who murders his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), whom he suspects of having an affair with porn facilitator and pimp Andy (Michael Massee). While awaiting execution, Fred falls into a psychogenic…
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The success of Halloween in 1978 and Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance therein, coming near the end of a decade of new ground broken in the themes, content, and storytelling approaches in horror (and film in general), marked the beginning of a surge in the popularity of scream queens and a concomitant change in the portrayal…