Movie Review: "Farm/Ominous/Evidence of a Haunting/Meadowoods/Deadrise" (2015: Echo Bridge/Green Apple/Midnight Releasing/Brain Damage/Monterey/Brauer)

...OK!! OK!! I admit it. I am an absolute sucker for those Echo Bridge multi-movie bundles. Yes, those bargain-bin, mish-mash cult film collections, often butting the most familiar, up against the most obscure. A treasure-trove of long-time movie favorites, with preferred-to-be-forgotten cinematic fumbles. Big-budgeted matter-of-facts, mated with low-budget, independents oddities. Cheezy, no name direct-to-video fodder...and big starring, director-notable okie-dokes. The 'dumping grounds' for lesser studio efforts and public domain classics. The campy, crazy and nutty stuff, originally released singularly, from distributors like Midnight Releasing, Full Moon Pictures, The Asylum, Brain Damage Films, Alliance Releasing, York, and countless others...

...a buck or two'll typically get ya' four or five of these films, laid out on one disc...four or five bucks'll get ya' ten of 'em, and so on. Most of the film titles on the smaller bundles will usually all be found on the 'step up to eight-or-ten' film' collections, along side one or two rarities. And most of those will be found on the 15-to-20-film collections, along side even more obscurities. And often, it genuinely becomes worth the slight extra cost to double dip on a bunch of others, which might be sitting on one's video shelf, in one previously purchased collection, to get that singularly unique and obscure rarity, which might be only available on that attention drawing second collection (...heck, I remember collectors going all ga-ga over the unceremoniously released, under-the-radar editions of the bloody, 1980 'Bigfoot' horror obscurity, "Night of the Demon", as well as the under-appreciated 1983 slasher entry, "Curtains" in this venue, before a couple of the major cult film distributors picked them up, 'legitimately' and the allure of collectible 'special features' editions)...

Movie Review: Skew (2011)

When it comes to independent filmmaking, you really have to get creative. I suppose that's obvious, considering the fact that this is a creative medium, but I mean in how you put the movie together. One popular trick is to make the cameraman a character in the movie. This started with The Blair Witch Project, hit a bigger scale with Cloverfield, and was tweaked a little in Paranormal Activity. It's a nice cover for bad video quality and gives some leeway on sound and camera work. What it doesn't make up for is story. If the story is good, sometimes the rest doesn't matter. Skew takes the concept and still maintains film and sound quality and uses solid storytelling.

It starts out with three friends on their way to a wedding. There are Rich and Eva (a couple), and then there is Simon, who annoys the other two with his endless filming. Simon's girlfriend is supposed to go, but she bails. Things get weird for him when a motel clerk's face shows up blurry through the camera, and he is later killed.