The Movie:

[Reviewer's note: Echelon Entertainment sent an unusual screener copy of Horror House to review. It arrived in a standard case but had awful-looking cover art with color bleed-through that appeared to have been printed from a standard home computer printer and standard printer paper. The disc wasn't much better - with that blue / purple tint that suggests DVD-Rom. Considering the low audio and video quality of this film, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and opted not to rate each. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that what was presented on the disc itself may indeed reflect the final product - more on that later in the review.]

There's a certain breed of horror movie that's not seen often or by many people. These films show up from small distribution companies on home video; horror movies made with shoestring budgets and amateur production values...Read the entire review

The Film:
Here's the deal with this film: an advanced screener arrived in my mailbox, with no box art and no information about a release date. Searching the web, and it is pretty difficult to find much information other than what is listed on IMDB and some reviews on a handful of websites. In this day and age of seemingly unlimited access to information, when you have any degree of difficulty finding information about a new film, it feels like a bad sign. Don't get me wrong, because I'm not superstitious, but at some point I started feeling like maybe there was some higher force telling me that I should not watch Zombie Wars. And if that's the case, I should have listened.

Written and directed by David Prior, who was responsible for some truly exceptional Z-grade schlock in the 1980s and 90s, Zombie Wars takes place many years after the dead have risen from the grave, and nea...Read the entire review

The Product:
There are several kinds of spoofs - the earnest, the rapid fire pop culture riff-fest, the way too insular and obscure, and the completely irredeemable and dumb. No one can claim to be a master of the genre, and yet every year, many individuals up and give such cinema a damn good try. Special Needs is an example of such an attempt. Tweaking both reality TV and the idiots who make with a sly and satiric thrashing, it's an almost effortless example of a success. The same can't be said for Randy Morgan's Jack Me. Looking at confrontational fact filmmakers like Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore and seeing something laughable, the amateur auteur hopes to skewer such stunt-oriented showboating. He also thinks fast food and the physical failures that can come from it are friggin' hilarious. Unfortunately, the joke is mostly on him. With its reliance on bodily functions an...Read the entire review

I enjoy animation. A lot. From Walt Disney's beautifullyrendered Technicolor shorts to the wackiness of Looney Toons to the creativityof Anime and even some of the absurd Saturday morning fare like TheWild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, I'll watch just about anything. With many of the majors putting out their classic cartoons on DVD, thetopic of racist cartoons often crops up. In the 30's and 40's, thingswere very different in America, and cartoons were sometimes brutally insensitiveto minorities. Over the years, various studios have taken these cartoonsout of circulation and they've somehow become known as "banned" films. (Not that anyone ever actually banned them...they just didn't distributethem.) The most famous examples of this are the near-mythic "CensoredEleven" from Warner Brothers, nearly a dozen shorts that WB won...Read the entire review

The Movie

If you've seen more than one film from Europe, then you know that they can often be quite different from American movies. The pacing is often slower, the imagery more important, and the subject matter can be less coherent. If there's any word that I would use to describe many of the European films that I've seen, it would be subtle. In contrast to the loud and brash films to which Americans are accustomed, there's nothing wrong with a film being subtle, as it gives the viewer an opportunity to dig deeper into the movie to find the meaning. But, a movie can be too subtle for its own good and the Belgian entry Praying Mantis is a good example of this.

Yann Chely stars in Praying Mantis (whose on-screen title translates as "The Feast of the Praying Mantis") as a cellist named Julien. While traveling in the south (of Belgium, presumably), he meets a strikin...Read the entire review

I've never attempted to start my own Internet business, but I sincerely respect those who can make it work. E-tailers such as Amazon, Buy.com and eBay (though the latter is more of a user-reliant site than a standard business) got their start like any other now-famous business or chain: with a simple idea that eventually snowballed into something much larger. In a way, they're like music groups, comic books or independent films: it takes a lot of work to get off the ground, but it even more work to keep the engine running smoothly.

For this reason, there are at least 100 failed experiments for every success story. Once-proud Internet businesses, like so many garage bands, now lay in ruins after burning brightly for a few years (or months…or weeks, even). Right around the turn of the millennium, s...Read the entire review

The Movie

Director/editor/cameraman/narrator Srikant Chellappa's quirky, quietly outraged and bemused Running Against Dick is a scattershot, charmingly ragged documentary that explores life on the fringes of American politics, while casting a jaundiced eye upon the Democratic and Republican parties. By dissecting the 2002 Congressional elections in Missouri, Chellappa (who introduces himself as an immigrant, returning to this "crazy Americans" approach a few times during his film) follows Dan Byington, Mike Steger and Mike Bram, three men who felt strongly enough to take on Richard Gephardt, a longtime Democratic Congressman.

During the rather brief run time of Running Against Dick, Chellappa succeeds more at sketching portraits of fiercely individual politicos who, rather than lash out at the system via editorials or rambling at family gatherings, take it upon them...Read the entire review

The Movie

Produced in 2000 and (wisely) kept out of the public eye for half a decade is The Ritual, an Irish occult thriller that's, frankly, as bad as movies get. Unearthed for some unknown reason by little-known schlockhouse Echelon Entertainment and wedged into a seriously chintzy DVD package, this thing is an absolute chore to sit through.

Produced mega-cheap on the Emerald Isle and starring nobody you've ever heard of, The Ritual is the tale of the "Danu Amulet," and all the goofy idiots who want it for their own reasons. There's Nessa, the open-minded archaeologist, Magda, who commits murder and employs mercenaries to track the artifact down, a few clueless cops, and a bunch of random nobodies. It's all very dry and drab, trust me. Low budgets and mediocre ideas I can handle, but this dizzying display of amazingly amateurish filmmaking is one for the ages.

Writer/direct...Read the entire review