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Festivals

Information about our favorite Film Festivals and the great features and shorts they’re showing.

Brooklyn 45 (2023) Review

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for horrific gun violence, some torture, and some crunchy re-animated dead.

Ted Geoghegan wrote and directed a nifty mystery box of a film wherein a group of WWII army officers support their friend, Lt. Colonel Hockstetter (Larry Fessenden) in his attempts to to reconnect with his recently deceased wife. A terrific veteran cast delivers the drama in this well constructed (and occasionally bloody) ghostly escape room of a story.

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Mike’s Review: Satan Wants You (SXSW 2023)

★★★★ out of ★★★★★ 🚫 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 If you know horror you know Satan. You might even say horror and Satan are best pals. They’ve been hanging around for a long time always pushing boundaries and always trying something cheeky and new.  Sometimes this friendship is on the down-low and sometimes Satan gets a pinch uppity and decides to out the entire relationship. Or at least his (or her) relationship to the general public. When that happens it’s a messy and ugly affair.
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Mike’s Review: Talk To Me (SXSW 2023)

★★★★.5 out of ★★★★★  🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸for some gnarly gore, eye gouging, and repeated head wounds. Each and every year there’s THAT horror film that shakes things up. Hits the festival circuit and creates tidal wave-sized buzz. Sometimes it’s deserved and sometimes it’s not. In the case of 2023’s festival darling Talk to Me, the buzz is profoundly deserved.
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Mike’s Review: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (SXSW 2023)

★★★★ out of ★★★★★ 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore and violence.  A hundred years on we’ve been blessed and not-so-blessed with hundreds, or maybe thousands or Frankenstein-related films. Remakes, reboots, re-imaginations,  reworking of the Mary Shelley source material, and even re-re-working of Shelley’s book. The Frankenstein mythos has comfortable slipped into our collective horror zeitgeist.
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Mike’s Review: Late Night with the Devil (SXSW 2023)

★★★★ out of ★★★★★ 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild gore. If you’ve even run across Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, or Dinah Shore you’ll know that they all roiled in a very specific talk show space in the 1970s. Talk shows were smarmy, boozy, and informal affairs that gave audiences time each day to let their hair down and forget about the doldrums of the Viet Nam War and the crushing presence of socio-economic injustice in America.  These talk shows were also incredibly competitive. Johnny Carson was king, but there was a lot of room under him to vie for advertisers and Neilson ratings. Late Night with the Devil follows that exact story line, by exploring frustrated talk show host Jack Delroy played pitch perfectly by David Dastmalchian.
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Mike’s Review: Only The Good Survive (SXSW 2023)

★★.5 out of ★★★★★ 🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 for mild comedic gore. Midway through Only the Good Survive the local sheriff and Dennis Miller impersonator (Frederick Weller) is interrogating young Brea Dunlee (Sidney Flanigan) about her involvement in a string of ritualistic murders and asks “…is this a comedy or a horror?” While the film chugs along like an Edgar Wright-inspired effort, this very sentiment is really the film’s problem. It wants to be both. Unfortunately, juggling these two juxtaposed art forms is a tricky bit of business that is almost never accomplished.
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Spooky Time Episode 7

The Scariest Things is heading down to Austin for SXSW and The Overlook Film Festival, two of the most influential festivals in America and we are previewing them for you in Episode 7 of Spooky Time!
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Abruptio (2023) Review

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸

What do you get when you combine the voice talents of Sid Haig, Jordan Peele, and Robert Englund with a cast of creepy life-size puppets and a story that might as well have been written by Philip K Dick? It’s called Abruptio.

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Mike’s Review: Regicide (Another Hole in the Head Film Festival 2022)

★★.5 out of ★★★★★ Regicide is one of those awesome $5 dollar SAT words. You’d swear you know what it means, but always end up having to look it up online. We’ll save you they trouble. Regicide is the killing of a monarch or king. In the case of 2022’s uber-indy flick Regicide, this kind of makes sense, but it takes the film an awfully long time to find the metaphor. 
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Eric’s Review: Agatha (2022 Another Hole in the Head Film Festival)

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★ Agatha resides at the intersection of an experimental art piece and a horror movie. Knowing that, you know how to proceed with this film. Agatha is visually stunning but ultimately difficult to process at times. It is mesmerizing and dreamy and entirely devoid of dialogue, so your attention span will be tested. Ultimately if you like visually poetic and painterly films, this will be your bag.
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Night of the Bastard (2022) Review

★★★ out of ★★★★★

Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Night of the Bastard is fun. Stupid fun. Be ready for a low-budget B-Movie brawler of a picture. A desert trailer-trash and Satanic Cult mashup awaits.

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Mike’s Review: Cryptid (Another Hole in the Head Film Festival 2022)

★★★ out of ★★★★★ While no one on the Scariest Things Podcast is a licensed cryptozoologist, it’s fair to say that we all have an interest in this murky science. There’s even a few of us — gasp — that might actual believe in the cryptids! When this most recent offering popped up at the Another Hole in the Head Film fest we knew we had to search it out. 
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Brightwood (2022) Review

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★ A crumbling relationship leads a couple to take their frustrations out on a jog around a nearby pond, but they get trapped in a mysterious Mobius loop that becomes a private hell for the two of them. A smart,, if repetitive (of course) time paradox tale that explores the truly destructive nature of a breakup in some very clever ways.
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Mike’s Review: Pig Killer (2022 Another Hole in the Head Film Festival)

★★.5 out of ★★★★★ An evocative film name for an equally evocative true story. Pig Killer should not be taken lightly and nor should the horrible tale of Willy Pickton who killed and killed until he made his way in to Canadian history books as the most prolific serial killer in the country’s history.
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