Review: Night Caller

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2022
Images from the Internet

Night Caller
Directed by Chad Ferrin
Crappy World Films; Girls and Corpses Films; 123 Go Films
84 minutes, 2022
www.123gofilms.com/night-caller

Back in the 1980s, late night was filled with commercials for things like telephone sex-talks and psychics. Personally, I don’t believe in this form of spirituality (I dated the assistant of a professional psychic a few years ago and saw how it worked). That being said, skepticism is not a hindrance to watch films like this one because, hey, is an unstoppable guy in a hockey mask reality?

Susan Priver

Anyway, now that I have gotten that caveat off my chest, let us delve into this film, which focuses in on Clementine Carter (Susan Priver), an attractive woman of a certain age who has a gift (what a certain writer might call a “shining”). She works on the business end of a telephone psychic hotline in a space she shares with fellow phone psychic and boss Jade Mei (international star Bai Ling). Jade also has visions, so in this story, both are legit psychics.

Bai Ling

At the very start of the film, Clementine gets a call from a stranger (the underappreciated Steve Railsback of 1985’s Lifeforce, among so many other classics) and gives her an obvious fake name (yet, Clementine gives clients her real name!), and she sees him murder someone (comedian Kristi McHugh) in her mind, with a big hunting knife. After, he does just that in the real world, in a nice, gory, practical-effects way, including his signature (we son learn) scalping. Shades of Maniac (1981)! This masked killer wears a black stocking over his face, a long blonde wig, and a toque on top (it is filmed in Los Angeles though, not Canada). There is a bit of sexual ambiguity with the killer, who likes to remove certain female body parts, reminiscent of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991); there is also a couple of nods to Psycho (1960). And like that film, there is a deep psychological element to both the killer and the psychic that both separates them, and makes them somewhat similar, dealing with the dead and the beyond, whether it is “real” or in the mind.

Clementine’s life is a bit of a struggle. She lives with a movie-loving dad, Charles (Robert Miano, who I’ve recently reviewed in Parasites in 2016, by the same director as this film, which I listed as one of my fave releases of the year) and Get Gone in 2019). His room is full of movie posters and VHS tapes. At one point he’s watching Patrick (1978), which is an Easter Egg as it’s a film about someone who kills, psychically. Her late mother, Emily (Kelli Maroney in cameo form, who was in a number of great ‘80s classics, like 1984’s Night of the Comet and 1988’s Chopping Mall), comes to visit her in dreams as a Cassandra, to warn her of danger. Then there is her racist, Ponzi scheming, violent and alcoholic ex-husband, Doug (Michael Cambridge) who is still pestering her and blaming her for his hitting her (“You should have seen it coming, ‘Madame Psychic’”). Will he redeem himself by the end, or will he be another body for the serial killer? I know which side the majority of the audience is probably on.

Robert Miano

One interesting concept is that, for the purposes of this story, fate can be altered, so if someone has a vision, steps can be taken to change it, which leads to unexpected developments rather than having a vision written in stone (or brain, anyway). Playing with this concept is one of the finer points on the story, and also keeps the suspense going, because even if one of the psychics has a vision, which left alone is what would occur, that does not mean it will happen that way.

The most frustrating thing about this film is that Clem (as her father calls her) has a tendency of making some really stupid decisions, such as going all Karen on the coppers (she even says, “Let me talk to your supervisor,”), giving out too much information or going to dangerous places alone (I get pissed at police procedurals where the cop goes in on their own without back-up, as well; it’s a too common theme). You don’t need to be a psychic to see the problems from a mile away. But it’s not just her: why does the Hotline keep answering the killer’s calls, and if they must, how come they don’t record them for the police? There is definitely, however, a nice interplay of what is “real” and events occurring in the mind of one of the seers.

Kelli Maroney

Another fine point with this film is that it is not filled with starlets running around akimbo, but rather mature actors who are more realistic for the roles (though Priver is only 17 years younger than Miano, who plays her dad). Along with Maroney, there are a few other cameos of note, such as Lew Temple (he’s been in a bunch of Rob Zombie’s films, including The Devil’s Rejects in 2005).

Despite the ages of nearly all the main actors being near or above senior citizen level, the photography makes them look good, even with the over-use of close-ups (for some reason, it seems most of Ling’s shots are a foot from her face; so close, in fact, that when she has scenes with Priver, they practically look like conjoined twins to keep them in the same shot.

As much as I kvetched about some aspects of this story, it still managed to keep the tension and interest high throughout, even as I yelled at the screen, “Why are you doing that!?” There is no nudity, but the gore is quite plentiful, top-notch looking, and all practical, by storied indie make-up artist Joe Castro. It all works together well for the story, so it lives up to its promise.

The film is available on a number of digital and cable platforms, including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, iNDemand, and DISH.

IMBD Listing HERE 

 

Horror Shorts Reviews for August 2021

Horror Shorts Reviews for August 2021

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2021
Images from the Internet

Filmmakers, please note: It is important that you list your films on IMDB. Usually, I do not review films (unless requested) that appear on sites like Alter and Screamfest, because they have a known platform, which is great, while I would rather focus on films with no affiliations.

Caw
Directed by Ricky Glore
www.RickyGlore.com
4:45 minutes, 2021
A pregnant woman in yellow (Stephonika W. Kaye) is being chased by a slasher in a yellow slicker through a forest deep. Why? Well, perhaps its ritualistic, but as is common in the shorter horror shorts, it is a scene out of context, but damn it works fine. The make-up effects look really great, and even in that short time, with no dialogue, the viewer can feel empathy for the woman (perhaps it’s the soon-to-be-or-not-to-be child?). Glore does well to keep the tension going for the scene, and his editing is also top-notch. Not bad for a stand-up comic/filmmaker. 
Full film HERE 

 

The Dark Dawn (aka Il Male)
Directed by Alessandro Spada
Fiatlvx Films
22:41 minutes, 2019
The viewer can tell pretty much from the start that this is a bit different, and that it is going to be interesting. In a secluded area, a Priest (Marco Foresti) walks through a snowy road and woods to an isolated farm house. The camera employs a lens that makes the image not completely sharp, and the colors muted. When one sees a modern genre film from Italy and it has a lone priest carrying what looks like a medical bag, it’s pretty obvious what the theme is going to be, in this case the exorcism of a young woman with a sordid past named Janet (Janet Fischietto), with glazed eyes and chained to a bed. But the events that follow are not expected, with a stunningly done twist ending that comes out of freakin’ nowhere to explain what has happened before. Of course, I won’t give it away. The film was shot nearly 10 years ago, but was released in 2019, and is getting a wider showing now. The cinematography by Flavio Toffoli is excellent, and I cannot recommend this highly enough. It is in Italian with some of the easiest captions I have seen. So worth watching, but do so right to the end of the story.
Full film HERE 

 

The First Snow
Directed by Kyle Bastin
Bastin Films; Media Pit; Pigasus Pictures
11:58 minutes, 2021
A winter’s day, in a deep and dark Greenwood, Indiana acreage. A cold front is a-comin’ (below freezing!! This made me laugh since it gets to -40F pre-windchill where I am, but I digress…) and with it the first snow of the season. Meanwhile, high schooler Jacy (Leah Evelynn Hummel) and her young brother Eli (Jacob Bawi) are getting ready for school, but the pipes are frozen, grandpa (Dennis Crosswhite, who played an uncredited student in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) has gone missing. The film is a musing on climate change with an angry Mother Earth (Judy Littlefield) ready to kick some student ass. The film is a bit opaque in bits, and the background music drowns some of the dialogue (at least on my system), but the storyline is strong, and the ending is actually very pleasing. It’s not preachy in any kind of way, but still gets its message of damage and love across quite well. It made me think of a song by the band Sparks (HERE). 
Trailer HERE 

 

The Flamboyant Rites of Gay Dracula
Directed by Richard Griffin
Nova Films Productions; Scorpio Releasing
9:08 minutes, 2021
This mock trailer, shot in wide screen, is introduced by Orson Wells (Terry Shea), much as with the old Masterpiece Theater fronted by Alistair Cooke. It seems Dracula (Robert Kersey) is being kicked out by his father, Dracula Sr. (Bruce Church) for being gay. He takes an appropriate Peter Pan bus to find his new life, including changing his name to Homosexuala and hosting the (literal) Fondu Party of the Damned. His nemesis? Well, there is two: of course, there is Anita Bryant (Victoria Paradis) who else, as the Van Helsing, and a rivalry for a suiter’s hand – er – nick by Gay Blacula (Cardryell Truss). Gay Dracula made his premiere previously in Griffin’s 2020 short, “Gay as the Sun.” In fact, Graham Stokes returns from his role in that film as Billy, Gay Dracula’s love focus. The humor here is kind of broad (pun not intended) but effective. The accents come in and out, and are occasionally oddly German (Dracula was Romanian), but that’s all part of the fun for me. Paradis comes close to stealing the show, but this is a laugh fest from beginning to end. It’s one of those things, like Monty Python, that may seem silly, but you can see the smarts written between the lines by Griffin and Robyn Guilford.
Full film HERE 

 

Racyst
Directed by Ricky Glore
www.RickyGlore.com
7:19 minutes, 2019.
When is someone white enough? An “agitated man” (Brian Roesel) can’t seem to cope with what he considers “Other.” People of color and those with accents turn him into a Ken (as opposed to a Karen), but something is suddenly physically wrong with him as his fear manifests into an event Cronenberg may envision in The Brood (1979). The effects work well with a touch of humor to it all, but at the same time reflective of modern technology culture where the Internet is full of Karen and Ken videos. This moral tale hits deep into white rage, pointing a mirror at it, which makes it watchable on many levels. The SFX team on this is currently working on Glore’s upcoming feature film, All Your Friends Are Dead, currently in Kickstarter mode at the above e-address.
Full film HERE 

 

The Serpent Writhes in a Glass Coffin
Directed by Richard Griffin
Nova Films Productions; Scorpio Releasing
6:28 minutes, 2021
Director Richard Griffin has a history of creating fake trailers, such as the excellent “They Stole the Pope’s Blood!” (2014), so it should come as no surprise that he would do one on one of his favorite genres, the Italian Cinema giallos. Many of these had odd names like Bird With a Crystal Plumage (1978) or The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1970). For this filmette, Louis (Neil Redfield) is a gay serial killer warped by electroshock therapy (a comment on conversion therapy?) who murders his lovers, with the police hot on his trail. Lots of giallo motifs run through the trailer, such as photographer and model, coppers in trench coats, cartoonish blood and violence, extreme close-ups of shadowed-laden faces, and clumsy, overly dramatic dialogue (“Inside his damaged brain was a nightmare carnival where the price of admission was death,” or “I got the mayor making more noise than a dozen king crabs fucking in an oil drum”). There is even a nod to Blazing Saddles (1974) or High Anxiety (1977) concerning a Republican politician. This is a strongly amusing film that you don’t need to know the genre to enjoy it, but if you have seen a few, your smile will probably be that much wider.
Full film HERE 

Review: Scarecrow County

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2019

Images from the Internet

Scarecrow County

Directed by John Oak Dalton

Midwest Film Venture

75 minutes, 2019

www.facebook.com/Midwest-Film-Venture-622094804959383/  

I firmly believe that one day, when we are looking back at John Oak Dalton’s film career at a retrospective, people will comment that either his early films were better, or this was just the start of his career and he’s grown so much. Directors like David Cronenberg and George A. Romero go through this all the time. No, I’m not comparing this film to theirs, but the philosophy is the same.

Andrew Britt

Oaks started off strong with directing his first feature, The Girl in the Crawlspace (2018). I also believe, in part, that this strength comes from three places: the first is that he has written a number of scripts before and has had the chance to initially grow in that way; second, he has been involved with the filmmaking process for a while with various directors so he’s had the opportunity to learn the craft; and third, he is under the mentorship of his producer, Henrique Couto, who has been making films in the Midwest for at least a decade (much as Gene Wilder did with Mel Brooks). This release was mostly shot in and around Farmland, Indiana, though filming was done as far as Dayton, Ohio.

It’s easy to tell that Dalton’s strength, at this early part of his directorial career, is in the screenwriting more than the helming of it, but that will take some time and practice to catch up the two together. What I particularly like about the script is that the characters are more fully developed than most indie films, the dialog doesn’t talk down to the audience, and the plot is both simple and nuanced at the same time.

Small town librarian Winnie (Chelsi Kern, coincidentally a perfect last name for a character dealing with text, may I add) gets ahold of a diary of a gay teen who had died, which of course leads to a series of events related to that occurrence. Meanwhile, there is the mysterious titular scarecrow that is going around killing people. While you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know these events are related, it’s how it all works out that is the focus of the film.

Tom Cherry, Chelsi Kern, Rachel Redolfi

Scarecrows are certainly not new to the horror audience, but Dalton has taken a common trope and played with it enough to make it interesting with the story’s own psychological drama.

The film is populated by a large and complex cast, including Winnie’s schizophrenic and agoraphobic cartoonist sister Zoe (Rachael Redolfi) whose drawings speak to her (using the very identifiable voice of Erin R. Ryan), Zoe’s promoter with the multicolored hair (Manic Panic?) Marlys (Erin Hoodlebrink), the pent-up angry Prentiss (John Hambrick) who has recently returned to town after a two-year service in Afghanistan, and lots of the character’s dads and friends (few moms involved that are living, apparently, despite the female-heavy cast).

Erin Hoodlebrink

Being an independent film director, Dalton wisely uses his budget in many ways, such as going to where the particular actor is rather than bringing them necessarily together in a room, and much of the interactive dialog is done over the phone: Zoe talks to Marlys and Winnie often using the device; most of the dads connect that way, including one to his girlfriend / sponsor (up-and-comer Joni Durian who stars in Couto’s latest, Ouija Room). 

Another way he wisely saves some money on the production is holding off on prosthetics and digital SFX. In other words, as this film is strongly story-oriented, all of the killings are done off-screen. I commend this, even as I like some blood in my meat, but again, if the story holds up as this one does, it becomes almost unnecessary (even if noticeable).

That being said, the scarecrow looks kind of cool. It’s mostly in the background, and often when a kill is about to happen, it and the area around it are filled with blue smoke and lights. It telegraphs what is going to happen, but honestly, it’s pretty obvious, even with a few good jump scares.

If there is anything I would to complain about, it’s the cheesy and stereotypical electronic music. Just does not work for me, as it was a bit of a distraction from what’s on the screen.

Much of the cast of The Girl in the Crawlspace has returned for this new release. The acting is mostly decent, especially among the female leads and the occasional male ones, but most of the wooden portrayals are from those with the Y chromosomes. Again, this is still in Dayton’s early stages. Have you seen some of the performances in early Cronenberg’s work? Makes this look like Best in Show in comparison.

Henrique Couto and John Oak Dalton

What compels this film especially to be worth watching – beyond the editing, which is quite good – is the writing. Sure, there are some really cool nuggets, such as the mention of the band the Dead Milkmen (saw them play at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, NJ, opening for Salem 66; but I digress…), and even some dark humor thrown in here and there.

For a second feature, it’s pretty obvious that Dayton can have a solid future in both writing and directing. Let’s support that, and check out his films as I’m sure they are bound to be floating around the festival circuit. I know The Girl in the Crawlspace is about to get a wide circulation on various media, and it probably won’t be long before this one will, as well.