The Bonebat Comedy of Horrors Film Festival is a local April tradition that may not be quite as inevitable as death or taxes, but it’s getting there. And it’s a helluva lot more fun.
Author: Tony Kay
Scream 6 brings back the satire and the scares
Scream 6 (2023 | USA | 123 minutes | Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett ) The original 1996 meta-horror classic Scream earned …
Tony’s Favorite Films of 2022
As per usual with years past, all my SunBreak co-conspirators saw a lot more new movies than I did this year, but …
Halloween Ends on a strange (and strangely hilarious) note
Since seeing Halloween Ends, purportedly the final chapter in director David Gordon Green’s reboot of the iconic slasher franchise, I’ve oscillated between dismissing it as entertainingly lousy, and viewing it as a work of operatically-pitched satiric genius. Truth be told, it kinda feels like both at once, and therein lies much of its cockeyed charm. Whether you succumb to that charm, however, is another story.
Expect a Pearl among Horror Prequels from the Follow-up to X
Pearl, the prequel to writer/director Ti West’s well-received shocker X, takes a character’s origin story—the kind usually dispensed as an afterthought in a couple of sentences of exposition or two minutes of black-and-white flashback footage—and turns it into an audacious, grandly operatic standalone experience.
SIFF 2022: Inu-Oh, I’ll Show You Mine, Flux Gourmet, and lots more
Several days late but not several dollars short, please see below for a machine-gun rundown of everything else I saw at SIFF …
SIFF 2022: Warm Blood
When I finished watching Rick Charnoski’s narrative feature debut, I was so bowled over I had to see it a second time in as many days on a festival screen—just to determine if my immense love for it was the cinematic equivalent of an immediate, all-consuming crush that evaporates in the harsh light of day. Upon second viewing, I realized my movie-crush was no fluke.
SIFF 2022: Navalny
When asked how he sees the movie of his life, Russian opposition presidential candidate Alexei Navalny bristles at the suggestion that his real-life story be depicted as a dry historic drama. It’s a thriller, Navalny asserts. And with that proclamation by its subject, filmmaker Daniel Roher literally opens the curtain on what turns out to be one hell of a thriller—and much more.
SIFF 2022: The Olive Trees of Justice and Piggy
Like anyone or anything just beginning to recover from the metaphoric or literal ravages of a global pandemic, the 2022 iteration of …
Foo Fighters Go to Hell (sort of) in Studio 666
In an era where artists like Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake engineer their crossover film success with algebraic levels of calculation, there’s something almost endearing about a big rock band farting out a schlocky horror comedy as their first fictional feature. So the scrappy contrarian in me was rooting hard for Studio 666, the debut narrative showcase for arena-alternative rock band Foo Fighters.