Who is the John Carpenter of tomorrow, or the Fred Olen Ray, the Mikels, the Russo?
I Had a Bloody Good Time at House Harker (2016) continues to be one of my favorite low budget independent efforts of that year. Descendants of Mina and Jonathan Harker from Dracula fight off a modern-day vampire. Director/writer Clayton Cogswell, screenwriter Jacob Givens and creator/actors Noel Carroll and Derek Haugen, along with a whole slew of talented friends and family pulled off a hell of a nice little flick. Since then, they continued their Good Cops web series including an exceptional Halloween episode. Check it out on the GoodCopsTV YouTube channel. A new feature, however, does not seem to be in the works, but we’ll keep hoping.
Watch out for this three-headed writer/director. François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, directed Turbo Kid (2015) under the company name RKSS Films. In a post-apocalypse world (sans cars, only bicycles) a young man takes on the persona of his comic book hero becoming the titular protagonist. Everything about this film is great, the acting, directing, set design, the comedy, and Michael Ironside. This filmmaking Ghidorah also created Summer of ‘84 (2018), now a part of the burgeoning serial-killer-next-door subgenre. But wait, we also get Turbo Kid 2 coming soon, but not soon enough for me.
The Love Witch (2016) was a masterpiece in production design alone, let alone cinematography. The 35mm film tells the tale of a witch casting spells to seduce her lovers–with disastrous results. Director/writer and all-around-crewmember, Anna Biller, also directed some shorts as well as the feature Viva (2007), in which a couple of couples in 1970s L.A. live the Bohemian lifestyle. According to a 2017 tweet currently pinned to her Twitter @missannabiller and an informative post on her blog her next project is a woman-in-peril movie based on the concept of the fairy tale Bluebeard and set in Hollywood’s Golden Era, but she had us at The Love Witch. Sure, the information is three years old, but there’s a nine-year buildup from Viva to The Love Witch.
Finis for now.