Author: Joel Fisher

Diana (Illenia Pastorelli) is a prostitute with a long list of clients. She’s very good at what she does and she takes no nonsense from anybody who wants more than she offers. However, one night as she turns down a man’s advances, he gets especially angry and chases Diana in her car and she gets into an accident. Waking up in hospital she is told that she’s blind due to brain damage and will have to get used to her new life.

In the car that she hit were a family and the only survivor was a little boy called Chin (Andrea Zhang), Diana wants to get in touch and say how sorry she feels. However, when she meets him, she can’t bring herself to tell him what happened and feeling guilty she takes Chin in to look after him.

Then one day the police come over as they believe that she is keeping the child in hiding, but Diana soon realises that her life may still be in danger.

Dark Glasses is a horror movie coming to Shudder directed by the visionary Dario Argento. However, much like the protagonist it seems that Argento’s vision has left him a long time ago. Once considered to be the father of horror, Argento is now churning out horror movies and once in a while they get picked up purely because of his name.

It seems that Argento is also running out of ideas because Dark Glasses is based on a script that was canned twenty years ago. However, even that long ago a movie such as this would have made Argento a laughing stock, degrading of a man whose name means so much to so many.

There is simply nothing original or engaging in Dark Glasses as every tired cliché gets done over and over again. Something which many fans of Argento’s would have resigned themselves to seeing long ago, but to still have no passion for an art that was his playground is a tragedy.

Save yourself the horror of watching a man’s work dry up and watch some of his more admired work instead.

Sarah (Lauren Crandall) and Brandon (Julian Green) are a couple looking to find the mysterious Florida bigfoot. However, among the rumours of what they locally call the Skunk Ape there’s also reports of a missing girl and so the pair are determined to uncover the truth one way or another. They talk to the locals and come across a couple of conspiracy theorists who are more interested in UFOs, but then they meet Dale (David E. McMahon).

Dale is your typical monster hunter, the kind that somebody might find in one of those fake documentaries about the mysteries of the bigfoot so Sarah and Brandon don’t take him too seriously at first. Although once they get to know him a little better, they start to realise that he either knows a lot about the bigfoot or more than he’s letting on about the little girl’s disappearance.

Then things go really bad for them.

The Wild Man is a horror with elements of comedy directed by Ryan Justice and written by Sean Michael Gloria and Ian Longen. Also being a found footage movie you may have to either be a fan of films such as The Blair Witch Project or hate examples of the genre such as 2016’s Blair Witch.

It certainly seems that the filmmakers fall onto the latter side as they seem to make fun of the genre and the certain characters that one may find within them. However, once the movie has been fully set up it takes a sharp turn into something more serious.

There lies the problem though, because after taking so long to give the audience the impression that the movie is going to be a comedy, after certain events the rest of the film is played deadly serious. This means that all that time where the audience may have been laughing at Tim or smiling at the knowingly preposterous set up, it feels like the tonal shift turns the movie into the very thing it’s parodying.

Which unfortunately makes it feel more unintentionally funny than intended. Despite the set up and the good performances, it seems that The Wild Man loses its nerve and ends up giving audiences what it thinks they want.

Lisa (Sian Altman) is about to get married. She’s gathered all her friends for a fairy tale weekend away at a mansion to prepare for the celebrations. However, something is lurking in the grounds and before they know it, a giant crocodile has set itself upon the wedding party as one by one the guests are picked off by the reptilian intruder.

Obviously, her day is ruined, but Lisa, her husband to be Charlie (George Nettleton) and their friend Dylan (Mark Haldor) are not letting the croc get away with devouring their loved ones. So, it’s time to put the proceedings in order.

Croc! or Croc Vengeance in some territories is a very low budget horror movie that seems to know what it is and offers little else. Shot in the English countryside, Croc! is an example of what can happen when an audience will just watch anything.

You know exactly what you’re getting into when you watch a movie like Croc! Although it seems that although the filmmakers seem to know its audience. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t still try and make something passable. It’s just a pity that they didn’t get there.

There are many questions that are raised by this British indie horror although the one that you may already know is why you are watching it in the first place. However, questions such as ‘where did the croc come from?’ ‘How is a badly rendered CGI crocodile able to sneak up on people so easily?’ and ‘Why did they buy Jason Mamoa from Wish?’ are never answered. Although that does seem to be part of the fun of watching a horror movie, even if it did have a higher budget and recognisable cast.

Croc is not reinventing the wheel and the audience knows it as well as the cast and crew. There are attempts at drama such as a vicar having a crisis of faith and an infidelity, but the audience knows that it’s all filler until the next kill.

Perhaps don’t buy Croc! at full price when it becomes available, or even when it drops to half price. Just be safe in the knowledge that one day you may find it on a bad horror channel and the British film industry is alive and well.

Ohio (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) and Virginia (Caitlen Mehner) have broken into a U.S. senator’s house and are armed. Heidi (Tara Westwood) and her husband David (Robert John Burke) live in a very nice place and since Heidi became a senator it feels that they may have lost touch with reality. However, now is their time to answer for what the senator has done to prevent gun violence in her country and she’s going to learn a valuable and rather brutal lesson.

That’s because Ohio and Virginia are there to make a statement and to ensure that the senator changes her ways when she so easily passes on changing the gun laws.

Triggered is a short film directed by Tara Westwood and written by Thomas Dunn which seems to come from a passionate and personal place about the state of gun control in America. Although never mentioned, the names of the intruders clearly represent those states and their characters are living embodiments of how they must feel about gun control considering the atrocities that have occurred.

The situation also plays out as something all too real but also something many people have seen in cinema for many years. Whilst this makes the story feel more palatable it may equally make it all the more unsettling.

However, regardless of the good intentions of the filmmakers and the clear message they want to send, Triggered feels like a harsh public information announcement rather than an engaging story.

Being done in any other way may have lessened the impact of its message, but audiences will soon pick up on the subtext and those who don’t will have been already indoctrinated in US gun culture. There never really is a right time to bring up the subject though, and the dramatic impact that the story has works as well today as it may have done shortly after the shooting in Columbine over twenty years ago.

After every shooting it may feel like America has come to a breaking point when it comes to restrictions or an outright ban on guns. However, Triggered reminds people that there may not be a limit to that break.

American politics plays out differently to any other politics in the world. With a two-party race you’re either on one side or the other and often entire states will be associated with either being red or blue. Kentucky is one of those states. With Republican politician Mitch McConnell being Kentucky’s senator since 1985 as well, it seems all but impossible to even think that somebody could try to topple the notorious Senate leader.

However, Charles Booker may be that man and the story of his campaign is a familiar one, but one that brings hope for the future.

From the Hood to The Holler is a documentary about Charles Booker and his attempt to bring a red state over to the blue and to speak for the people who don’t have an equal say in America. As he says himself, his family were poor and even his teachers thought that he wouldn’t amount to anything, so his determination is all that more powerful.

Also, it seems that Booker’s campaign either came at the worst or the best time for him because alongside a global pandemic came an uprising in the Black Lives Matter movement. Although Booker would never use either to tug on the emotions of his voters, it was surely a time where we were all trying to come together and solve a widespread problem.

Telling the story of Charles Booker’s rise in the political field could have either gone two ways. It could have been a biopic which talks about his personal life and his family and how he struggled against the odds all his life. It also could have been an inspirational story about the first black man to run for the senate in Kentucky.

From the Hood to The Holler keeps a balance between the two though, even if it’s hard to deny Booker’s place in political history – especially when he says himself that he doesn’t want to put on a pedestal in that way.

Whatever you see in Charles Booker’s story, it’s a tale of a man coming from nowhere and believing that he can make a difference and seeing it through. The politics may be portrayed far more dramatically than anywhere else in the world, but the impact feels just as important.