Dir - Christopher Smith
Overall: MEH
Too bleak and miserable to fully engage, Christopher Smith's Black Death struggles with some interesting ideas that do not get off the ground. Funded and filmed in Germany though set during the Bubonic Plague in Medieval England, two Game of Thrones actors are typecast with Sean Bean playing the righteous Christian soldier and Carice van Houten a beautiful, pagan witch. While it might be fun to see them essentially playing mere variations of their GOT characters, it takes away some of the would-be tension as we can rightfully guess van Houten's unwholesome intentions from the second that we lay eyes on her. To his credit though, Smith is not necessarily going for any mystery here as this is a dour experience first and foremost, not just in its brutal subject matter, but also in its visual appearance that is muddy, bloody, and color-muted to the point of may as well being in black and white. A story about how both Christians and non-believers suffer and deal with such a hopelessly, plague-ridden time, the sides are not properly balanced to give them any though-provoking weight. The Christians are the good guys, the pagans are evil, and any intended sub-text is left mute, which for better or worse, just leaves a violent and gloomy movie set in the Middle Ages.
Dir - Joshua Grannell
Overall: GOOD
A demented, full-length debut from drag performer Peaches Christ aka Joshua Grannell, All About Evil is a movie that revels in its low-budget, goofy sleaze in a way that the material exclusively deserves. Grannell's background as a midnight movie runner at San Francisco's Bridge Theatre informed both this and his earlier short Grindhouse which utilized the same premise of a crazed theater owner making their own snuff films for the eager masses. The tone is about as serious as a basement reenactment of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and it is something that celebrates fringe B-movie worship in an enduring way. Equipped with a razor-thin script, cheap production values, genre in-jokes, and a delightfully ridiculous performance from Natasha Lyonne, all of the pieces are appropriately in place to deliver the trash enthusiast chuckles. The only downside is that the film is nowhere near as clever as the best ones which it celebrates, since Grannell's overall writing/directing chops are slow on the draw. Several of the audience-winking gags are fun though and Lyonne's pretentious, wackadoo Mae West transformation is easily worth the price of admission alone.
Dir - Kōji Shiraishi
Overall: GOOD
If anything else, Kōji Shiraishi's Shirome, (White Eyes), deserves some ingenuity points for its absurd blending of J-pop musical and found footage horror. Once again hinging on a premise of a cursed location, it features Shiraishi playing himself as a documentarian that is tasked with making a television special where the Japanese idol group Momoiro Clover Z, (also playing themselves) is sent into an abandoned school to perform for a supposed supernatural entity that is less than friendly. The concept is so ridiculous that one has to assume that it was intended for at least some laughs. What is both interesting and clashing is that the tone is straight-faced and Shiraishi does in fact, (against all conceivably odds), create a significant amount of skin-crawling dread during the final act. Endless questions are raised as to why in the hell any network television program would not only come up with something so nutty in the first place, but also why they would submit six high school girls, (with none of their parents anywhere to be found), to something so traumatizing. It just plays more into the tongue-in-cheek gag of it all though and while it is far too perplexing in conceit to be regarded as a conventional masterpiece, it is plenty creepy and should still be seen to be believed.
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