Dir - A.D. Calvo
Overall: MEH
With Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl, Argentine-born filmmaker A.D. Calvo has crafted a muted throwback of sorts, a film that hearkens to a bygone era of the more low-key regional exploitation films from decades past, especially the ones that were largely set in antiquated Victorian houses with a small crop of characters. Several contemporary indie genre movies have also gone this route, (think Oz Perkins' I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Ti West's The Inkeepers and The House of the Devil, H.P. Mendoza's I Am a Ghost, or to a lesser extent, Rose Glass' Saint Maude), and it is a harmless tactic that bypasses hackneyed jump scares and the like. Instead and as the title would suggest, we have a somber character study about a, well, lonely young woman whose social anxieties leave her feeling left out while she cares for her agoraphobic, sickly, and curmudgeon aunt while falling for someone who takes a liking to her and represents all of the go-getter personality traits that she herself lacks. The narrative hooks have all been utilized before, and the film is anti-wheel-inventing by design, but it has a sincere approach that occasionally makes its recognizable shout-outs enduring. Unfortunately though, it fails to flesh-out Erin Wilhelmi's troubled protagonist, and worse yet, it drops a psychological and/or supernatural twist finale out of the blue, one that feels unearned and sloppy.
Dir - Steven DeGennaro
Overall:WOOF
The full-length debut from indie filmmaker Steven DeGennaro, Found Footage 3D is a problematic meta commentary on horror movies which does the same things that it makes fun of doing. Deliberately Scream-adjacent, its gimmick and sub-genre are referenced solely in the title, and the characters therein consistently discuss the major drawbacks of found footage and horror films in general. It is a cluster-fuck by design, being a movie-within-a-movie-within-another-movie, struggling with itself to be original while failing spectacularly. This is a conundrum to be sure, since its main antagonist is a roaring alpha douchebag writer/director/star who cartoonishly personifies a type of narcissistic hack that defends every cheap gag which he gets excited about, regularly proclaiming that the audience members are stupid and everyone should stop "overthinking" everything. Yet the product that DeGennaro himself has produced insults the viewer in the exact manner that his main villain does, and that his on-screen crew fights him against. So characters acting like morons, the camera rolling and being pointed at things for no rhyme or reason, horrendous CGI ghosts and monster faces, jump scares, psyche-outs; it is all fair game since its OK folks, the filmmakers behind the filmmakers are in on the joke. Maybe some viewers will be too, but for the rest of us, we do not need a hundred-minute reminder of how idiotic these movies are.
Dir - Nacho Vigalondo
Overall: GOOD
Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo does a wacky thing with Colossal; a kaiju movie that behaves like no other kaiju movie has ever behaved. That is because it is as much a low-key indie drama as anything, one with a comedic tone up until a point that just so happens to throw into the mix a giant robot and reptilian monster battling it out in South Korea's largest city Seoul. The science, (or lack there of), behind the premise is not important, but somehow Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis are the culprits of such kaiju tomfoolery, and Vigalondo is exclusively interested in delving into their dysfunctional dynamic. Hathaway is a likeable drunk who has made a mess of her adulthood, and Sudeikis is a manipulative grown-up bully who runs a bar, but the extent of the latter's pathetic and deplorable nature only becomes crystalized as things progress. Much of the movie's charm is how singular its genre melding is, and Vigalondo makes it a point to utilize Hathaway and Sudeikis' inherent comedic chops to keep the viewer amused. Never does he stop and chuckle at the absurdity of the premise though, treating it matter-of-factly in order to emphasize just how much baggage these people have to work with. The fact that it gets unloaded halfway across the world in a disaster film scenario nearly becomes an afterthought if not for Hathaway's heart of gold nature remaining steadfast. While some of the implausibility carries over into the character's behavior, (Sudeikis is too unsympathetic to buy into at times), it is delightfully unique and well-crafted.
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