Dir - Ben Blaine/Chris Blaine
Overall: MEH
Partially Kickstarted, writer/director/editor brothers Ben and Chris Blaine's Nina Forever is more interesting in premise than it is in having any kind of coherent payoff. The film tackles the concept of moving on from grief and a previous relationship and the hangups that come from such a thing for both parties. It essentially goes literal in how sometimes old lovers simply will not stay gone. What it all ends up meaning to the characters involved is left frustratingly incomplete though. It is very difficult to grasp what it is we are exactly supposed to get out of Nina Forever, even naturally taking into account that different audiences will theorize different things. Though some could argue that the movie's ambiguity makes the film more intellectual, it does come off a little too underwritten and the characters are perhaps too eccentric to really relate to. If that is even the point. The comedic moments work less than they should and the film is really at its best when exploring the grieving process of the title character's parents compared to the main arc. It is an impressive effort though and one that could easily prove more rewarding on future viewings.
Dir - Jason Lei Howden
Overall: WOOF
One can at least recognize visual effects artist-turned director Jason Lei Howden's Deathgasm as being deserving of a particular audience who likes their horror really, really moronic. Equal parts Teenage Metalhead Cliches - The Movie and self-aware, slapstick gorefest, Deathgasm revels in its stupidity, poking fun at itself while pummeling you with bodily fluid jokes, gallons of blood, and more dull horror/teenage comedy tropes than you can wave a dildo at. Equipped with one of the dumbest scripts ever written, the movie's attempts at being funny and clever are so juvenile and generic that it is more obnoxiously eyebrow-rolling than entertaining. The movie is insulting beyond your standard, cynical nitpicking though. A big, loud, gross splatter-ride like this is deliberately one-note, but Deathgasm is just too goddamn imbecilic to get into. Again, the whole "metal + horror = badass" scenario is incredibly irksome and when characters describe their love of metal as being because nobody likes them in school and they fantasize about being Manowar clad barbarians who can moisten women with their ax- slinging abilities, you can only shudder at the laziness of it all.
Dir - S. Craig Zahler
Overall: GREAT
A quite excellent debut from director/novelist S. Craig Zahler, (who works from his own script), Bone Tomahawk is a brutal, near-perfect realist Western. There are a slew of recognizable faces, (Kurt Russell, Matthew Fox, Patrick Wilson, David Arquette, Sig Haig, and even Sean Young and James Tolkan in cameos), and the performances are rather superb. Russell and Fox particularly are fantastic and they are helped immeasurably by Zahler's incredibly good, naturalistic dialog. Every character in the film behaves especially rational and in a lesser filmmaker's hands, it almost would have came off as comedic how logical and polite everyone routinely is. There are elements of comedy to be sure and that is really the only area where Tomahawk falters a bit. Some of the jokes seem very out of place considering the incredibly dire and hopeless, (let alone highly disturbing), situations these people are in. To give Zahler credit, perhaps playing every frame of the movie in the utmost seriousness would have made for too depressing of an ordeal, but everything else is so expertly done that this is a small complaint if anything. It barely registers as a horror movie nor does it need to and even some of its more cliche "scary" sound design gets an explanation from the script, yet another thing Zahler displays the expertise for caring about.
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