Dir - Bobby Roe
Overall: MEH
To enjoy a found footage film like The Houses October Built, (as is the case with many found footage offerings), one has to suspend disbelief to a breaking point. This is not to say that director Bobby Roe's independent debut here is not without its merit; it is just that the problems are the ones that such movies with problems usually face. It begins typically enough with a text introduction as well as a disturbing scene that then follows with a "Six days earlier" tag that lets us catch up. So right away, the issue of who is editing this footage together, where some of it even came from, and why it is presented in such an entertaining fashion becomes an unstoppable elephant in the room. Outside of that, the characters themselves are given a reason to go as far as they do down their ultimately disastrous trek, but again, plausibility suffers as their behavior seems so idiotic as to routinely break the spell. This is a shame really as the actually tension building is expertly handled by Roe and his cast. The things that are meant to be terrifying certainly are, but the hackneyed presentation, stupid Halloween masks, and awful, awful industrial metal music mostly ruins the experience.
Dir - Takashi Miike
Overall: GOOD
Drenched in intensely low-key, otherworldly atmosphere, Takashi Miike's Over Your Dead Body, (Kuime), emphasizes one of the many stylistic motifs that the prolific filmmaker toys with. A "life imitating art", story-within-a-story adaptation of 1825's benchmark Japanese ghost tale "Yotsuya Kaidan", the melding between two supernaturally overtaken worlds is purposely obscured with an almost unbearably slow-boil approach that will surely prove detrimentally excessive for movie-goers who possess a minimal amount of patience. Bouncing between the contemporary setting and the elaborately detailed stage production rehearsals of the aforementioned part-source material, Miike utilizes the same comatose pacing and unnatural mood in both. Until the most harrowing of circumstances occurs, the character's primarily behave in a cold, emotionally ambiguous fashion that keeps the tone in check, plus the sound design combines extremely long periods of no incidental music whatsoever with a traditionally eerie score interjecting during the period piece throwbacks. Being a Miike movie, fan's of the director's penchant for unpleasant, extreme visuals will not be disappointed, that is so long as they can endure the deliberately unhurried presentation.
Dir - Hunter Adams
Overall: GOOD
A strong debut from independent director/co-writer Hunter Adams, Dig Two Graves is an evocative and sincere Midwestern revenge story that weaves its supernatural components in a befitting way for the material. Chosen as part of the Independent Filmmaker Project's Emerging Narrative Program's twenty scrips in 2013, it went into production in Southern Illinois which offers up an appropriately rustic locale for both its 1940s and 1970s time periods. Both Ted Levine and Troy Ruptash deliver the most effective performances, one as a benevolent, weathered, marble-mouthed Sheriff with a regretful past and the other a fully grown gypsy kid with a vengeful agenda. Relative newcomer Samantha Isler is strong as well, giving her young grief-stricken protagonist a sense of survivor's remorse that makes it believable that the unwholesome, mystical temptation that is thrown her way would hold sway. The story's themes are delivered without any overbearing sentimentality and the few examples of dark magic that we are show could have easily come off as silly in a more genre-pandering fashion than is allowed here. Last of all, the cinematography from Eric Maddison is naturalist and lovely, even with its derivative, de-saturated color pallet in tow.
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