NIHIL NOCTEM'S FOR A GOOD TIME CALL..."REVENGE IS ONLY THE BEGINNING"

Director Izzy Lee, who made the great INNSMOUTH, which is streaming on Shudder now (read my review HERE), A FAVOR, POSTPARTUM, and PICKET just got her first Official Selection for the Chattanooga Film Fest for her short FOR A GOOD TIME CALL... which stars Diana Porter (INNSMOUTH) and Tristan Risk (INNSMOUTH, AMERICAN MARY). Like all her work, it's a challenging, creepy, and punk-as-fuck piece of transgressive cinema.





The film starts with an asshole (played with considerable sleaze by Sean Carmichael) hiding a camera in his room before having sex with a woman (Porter). He then leaks the video to the internet and the woman is shattered. He plays dumb, of course, has no idea how the video got on the web, naturally! And he's really broken up by how upset this woman has gotten-so upset, in fact, that he doesn't hesitate to follow another woman into a public toilet at a rest stop.

"I hope something very bad happens to you,"Porter's character had said before the next woman appears.

And then things get...dark.

All I'm going to tell you is that Tristan Risk is scary here. The make up FX is superb and the story, as a short film, combines technology with urban legend come-to-life. It calls to mind one of the morality stories from TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, but with a far more pronounced since of the fucked up. I love it.

Any and all accolades Lee receive are earned and deserved. She absolutely kicks ass as a director and writer. On the heels of the Chattanooga Film Fest announcement came the news that INNSMOUTH also got an Official Selection nod from Mad Monster Party in Charleston SC.

To see the teaser follow the link HERE to view it on Vimeo and you can follow Lee on Twitter @NihilNoctem. 

AMERICAN MARY Spoiler Free Review

 Jen and Sylvia Soska's second feature American Mary lives up to the hype that's been building over the last several months. Let me just get that out of the way right now. Before beginning this review, I was doing a little internetting and noticed that Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB had American Mary getting roughly a 60% rating on both sites. This gave me pause. I needed to find out exactly why this, one of the better films I've seen in a while, wasn't scoring higher.
Rotten Tomatoes seemed to think the acting was uneven and the climax a let down.

Well allow me to retort.  Katherine Isabelle (Mary Mason) and Tristan Risk (Beatress Johnson) are absolutely magnetic and surprising throughout the film. Isabelle carries the movie with a deftness you'd expect from a seasoned actress, giving an emotional gravity to her scenes that help keep the more outlandish moments focused and real. The supporting cast is constantly confounding your expectations as they evolve throughout the film, practically no one is who you expect them to be. And in the midst of the sex and blood, we look into the misunderstood/marginalized world of

body modification and find humanity where we would normally see a freak show.
American Mary is about class and gender struggle and about how the only true freedom is forging your own path, creating your own you, and defying the world's expectations as often as possible.
The only criticism I want to offer is that I wish there was MORE. Mary Mason's story was exciting and The Twisted Twins introduced many great characters that I'd loved to have seen more of. The only way the climax was a let down is that it came too soon.