When you really sit down (or, heck, stand up) and think about it, no two horror subgenres are a more natural match for “cross-breeding” purposes than Sasquatch stories and “found footage” flicks. The 1970s were absolutely rife with low-budget “In Search Of Bigfoot”-type documentaries, so it’s something of a wonder that once the “shaky – cam” craze took hold in earnest in the wake of the enormous critical and commercial success of The Blair Witch Project that it took several years before intrepid (and, perhaps crucially, broke) indie filmmakers chose to chronicle the exploits of “mockumentary” crews out for a weekend of ‘squatching. As a matter of fact, I foolishly believed that Bobcat Goldthwait’s admittedly-quite-good Willow Creek was the first of its ilk, but I’ve recently discovered that my assumption was — contain your surprise, please! — wrong and that he was beaten to the punch a year earlier by…

As a long-time fan of Blade Runner-esque dystopian sci-fi, the premise behind writer/artist/letterer/colorist Raffaele Ienco’s new Top Cow/Image series Mechanism sounded right up my alley — sometime in the not-too-terribly-distant future, a reptilian race of flesh-eaters referred to by the besieged populace of Earth as “Geckos” have descended upon us from above with a view toward turning the planet into their personal larder, and in response such humans as still remain have constructed a shit-ton of militarized robots to fight off the marauding lizard-men. Results have been decidedly mixed, however, and now a new “leaner, meaner” — and hopefully smarter — prototype has been sent into the field well before it’s probably ready, and it’s up to a pair of cops who well and truly don’t seem to like each other very much to show their new mechanical “pal” the ropes while it just sits (or stands) there, quietly…

As recent reviews on this very site have shown, finding a hidden gem among the low-budget “found footage” horror offerings on Hulu can indeed be exhausting work — but the good news is that sometimes it pays off. For awhile, at any rate. Which isn’t to say that the film under our metaphorical microscope this evening, 2014’s Chasing The Devil (which I’m given to understand is soon to see release on DVD — though not on Blu-ray, go figure), is in any way a masterpiece or anything, but it does manage to stand out more than a bit among its competitors, and after several evenings of cinematic near-torture, I think my mental faculties have been whittled down to the point where that is, perhaps sadly, good enough for me.

Our particulars for this one go as follows : actor Patrick McCord (played by Tim Phillipps) isn’t buying that his sister…

Under normal circumstances, a “found-footage” horror flick made by an amateur writer/director with an unprofessional cast for $6,000 (drummed up by means of a Kickstarter campaign, no less) in rural Ohio is something that I’m gonna root for. Tell me that it was shot in 2014 and still hasn’t even managed to find its way onto even DVD, much less Blu-ray, and I’ll be doubly interested. But at the end of the day, some films remain undiscovered for good reason, and Anthony Daniel’s Spirit In The Woods — which is now streaming free on Hulu and for a few bucks on Amazon — is definitely one such effort.

At its core, what we have here is a barer-than-bare bones Blair Witch Project rip-off that seems to think that if you just strip-mine that premise off all suspense, intrigue, characterization, and cleverness, you’ll somehow come out with something watchable at the…

Having had some pretty good luck with European low-budget “found-footage” horror recently thanks to the rather splendid German indie effort Die Prasenz (or The Presence, if you prefer), I decided to give 2015 UK import The Cutting Room a go when I saw it available for streaming on Hulu (it’s also available on Blu-ray and DVD depending on where you live) just to see if there might be a trend brewing across the pond when it comes to breathing new life into this much-maligned genre. A spot of quick reading beforehand revealed that writer/director Warren Dudley got this thing in the can for the paltry sum of 12,ooo pounds, further piquing my interest, and reviews, while far from great on the whole, seemed to at least be mixed enough to offer some hope. Odds are I wouldn’t be walking into a classic here by any means, but what the…

The whole goddamn “drug war” is such a clusterfuck of bad ideas that it’s a wonder the premise in Justin Jordan and Raul Trevino’s new four-part Boom! Studios series — that of a frustrated DEA agent “going native” and crossing the border into Mexico to take the fight to the cartels using the same brutal methods that they themselves are infamous for — hasn’t played out in real life already. Or maybe it has and they’ve just managed to keep it out of the press?

It’s certainly been explored in fiction before, no question about that — Joseph Conrad’s timeless classic Heart Of Darkness did it first, and Francis Ford Coppola famously transposed that story into Vietnam for Apocalypse Now — so we can’t go so far as to give Jordan any particular points for originality here, but he adds an interesting new wrinkle into the proceedings by having the agent…

Trying to review the new Image Comics series Snotgirl is a bit tricky because, frankly, I’m not sure how much a reader like me is even supposed to like it, given that it’s clearly aimed at a younger — and decidedly more female — readership. All in all this is a good thing given that books aimed at a 30-and 40-something male readership are absolutely saturating the market, whereas titles squarely aimed at women in their 20s are depressingly few and far between —the problem with this book, though, is that it seems to be trying more than a little bit too hard to connect with its intended demographic and ends up feeling like it’s pandering, rather than speaking, to its hoped-for audience.

The creation of writer Bryan Lee O’Malley (of Scott Pilgrim fame) and artist/webcomics sensation Leslie Hung, Snotgirl follows the so-far-quite-dull exploits of one Lottie Person, an L.A…

On the one hand, it’s sort of easy to slag writer/director Mickey Keating’s 2015 indie horror offering Darling as a pretentious, overly-self-conscious, hopelessly derivative knock-off of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion with, sadly, no trace of Catherine Deneuve in sight. In fact, if we get right down to brass tacks here, it’s more than fair to say this film is, at its core, simply an uncredited remake of that earlier — and admittedly superior — work.

On the other hand, though, that’s giving pretty short shrift to what Keating actually has managed to accomplish here, which is to craft a visually stunning, intensely moody, deliriously provocative, and painfully believable tale of a young woman’s descent into madness that, while being far from original, is certainly harrowing and memorable enough in its own right.

Shot — as its predecessor was — entirely in black and white, Darling follows the downward spiral of its…

One thing I’m kind of digging about Hulu these days is that you can find a decent number of really low-budget, truly “indie” horror flicks on there (the rights to which were probably secured at sub-fire sale prices) that Netflix wouldn’t touch in a million years. Granted, most of these are every bit as amateurish as you’d expect, but that doesn’t always mean that they’re necessarily bad. Case in point : director Andy Palmer’s Colorado-lensed 2014 effort, Find Me.

This is obviously a get-some-friends-together-in-front-of-the-camera affair, given that co-stars Cameron Bender and Kathryn Lyn are credited as co-screenwriters along with Palmer himself, and as ghost stories go it’s nothing beyond the standard, plot-wise : newlyweds Tim (Bender) and Emily (Lyn) are starting a new life in the unnamed small town where Emily grew up. Tim’s landed a gig as a teacher at he local high school and Emily’s still…

So far, DC’s newly-launched revamps of classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon properties have ranged from fairly traditional takes (Future Quest) to radical re-imaginings (Scooby Apocalypse, Wacky Raceland) with not much in-between and, if I’m being brutally honest, fairly limited success. Scooby Apocalypse is an atrocious mess, Wacky Raceland is at least an interesting mess, and Future Quest — well, even a hardened cynic like yours truly has gotta admit that book is just plain cool. Into the breach next, then, comes writer Mark Russell and artist Steve Pugh’s updated version of The Flintstones, and if the first issue is any indication, it seems to be the first of these titles to stake out something of a “middle ground,” remaining fairly faithful to the core characters and concepts but updating them for a contemporary, and somewhat older, audience. Sure, there’s nothing in here to prevent 20-something, 30-something…