A thorough appraisal of the micro-budget horror offerings available for streaming on Amazon Prime would’t be complete if we didn’t check out at least one rip-off of The Exorcist (there are literally dozens to choose from), and so I rolled the dice on writer/director David Spaltro’s 2015 effort, Dark Exorcism (originally released under the title In The Dark, not sure when or why the name-change happened), which manages to stand out from the pack in that it features four female leads — but apart from that, I’ll give the game away right at the outset (never an advisable thing to do in the review game, I know, but what the fuck) and just state plainly that this is “been there, done that” stuff all the way.

If you’re still reading, then, here are the particulars : art student Bethany Mills (played by Grace Folsom) has recently survived a horrific…

Hey! Whatcha reading this week? I’ll tell you what stood out, for good ill, in my book pile —

R. Sikoryak breaks the mold and gets contemporary in The Unquotable Trump, done up in old-school “giant size special” format by Drawn + Quarterly, and man oh man is this a humdinger of unfortunate laughs. Real quotes from our shithead-in-chief transposed onto re-creations of classic comic book covers (ranging from Plop! to 300 to Watchmen to X-Men and everything in between) is one of those things that only seems like a “no-brainer” after someone’s already done it, and if that “someone” is Sikoryak, you know you’re in very good hands. I guess he originally did this as a 16-page b&w mini-comic, but 48 lush, gigantic, full-color pages is definitely a big step up and does the material justice. It’s all got a tinge of gallows humor to it right now…

Another quasi-autobiographical art school memoir — is this what the world really needs these days?

It certainly seems a reasonable enough question — after all, Clowes pretty much eviscerated every last narrative inch available to anyone looking to mine this vein, and in just a handful of pages no less, with his (pre-Hollywood) “Art School Confidential” strip about 20 years ago, didn’t he? Still,  in the ensuing decades, any number of cartoonists have figured that their pre-and post-graduate “salad days” were worth telling us about, to the point where one could be forgiven for thinking there’s just nothing new to be gained from one more guy or gal going down this road. And yet —

Joseph Remnant started serializing the work that would eventually become his first “solo” graphic novel, Cartoon Clouds, something like seven or eight years ago. He was slapping it up page-by-page online first, and then…

At this point, you have to wonder where and when this whole “ghost hunting” thing will end.

“Reality” TV is full of this kind of crap, of course, as is the “micro-budget” horror scene, and on a purely practical level it certainly makes sense : you don’t need much money, after all, to make a film where amateur acting, equally amateur cinematography (usually of the “shaky-cam” variety), and “hinted at but not really seen” effects work are built right into the story itself. In short, where unprofessionalism is not only countenanced, but expected. With all that in mind, then, it would probably be terribly naive to expect this burgeoning sub-genre of “found footage” horror (a sub-genre in and of itself) to go away anytime soon — but goddamn, sometimes I wish it would.

Case in point : 2015’s Ghostfinders, a zero-budget effort that comes our way courtesy…

Hard is it may be to believe in this day and age, there once was a time when the tag-line “Based On A True Story” was used to sell a film. It was a simpler and more naive era, I suppose — but as the years progressed, most audiences wised up to the fact that even these purportedly “true” stories were heavily fictionalized, if not outright fabrications, and so movie-makers started giving themselves a little bit of breathing room (not to mention legal protection) by claiming that their productions were merely “inspired by true stories” or, to push the degrees of separation out a bit even further, “inspired by true events.” These days, though, who are we kidding? Even these tepid labels impress precisely no one — but apparently Connecticut-based producer/director/actor BuAli Shah didn’t get the message, because he was still trying to gin up interest in his 2014 straight-to-streaming…

Plenty to look at this week, so let’s dive right in —

Berserker #1 is a recent sci-fi anthology from Breakdown Press in the UK that seems to be aiming to combine the sensibilities of 2000 A.D. with those of American “alternative comix.” Edited by Tom Oldham and Jamie Sutcliffe, it’s an impressive 64-page volume with a high-gloss cover that’s printed on heavy paper stock and is roughly evenly split between comics and text pieces. On the comics front, far and away the strongest strip is Anya Davidson’s “The Night Timers In : No Rest For The Wicked,” the first installment of a topical and dynamic long-form series that successfully splits its attention between genre action and “real-world” social and economic concerns, while Jon Chandler (with colorist Sarah-Louise Barbett) contributes an interesting “virtual reality” conversation strip that comes up a bit short in terms of its execution in “Sword Of…

When Shelly Bond was let go by DC as head honcho of their Vertigo label, it marked the end of an era — the last member of that venerable imprint’s original crew had left the building, and its future was suddenly looking very uncertain indeed.

Truth be told, it still is — Jamie S. Rich took the reins for a time, and now they’ve been passed on to, if memory serves me correctly, Mark Doyle and Andy Khoury, so we’ll just have to see what happens there. Bond, though, for her part, landed on her feet pretty quickly — IDW offered her a line of her very own to oversee, and after a year (-ish) of planning and preparation, Black Crown is finally here. But for those either hoping or worried that a simple Vertigo redux was what we were in store for here, it’s time to get stressed or…

And so, we’ve come to the end of the line for what I assume to be the first iPhone-shot trilogy in movie history. Goodbye, Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. Goodbye, house on Steelmanville Road. Goodbye, Nigel Bach.

Although probably not for long on that last one : Bach’s clearly caught the filmmaking bug, and given that he got all three of his zero-budgeters onto Amazon Prime’s streaming service, there’s literally no reason for him not to keep on keeping on. What he’ll do next is anyone’s guess, but I feel safe in making at least one educated guess — it won’t have much (if any) budget.

Which is no bad thing, mind you, as long as the end result is worth watching. The original Bad Ben certainly was. Steelmanville Road : A Bad Ben Prequel just as certainly wasn’t. And Badder Ben : The Final Chapter ends things on a…

To quote this film’s own tagline : “What Happens When Four Crazy Men Kidnap One Crazy Girl?” And to take it one step further : “What Happens When You Only Have $10,000 To Tell The Story?”

You know we love ’em cheap and homemade around these parts, and it doesn’t come much cheaper or much more homemade than director/co-producer/co-writer James D. Froio’s early- 2017 effort, The Girl With No Name, a quickie out of Syracuse, New York, that has a pretty cool premise and has fun turning the tables on various “redneck horror” tropes. We’re all used to inbred country bumpkins kidnapping and torturing nubile young damsels in “Z-Grade” productions, sure, but this time out when Papa Lester (played with sneering OTT relish by G. Van Mills) and his boys Lloyd (Brandon Ferraro), Troy (Brandin Fennessy), and Markus (Issaiah Vergara) set their moonshine-blurred sights on an unnamed (but I…

Once again into the breach, as we take a look at various items that caught my interest from the past week, whether at my LCS or in my mailboxes, physical and electronic —

Baking With Kafka is Tom Gauld’s latest collection from Drawn + Quarterly, and I’m sorry to say that the shtick is wearing a bit thin. I gather that Gauld is viewed as something of a national treasure in the UK, and that’s all fine and dandy, but $19.99 for a collection of strips that have all been published elsewhere (most notably The New Yorker and The Guardian) is a bit much, unless said strips pack in quite a few laughs — and I’m sorry to say these don’t. I really rather enjoy Gauld’s minimalist style, but it works better for me in leisurely, longer-form narratives like Mooncop. Here he “reaches” for too many punchlines (most…