The name Richard Mansfield is not, I would assume, one known to very many, but I’d been hearing a little bit here and there over the past few years about this UK-based “micro-budget” writer/director and his production outfit, Mansfield Dark Productions, from fellow aficionados of cash-strapped filmmaking,  so when I noticed that a number of his flicks were available for streaming on Amazon Prime, I thought I’d give at least one of ’em a go and see what the less-than-buzz was all about. As it turns out, I ended up watching two, but we’ll get to the other one in our next review. First up : 2014’s The Mothman Curse.

Looking every bit like the one-thousand-pound (reportedly) production it is, this “supernatural thriller” certainly bases its entire shtick on the tropes one is used to from the “found footage” sub-genre, but can’t be fairly said to fit into said…

Odds are pretty good that the 50%- or- so of my regular readers (not that there’s anything “regular” about any of us, of course!) who speak fluent “comic book-ese” are well aware of the industry’s sorry ethical history, but for the other half who are blissfully unaware of how badly outfits like Marvel and DC have put the screws to the creative geniuses who dreamed up their billion-dollar properties, the reality can be shocking : Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster selling away the rights to Superman in perpetuity for the princely sum of $130 just before they were shipped off to war because they wanted to provide a little something for their families in case they didn’t come back home; Jack Kirby’s struggles just to get back the thousands of pages of original art he drew of the hundreds of characters he invented and his family’s subsequent legal battles after…

If there’s a tough character to write in comics, it’s Black Bolt. The king — or, at least as of this writing, former king — of the Inhumans is, of course, famously silent, not because he’s mute, but because the mere sound of his voice is powerful enough to level cities. It was a great gimmick when Jack Kirby came up with it way back when, but it’s been a tricky conceit for subsequent creators to build upon. Paul Jenkins gave it a pretty good effort in his fine Marvel Knights Inhumans series done in collaboration with artist Jae Lee, but since then, no one’s really seemed to know what to do with this guy.

Apart from Marvel’s “suits,” of course, who had Black Bolt set off the so-called “Gene Bomb” a few years back that’s been utilized as the company’s preferred method for writing Mutants out of their corporate…

Let me know if this sounds more than just a bit familiar —

On May 24th, 2016, an unsolicited package arrived at the purported “offices” of a purported “production company” in New Delhi, India, called WPoV Films. The package contained a hard disc — as opposed to a flash drive — that featured disjointed and frankly mangled footage shot by an amateur filmmaker named Dhruv Vidur who, along with friends Sagar Joneja and Deepanshu Singh, headed out to a semi-remote wilderness area known variously as Faridabad and/or Bheem Bharsa in order to ascertain the truth behind stories that Dhruv’s father, Bhushan, had related to him since he was a boy about a (probably) mythical beast that haunts and terrorizes the region. The trio promptly disappeared and haven’t been seen, or heard from, since.

Yes, friends, no-budget horror filmmakers the world over are going the “found footage” route in order to…

Right off the bat, let me just make clear that writer/director Daniel Ray’s 2014 ultra-low-budget “mockumentary”-style indie horror Heidi isn’t about a little pig-tailed girl living in the Swiss Alps. As a matter of fact, it was filmed (in 2014, although it’s only somewhat recently been added to Amazon Prime’s streaming queue — it’s also apparently available on DVD) in Las Vegas (well away from The Strip or Fremont Street, mind you), and our titular Heidi is a creepy fucking doll.

Hell, I’d even go so far as to say she’s damn creepy, and while Annabelle, Chucky, and others hit the scene years — even decades — before Heidi did, she can proudly take her place in the “haunted doll” pantheon right beside them. In other words, dear reader, this flick is actually surprisingly good.

Here’s the rundown : semi-annoying high school kids Ryan (played by Samuel Brian) and Jack…

Well, that didn’t take long : mere months after the release of the most “solo” film effort you’re ever gonna see in your life, Bad Ben —in which no-budget auteur Nigel Bach served as screenwriter, director, producer, cinematographer, and the flick’s only actor (hell, he even filmed it in his own home!) — we’re back in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, to learn about the unlucky people who owned Bach’s spread before he did. I hope I’m not “spoiling” anything when I reveal that their attempted home-making experience was not a pleasant one.

But what about your viewing experience? Well, Steelmanville Road : A Bad Ben Prequel suffers from the same inherent weakness that all “stories before the stories” do, namely that you you’re already pretty well clued in as to how things are gonna end, but I could probably live with that if it were the only thing wrong with…

Once upon a time, the “single-creator anthology” was an actual going concern in comics, and let me tell you, those were some very good days indeed. Cartoonists like Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, Chris Ware, and others had books they could call their own, where anything and everything went : long-form stories that ran for several issues ran alongside shorter “one-off” strips of varying lengths, the subject matter was eclectic and well and truly ran the gamut — these folks were just going wherever their individual muses took them, and their publishers had faith in them to come up with good stuff, which they invariably did.

In these beleaguered times, however, you don’t see publications of that sort on your LCS shelves too often. So thank goodness for Eric Kostiuk Williams.

I admit, his is not a name with which I was previously familiar (although apparently he self-published a…

As far as horror movie locales go, they don’t come much more haunted than New Orleans, so the fact that the city (or, at the very least, its surrounding environs) hasn’t featured more prominently in zero-budget, direct-to-streaming indie horror efforts is somewhat surprising, when you think about it. Fear not, though, for here in the (still somewhat) early days of 2017, a cash-strapped would-be auteur named Armand Petri is out to fill that void with his recently-added-to-Amazon-Prime-and-Vimeo number, Bayou Ghost Story, which latches onto the suddenly-surging “real”movie/hand-held “mockumentary” mix format in order to tell a — well, shit, the title gives it away, doesn’t it?

A quick word of warning before we go any further : if self-appointed “paranormal investigators” reflexively work your nerves, this is a flick best avoided because it’s positively crawling with them. We’ve got grad student (at Miskatonic University, no less!)/documentarian Hassan (played by Petri…

Maybe I’m just a crusty old-timer who yearns for days gone by, but goddamnit — I miss having comics on the store shelves that were sick and wrong.

Oh, sure, plenty of series have moments here and there designed to shock — Saga is certainly famous for it, although such instances been fewer and farther between lately — but books with a genuinely twisted and perverted core premise are in painfully short supply, and have been for some time. Thank goodness (or, more likely, its polar opposite) then for a couple of upstanding gentlemen I admit to never having heard of before named Doug Wagner and Daniel Hillyard.

Granted, the first issue of their new Image Comics five-parter, Plastic (which comes our way under the auspices of the suddenly-surging 12-Gauge Comics studio/imprint) isn’t going to make you suddenly forget all about the work of gleeful reprobates like S. Clay…

Even among connoisseurs of “this sort of thing,” director Donald M. (not to be confused with Donald S. of The Forest and Schoolgirls In Chains fame) Jones’ low-rent straight-to-video slasher Muderlust has something of a checkered reputation for being nastier than the norm. Shot in California in 1985 for next to nothing, it was released straight to VHS in 1987 and quickly managed to raise a few eyebrows — among the few who were paying attention — for its downright gleeful misogyny, which reminded one youthful viewer (okay, me) of, say, what you’d end up with if Maniac didn’t take itself very seriously. But does that make this film less disturbing than others of its ilk — or more?

I gotta admit, having recently watched it for the first time since I was a teenager thanks to its recent addition to Amazon Prime’s streaming line-up (although Severin Films’ “cult”…