The iPhone is an amazing device. You can use it to take high-quality photos and send them to all of your friends instantly, to listen to music of your choosing for hours on end, to watch entire seasons of your favorite TV shows while you’re running errands around town, to call in sick from work, and other noble pursuits. Yesiree, this one little gadget can do it all, and once you’ve got one, it becomes almost impossible to imagine life without it.

Or so I’m told. Believe it or not, for a guy who contributes to any number of websites (okay, five or six) and maintains his own blog, I’m actually a bit of a technophobe and neither own nor particularly want one of Apple’s little pocket-sized miracles. But when I learned that one of my favorite films of 2015, Sean Baker’s beyond-magnificent Tangerine, was shot entirely by means…

I’ll say this much — Marvel Studios’ latest mega-blockbuster, Doctor Strange, certainly is an amazing feast for the eyes. From the amazing opening fight sequence to the trippy other-dimensional mystical mindscapes peppered throughout the film, director Scott Derrickson (who also co-wrote the script along with John Spaihts and the erudite-sounding C. Robert Cargill) pulls out all the stops to “wow” you and succeeds in his goal admirably. In fact, if there’s ever been a flick that you need to see in 3-DD, Imax, and all that shit, it’s this one.

Here’s the rub, though : if you’ve seen all, some, or even just one of Marvel’s other cinematic products, then you really don’t “need” to see this thing at all.

By all rights, of course, this movie (which only came out two weeks ago, but I’m slapping my “Late To The Party” header on it anyway since most people…

They say that practice makes perfect, and you know what? In the case of micro-budget auteur Israel Luna, that’s absolutely true — his 2011 effort The Ouija Expriement was a sorry piece of shit, and his 2015 follow-up, The Ouija Resurrection : Ouija Experiment 2  is a perfectly sorry piece of shit.

True, our writer/director obviously has a bit more money to play around with here (most of which is squandered on embarrassingly lame CGI) but this film — also known as either  The Ouija Experiment 2 : Theatre Of Death or, simply, The Ouija Resurrection — ups the ante in the terribleness department by actually having the gall to think it’s clever rather than simply stupid.

Evidently Luna has convinced himself that his first flick has somehow attained “cult classic” status — which, I assure you, it hasn’t — because the premise here in round two is that…

In recent weeks, Ouija : Origin Of Evil has meet with a surprisingly positive critical and commercial reception, but you know how we do things here at TFG : why review the “real thing” when low-budget alternatives are available? To that end, I plunked myself down in front of Netflix the other night and watched writer/director Israel Luna’s 2011 “found footage” horror The Ouija Experiment, as well as its sequel (which we’ll get to in our next write-up), just to say I did my part to support the current Ouija craze without putting a dime in Hollywood’s pocket. As it turns out, though, I shouldn’t have wasted my time.

Cranked out for the paltry sum of $1,200, Luna’s flick is the sort of thing I probably should have enjoyed just to maintain my reputation as a connoisseur of zero-budget filmmaking, but try as I might — and believe me…

You can do a lot with $30,000. You can buy a pretty nice car. You can make a sizable down payment on a pretty big house. You can take one hell of a nice vacation to just about anywhere. Or, if you’re California-based indie filmmaker Gualtiero Negrini, you can head out to the Lucerne Valley and crank out a moody, almost dreamlike little horror flick.

Obviously, our guy Gualtiero chose the latter option of the bunch, and the end result is Fairlane Road, which was filmed earlier this very year (that’s 2016, in case you’re reading this in what will become the future) and recently found its way onto Netflix’s list of horror selections (no word as of yet about a Blu-ray or DVD release). Most of this straight-to-streaming stuff is pretty well crap — if you’re a regular reader of this site you’ve seen me bitch about enough…

Last week, I cranked out a little column called “Five Comics To Help You Survive The Age Of Trump” that got a fairly healthy number of hits and re-tweets and all that shit — for which I’m grateful, rest assured — but while that piece focused entirely on currently-running series, the perhaps-unbelievable truth is that comics’ ultimate response to the “Trump Age” actually came out way back in 1971.

If there’s one creator who could predict the future with uncanny accuracy it was, of course, Jack Kirby — and he frequently did just that. Kirby was — and remains — comics’ pre-eminent visionary, but one could actually make a strong argument that the fruits of his boundless imaginative prowess constitute the single-greatest body of work produced by any artist in any medium in the last century. Every great creative genius has a greatest work of his or her own, though, and…

I don’t get it. There are literally thousands of aspiring horror filmmakers out there just looking to get noticed. They bust their asses for days, weeks, months, even years. They populate their crews and casts with friends, relatives, or other low-to-no-price talent searching for a usually-elusive big break themselves. They pour everything they’ve got and then some into getting their flicks made, hustling up whatever cash they can via crowdfunding, loans, you name it. They work two or three jobs to finance their ventures themselves to whatever extent they can and film at nights, on weekends, or whenever they have a couple of hours to spare. And if and when their movies get completed, then they have to double down and work even harder just to get anyone to see them. They hit you up on twitter. They email you. They start facebook pages that get 15 members. And…

I meant to see writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room when it was out in theaters “back” in 2015. Never happened. Then I meant to see it as soon as it came out on Blu-ray (from Lionsgate, who have put together a nice little package with a “making-of” featurette and a full-length director’s commentary track that’s pretty engaging). Never happened. Then it finally made it to the top of my Netflix rental queue (yes, I still have one of those) and guess what? Last night I did, finally, see it. And you know what? I’m glad I waited.

I say that because as good as Green Room no doubt seemed when it came out — and it is very good — it now seems downright prescient as an allegory for American life circa late 2016/early 2017. A year-and-change ago this punks-vs.-Nazis survival horror probably came off as being a bit far-fetched…

From Bonnie And Clyde to Natural Born Killers, star-crossed lovers on the run from the law and racing head-first to a date with death have been a popular box-office draw for decades, and if you’re willing to tinker with the formula just a bit it’s not too great a leap to see how drive-in classics like Bonnie’s Kids and Black Mama, White Mama are cut from very much the same cloth. With the popularity of the exploitation ethos at an all-time high in the pages of indie comics thanks to series like Alex Di Campi’s Grindhouse and Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s Bitch Planet, then, it was probably only a matter of time before we got our own funnybook stand-ins for Mickey and Mallory, and now that writer Frank J. Babiere and artist Victor Santos’ new Image five-parter, Violent Love, is on LCS shelves, my only…