Who knows? Maybe one day in the future, when aspiring directors are shooting medium- and even big-budget productions on these things, we’ll look back at 2016 as being a watershed year in the history of iPhone filmmaking. And if that turns out to be the case, then it’s safe to assume that one Nigel Bach, of Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, will be considered a trailblazer. A pioneer. Perhaps even a prophet. But for now, in all honesty, he looks like a guy with way too much free time on his hands.

It’s not that his recently-completed effort, Bad Ben, is necessarily a bad film, per se —  please don’t think that’s the case by any stretch — it’s just that, after having seen it, I can’t possibly fathom what possessed him to even make it in the first place, beyond the most obvious explanation : simply because he…

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…