Once in awhile a documentary comes along with such a bizarre, out-of-left-field premise that it proves the old adage that reality is, indeed, stranger than fiction, and Tickled, a new one in theaters now that comes our way courtesy of the New Zealand directing tandem of David Farrier (a pop-culture correspondent for an Auckland television station) and Dylan Reeve (a techie-turned- research-guru-and-camera-operator), certainly fits that bill — but it also raises some reasonably thought-provoking questions in the minds of viewers, chief among them being “what, exactly, constitutes something as being pornographic?,” and “how far are some people willing to go in order to fuel their obsessions — and are those with greater financial means in a position to become completely swallowed up by them?”

I freely confess that I’d never heard of the so-called “sport” of — get this — “competitive endurance tickling” before seeing this flick the other…

It’s not every day that you find an unassuming, largely unheralded gem hidden deep in the Netflix horror section, so what the heck — when you do, in fact, stumble across one, it’s probably worth crowing about just a little bit, right? So allow me to introduce you, dear reader, to first-time director Leigh Janiak’s 2014 effort, Honeymoon.

Filmed in rural North Carolina with two British leads (not that you can tell, mind you — their American accents are flawless) for a reported $1 million, this flick is a perfect example of how much you can do with a small cast,  an insular location, a “been there, done that” premise, and what looks to be a rather short filming schedule, as long as you’ve got a director who understands how to build suspense, get great performances from their actors, and keep his or her audience on their proverbial…

Of all our shameful pastimes here in the US — and let’s be honest, there are plenty to choose from — trashing on immigrants has to rank right at or near the very top of the list, and given some of the headlines we’re seeing coming from Europe in recent weeks and months, it appears we’re not alone in being way less welcoming than we should be to our new friends and neighbors. You can toss all the tired arguments at me you want — “these people don’t speak our language,” “they come from a totally different culture,” “they don’t share our customs,” “they don’t understand how we do things here,” etc. — the simple fact is that the exact same thing was said about your Irish, German, Italian, French, etc. ancestors, and I bet that if they knew their family lineage would end up producing the same kind of…

Horror fans everywhere were reasonably enthusiastic at the prospect, first announced a few years ago now, of a newly-“reimagined” version of the classic TV series Tales From The Darkside being developed for the CW network under the creative guidance of up-and-coming author Joe Hill,  and why not? Hill comes from about as distinguished a genre pedigree as one can imagine, after all (in case you didn’t know his full name is Joseph Hillman King), and has some best-selling and critically-acclaimed novels of his own under his belt (one of which, Horns, was adapted by Alexandre Aja into a darn fine feature film), as well as a little comic-book series you just may have heard of called Locke & Key. Surely this would be a pretty good little show whenever it finally hit our screens, right?

Except, of course, it never did. Somewhere along the twisting, winding, perilous…

Question of the day : can an 86-minute movie totally redeem itself in the last 10 minutes? I confess I don’t know the answer myself, but director Eytan Rockaway’s 2015  indie horror The Abandoned (which played the horror film festival circuit, and even “enjoyed” a very limited theatrical run last year, under its original title, The Confines, before undergoing a name-change for Blu-ray/DVD and streaming service release via IFC Midnight) certainly comes pretty close. It gathers up a few too many strikes against it in the early going to completely pull its metaphorical fat out of the fire, it’s true, but if you do decide to stick it out to the end, you’ll at least give yourself the opportunity to see the best part, and who knows? Maybe you won’t walk away from it feeling your time was completely wasted.

I gave Rockaway’s obviously-low-budget little opus a go on…

Like you, I’m sure, I’ve learned to become more than suspicious of the Netflix “Recommended For You” list, and more often than not find myself wondering if whatever algorithm comes up with it really takes into consideration my prior viewing habits at all. Once in awhile, though — just once in awhile — the damn thing comes up trumps and scuttles my plans to quit paying attention to it altogether for at least a little bit longer. Last night was just such an occasion, as a 2015 indie horror flick from a director I’ve never heard of named Mike Testin found its way to the top of my recommendations and, having nothing else and/or better to do, I decided to give it a go, only to walk away from it 90 minutes later pleasantly surprised by the whole thing and reasonably eager to get off my ass and tell you…

Some folks still call WWII “the good war” — but you don’t hear many veterans of the conflict calling it that, do you? No, that term seems to be the exclusive domain of those who either sat it out or were too young to have fought in it. I might grant you that other euphemisms people use to describe it, such as “the last war where we were clearly on the side of right,” might be a little bit closer to the truth given that the Axis powers, Germany in particular, were clearly in need of stopping, but shit — it’s not like Stalinist Russia was the most noble of allies, and it’s not like we in the US had purely altruistic motives underpinning our involvement in either Europe or the Pacific ourselves. A “good war”? Sorry, but there’s no such thing.

Today, of course, we’ve at least made some…