This film recants the story of the murder of Brian Deneke, a 19-year-old Amarillo, Texas punk killed by a 17-year-old jock in 1997. Directed by Jameson Brooks, produced by Cheldon R Chick, and written by the pair, it’s a deeply evocative look into the immediate events that lead to that situation. It’s both a singular story and a repetitive one (Sophie Lancaster springs to mind), but the film goes beyond a simple reenactment. Continue reading
Bomb City (2017) is a brilliant social drama
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“When a nun in a remote convent claims immaculate conception, the Vatican sends a team of priests to investigate, concerned about an ancient prophecy that a woman will give birth to twin boys: one the Messiah, the other the Antichrist.” Which is a perfect setup for a bit of religious-themed horror, the only thing you need to add is a decent cast and a spooky church.
The tagline for this is “The antisocial son of an alcoholic father and a bipolar mother grows up in 1960s Ireland”, so forgive me if that and the colour grade on the promo photos meant I went in thinking this would be some overly earnest misery-porn. What we have here is some high-quality bait-and-switch weirdness that simply has to be explored. And, yes, a bit of 60s Ireland misery-porn. 
For those who don’t know it, ALF was a mid-80s sitcom about and Alien Life Form living with a suburban middle-class family in a generically affluent part of mid-80s California. Other than ALF’s propensity for eating cats, it was mild mannered family entertainment hinging on culture shock and mild ill-mannered behaviour. As a series it touched on nothing of any real importance, other than being based on a flagrant disregard for immigration laws, and it go through it’s 102 episodes on the principle that anyone will laugh at a 3-foot-tall fury humanoid with a Connecticut accent. So whilst I knew the series ended on ALF being captured by the US Air Force I wasn’t expecting the movie to be an unrelenting nightmare.
Trash or Treasure 