Tetsu (Hideki Takahashi) and Kenji (Kotobuki Hananamoto) are brothers, very different in temperament but bonded by blood. Tetsu is a hardened yakuza hitman who finds himself on the other end of a Yakuza altercation, but is saved by more sensitive and artistic Kenji, leaving Tetsu’s attacker dead. They are both forced to skip town for…
Viva La Muerte! [Radiance] Blu-ray Review
A young boy named Fando watches as his father is executed by firing squad after the Spanish Civil War under the Franco dictatorship. He comes to discover that it was his mother who actually turned his father in due to their conflicting political ideologies. The film follows Fando as his imagination conjures up bizarre and…
Exhuma [Well Go USA] Blu-ray Review
Exhuma begins when a well-to-do Korean-American family solicits help from a geomancer and his team of shamans to aid in discovering why their infant is in constant unrest, hospitalized and crying non-stop. The world-weary geomancer (Choi Min-sik of Oldboy and I Saw the Devil) discovers that the source of the disturbance is at an ancestral…
My Love Affair with Marriage [MVD Visual] Blu-ray Review
Zelma has been taught from a young age that falling in love with the right man and giving everything she has to him in as womanly a way as possible is the key to her long-time happiness. But as hard as she tries, Zelma constantly grapples with her inner self and society’s perception of who…
Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza [Radiance] Blu-ray Review
Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza, originally appearing as a stage play in the 1920s and being adapted to film several times since then, is the story of a wandering samurai named Tokijiro (Kinnosuke Nakamura) who works for gangsters in exchange for shelter for the night. They give him a bed and food, and he agrees to kill…
Intensely Independent: The Micro-Budget Films of Blake Eckard [Synapse] DVD Review
In Bubba Moon Face, we follow Horton Bucks (Tyler Messner) who returns to his hometown in northwest Missouri after his mother’s death. He’s broke with no car and resorts to crashing on his brother Stanton (Joe Hammerstone)’s couch. While dealing with their mother’s funeral, Stanton’s fuck buddy Sabetha (Sylvian Geiger) shows up with a baby…
Terror Firma [MVD Visual] Blu-ray Review
It all starts when Lola (Faye Tamasa) shows up to crash at her brother Louis’ (Burt Thakur) place. She is immediately creeped out by his weird roommate Cage (Robert Brettenaugh) but barely has time to begin adjusting before an unexplained city-wide mandatory lockdown is put in place. Between unresolved past sibling issues and the increasingly…
The Escort [Indiepix] DVD Review
Miro (Zivko Anocic) is a upwardly mobile, successful businessman with a loving family and a lot to lose. He makes a grave error while away on a trip when a prostitute shows up to his room unannounced and he taking advantage of her services. He later finds her dead in his room, and his situation…
Sherlock Holmes [Severin] Blu-ray Review
Review by James Layton Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes ran on BBC during 1968. Originally, there were sixteen episodes but it was a common practice to record over the video tapes if a show did not perform well,. Sherlock Holmes was considered to have little future potential and most of the episodes were wiped…
Before Dawn [Well Go USA] Blu-ray Review
Based on anecdotes pulled from the real diaries of ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) who fought on the western front during World War I, primarily in the days and months after the Gallipoli campaign, this film follows a young man named Jim (Levi Miller) who leaves his family’s sheep farm in the Outback…