Film Reviews

MURDEROUS TALES is a special effect animated feature film combining live actors with 3D/2D animation, puppets and back projection. It contains three stories: Antonio Cacto, Lighthouse and The Big Man, plus three ultra-short films called Charge the Dragon. Each episode uses different production technology and is in a different genre, but both their form and their content are related. All the episodes are about double standards and the topics of heroism and death. Something very small meets something very big (a tiny knight meets a huge dragon, an old Mexican goblin meets a man, a tiny Professor meets real-life cows, two mobsters meet the Big Man). All these meetings result in the heroic death of the small principal characters. Each script sees heroism and death differently.

A soldier returning from war is hired by her own father to drive his prostitutes around town. She calls upon herself to help one of them.

Twelve years after their beloved eldest son, Junpei, drowned while saving a stranger's life, Kyohei and Toshiko welcome their surviving children home for a family reunion. Younger son Ryota still feels that his parents resent that he isn't the one who died; his new wife, Yukari, is awkwardly meeting the rest of the family for the first time. Daughter Chinami strains to fill the uncomfortable pauses with forced cheer.

Ivan Tretiak, Russian Mafia boss who wants to create an oil crisis in Moscow and seize power as a result sends Simon Templar, great international criminal, to England to get a secret formula for cold fusion from U.S. scientist Emma Russell. Templar falls in love with Emma and they try to outwit Tretiak and his guerrillas, hiding from them in Moscow

A mentally disturbed young woman takes a job at a posh country club and falls in with a clique of wealthy college kids where she's taken under the wing of the clique's twisted leader, who harbors some dark secrets too terrifying to tell.

The Pinkerton detective agency uncovers a plot to assassinate President James Garfield in 1881 Texas. The film, a "political" Spaghetti, is a very overt mirroring of the JFK Assassination in 1963.

Jackson and Emily aren't like the other kids. Two burgeoning sociopaths on the brink of total meltdown. Ticking time bombs seeking revenge. Who will unravel first?

The history of Sound City and their huge recording device; exploring how digital change has allowed 'people that have no place' in music to become stars. It follows former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighter David Grohl as he attempts to resurrect the studio back to former glories.

A delicately told and deceptively simple story of a group of children in a depressed small town who band together to cover up a tragic mistake.

A San Quentin inmate, sentenced to life without paroll, writes a play that catches the interest of a reporter.

When Dracula leaves the captive Jonathan Harker and Transylvania for London in search of Mina Harker -- the spitting image of Dracula's long-dead wife, Elisabeta -- obsessed vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing sets out to end the madness.

A double leg amputated woman sits and writes a long meandering letter while her ineffective nurse attempts to attend to her stumps.

Kronk, now chef and Head Delivery Boy of Mudka's Meat Hut, is fretting over the upcoming visit of his father. Kronk's father always disapproved of young Kronk's culinary interests and wished that Kronk instead would settle down with a wife and a large house on a hill.

Director Julien Duvivier's 1943 anthology film tells three tales of the supernatural. The first story is set at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the second involves a psychic who predicts murder, and the third is about a man who literally meets the girl of his dreams.

In 1950s Ireland and New York, young Ellis Lacey has to choose between two men and two countries.