Rebellious, quick-witted Erica Vandross is a 17-year-old firecracker living with her single mom, Laurie, and her mom's new boyfriend, Bob, in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. When Bob's mentally unbalanced son, Luke, arrives from rehab to live with the family, Erica finds her domestic and personal life overwhelmed. With Luke and her sidekicks Kala and Claudine in tow, Erica acts out by exposing a high school teacher's dark secret.

Plot Summary

Rebellious, quick-witted Erica Vandross is a 17-year-old firecracker living with her single mom, Laurie, and her mom's new boyfriend, Bob, in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. When Bob's mentally unbalanced son, Luke, arrives from rehab to live with the family, Erica finds her domestic and personal life overwhelmed. With Luke and her sidekicks Kala and Claudine in tow, Erica acts out by exposing a high school teacher's dark secret.

Forbidden Power seems like an ambitious movie that is mixing an interesting blend of genres. Here is how the film described its plot:

After a one night affair with a mysterious woman, a young man wakes up alone, empowered and with a cryptic message. He uses his power in business and then searches for the women to find out where her power came from.

The movie is written and directed by Paul Kyriazi, an industry veteran with more than four decades of movie business experience. This is probably the reason why he decided to combine things like science fiction, thriller, action, and mystery, each of which is a big challenge for independent production.

Yet, it seems that Kyriazi managed to hold his own.

As the trailer shows, the premise seems similar to the movie Limitless, in a sense that both films explore the idea of a man who suddenly attains incredible and almost supernatural powers. But, while Limitless uses a somewhat weak and passing underlying story, Forbidden Power takes its own into science fiction territory. Clearly, the same sci-fi concept only grows in relevance as the movie progresses, aiding the overall sense of mystery.

Thanks to its bold approach to a complex combination of genres, Forbidden Power seems like a film worth the time of anyone who is into an indie mystery and science fiction releases.

Storyline

After a one night affair, a young man is left with extra power and a cryptic message. He searches for the woman to find out the source of her power.

Story Line

A Quiet Place (2018) - Two parents do what it takes to keep their children safe in a world full of creatures hunting every sound they can hear. Not a sound can be heard from the family hiding in silence, but all it takes is one noise and everything can go wrong.

It's hard to tell for sure where Mute was trying to go and what was its director, the brilliant Duncan Jones, trying to do. As a cyberpunk tale set in the undefined period in, I guess, the future, it has all the hallmarks of a noir story. The movie showcases a mute main character that gets his love taking from him, a group of odd persons from the margins of society as supporting characters and some weird new pieces of tech everyone is using. 

The result is something that is an unholy mix of Strange Days and Southland Tales, but which features all of the failed quirkiness of the later film. It might sound strange, but Mute is a movie that is somehow completely devoid of charm and it kind of needs it. In fact, it needs it bad, like many science fiction films that are high concept pieces. This one is a film like that, but it has a lot of charm. Jones maybe did not intend this, but the movie is still a high concept (at least parts of it try to be one). This is why watching the film, at least for me, seems like a waster experience from start to end. 

Storyline

Berlin. Forty years from today. A roiling city of immigrants, where East crashes against West in a science-fiction Casablanca. Leo Beiler (Skarsgard), a mute bartender has one reason and one reason only for living here, and she's disappeared. But when Leo's search takes him deeper into the city's underbelly, an odd pair of American surgeons (led by Rudd) seem to be the only recurring clue, and Leo can't tell if they can help, or who he should fear most.

There is one word that perfectly describes the new indie thriller-horror Brokedown by Pole Star Studios - this word is “rough”. At first, this might sound like an overly simplistic description of a film that clearly has a lot of time and effort invested into it. Its runtime of about 90 minutes is packed full with a complex script and a storyline of multiple threads that weave into a single cohesive mesh at its very end. There is a clear sense that the film’s director and writer, John Reign, just like the cast, placed a lot of time and effort into the film. Yet, in spite of this, the roughness of the movie is the thing that left the biggest impression on me.

The movie premise is simple and will be familiar to most of the fans of the US cinematography. In it, a punk-rock couple of Stormy and Jason head off from a concert Jason just had. Immediately after it, in the midst of a heated argument, he proposed to his girlfriend and they decided to speed home to share the news. However, in their return journey, they come across a gas station deep in a place that can be only described as mountain hillbilly central. An altercation with a group of local men sets the stage for a bloody and tension-riddled film.

Sure, Brokedown has some of the practical roughness that regularly comes with any ambitious indie films. In some shots, the camera shakes or loses a bit of its focus. Some of them are framed ad-hoc. Some shots look stylish and beautiful, featuring a long exposition, which others seem almost documentary in their setup and execution. However, as the movie begins to unravel and reveal its truly disturbed nature, the same approach to cinematography begins to make sense. In the story and its supporting characters lie the true roughness of the film. 

The hillbilly criminals, the corrupt local sheriff and his cronies, all of them are as if they just stepped out of a modernized version of Hills have Eyes or Deliverance (there is an especially gruesome homage to the latter film in Brokedown). Characters like Sheriff Elwood are immediately set up as the classic archetypes that lurk deep in places like the Ozark mountains. From the first moment, Jason and Stormy make the mistake of stopping at that pump, the film builds up its tension a notch at a time.

In it, the rough dialogues the character have are full of hate, spite, and threats, while their body language shows that the threats are real. The sheer nauseating moments of the threat of danger to the main characters or someone else are enthralling in their roughness. The actors, deliver the same tense dialogues in great style, never missing a bit and improvising when need be, all to great effect that enforces, again, their roughness. Finally, among all of this, the film features even a horror element that manages to weave itself into the story in an unexpected manner. 

Synopsis ...a group of hillbilly's terrorize a couple after their car breaks down.

Director: Aaron Harvey 

Stars: William Fichtner, Jessica McN

Allie Marshall  - Stormy

Carl Bailey - Buck

Jimmy Gerovac - Jason

John Reign - Sheriff

Sierra Reign - Erlene

Rest of cast listed alphabetically:

Frank Junior Guertin - Band Member

Scott Hoon - Cooter

Jim Kuhn - Security guard

Aaron Mccrumb - Otis

Cayla Milocich - Boomers Daughter

Chris Monte - Band Member

Larry Overfield - Creature

James Salamon - Band Member

Aj Santillo - Grisly

Thomas Stoops - deputy Boomer

A new indie feature-length film is on its way in less than two months and it promises to bring a mixture of drama, action and suspense thrills. The name of the movie is AnyBodies Game and here is how it describes itself:

While a group of friends are enjoying life they mysteriously began to receive bloody letters and prank phone calls. They all began to take the threats serious after the death of one of their own friends. Who could do such a thing when the finger is pointing at all of them? This could be AnyBodies Game 2018.

The trailer shows an ambitions piece written and produced by Ann P Productions. It holds plenty of characters and a plot that seems to be constantly going through twist and turns.

With a strong element of mystery, AnyBodies Game appears to tackle the horror thorpe of a group of friends being hunted by an unknown assailant. The first thing that comes to mind with this setup in the series Scream, but with a setup that is taken into the modern time and complemented with a natural approach to acting.

The movie is set to have its theatre premier on July 5th, 2018. For more information about this event and the movie, check out the AnyBodies Game official website.

For any independent movie, there is always the dilemma of how should a particular film present itself. Should it be flashy and shocking from the first moment, trying to catch the viewer with this effect alone? Or should it try to play it cool and slow, allowing the viewer to gradually become immersed?

Hongo, made by the Misguided Perceptions Media Group is an interesting movie that apparently uses a little bit of both approaches. The film tells the story of a convict that get paroled and released into a world where he ends up struggling just to get by. Desperate for any option, he listens to the recommendation of this parole officer and contacts a man who offers him a job.

At this point, the film takes a sudden and menacing. In an unknown open space, he and other individuals are placed in a surreal, but a very deadly situation.  As their plight begin, so does the film take a step into a horror-thriller domain.

Aside from an interesting plot, Hongo features great cinematography, with excellent shots of serene nature, which is a complete contrast to the frightened and desperate character. The film also features really cool editing, especially when it comes to its action-drive second part. The trailer clearly shows this fact near its very end with a great jump-scare.

Once more, the movie world puts a sniper rifle in the hands of Jeremy Renner, but this time, it exchanges the sun-scorched wastelands of Iraq for the frozen wastelands of Wyoming. 

There, a murder of a young woman belonging to the local Native American tribe brings in the law enforcement, but also many questions related to a community struggling with real-life problems, as well as their cultural identity and a sense of purpose. 

The film was made by Taylor Sheridan, who had his part in movies like Sicario and Hell or High Water, which makes him a prime author of modern gritty thrillers. 

Wind River 2017 is also a very good thriller, but not much than this. For me, the main issue that comes across is the lack of real depth in relation to the Native American angle of the story. Aside from the expected sympathy for their silent plight and somewhat simplistic representation of many struggling characters, the film ends up being something that just did it research and then completely forgot about Wyoming or its inhabitants. For me, Mystery Road is an example how this type of a story can be told with less cinematographic polish but with a more hearth, which Wind River lacks just a little bit.

Dolls are creepy and Annabelle: Creation is weirdly a film about a creepy doll that (very commendably) doesn’t use the same object too much. This was a great move by its director, who fought off the impulse to make the doll front and center, which would do the story no favors. Instead, the film switches its focus between the girls of a Christian orphanage who get to travel to the middle of nowhere with their guardian nun and start living in the home of a good Samaritan dollmaker and his wife.

As the horror action begins to unravel, the director follows a single girl on her quest of moving from a victim to the main monster, switching perspectives smoothly and effortlessly. At the same time, frights are abundant and striking, but they also lead to a somewhat ineffective finish. While the ending and the last third are not bad, they do feel like a missed opportunity to score some bigger and more dramatic horror points. In this regard, Annabelle: Creation works much like its previous part, ending up a decent modern horror but still feeling very forgettable.

Director David F. Sandberg

Genre : Horror Movies

Starring -Stephanie Sigman, Talitha Bateman, Anthony LaPaglia

Supporting actors - Miranda Otto, Lulu Wilson, Philippa Anne Coulthard

Studio - New LineWarner Home VideoWarner Bros.
Movie time: 1 hour , 49 minutes.