Month: October 2015

 Joining the big screen celebration of Halloween is “Gravy,” a bizarre picture that doesn’t exactly top off the tank with nightmare fuel. A horror-comedy that plays unsettlingly broad, the film marks the feature-length directorial debut for actor James Roday, who also co-scripts this attempt to outdo recent cannibal movies, submitting a grotesque effort that’s slathered in gore and mindful of one-liners, while keeping a low-budget aesthetic that contains the brutality to a single location. Much too self-consciously zany to be funny, “Gravy” is best approached as a celebration of make-up achievements, with gushy guts and mutilated bodies emerging as the highlights of this wheezy Looney Tunes-style take on savagery and foodie culture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Just in time for Halloween comes an anthology film about Christmas? “A Christmas Horror Story” combines the two best holidays to dig up nightmarish qualities about the season of joy, working with four different narratives to explore the wrath of demons, the terror of changelings, the mystery of ghosts, and a viral plague. Directors Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban, and Brett Sullivan put in an impressive low-budget effort with “A Christmas Horror Story,” and while not all the tales come alive, more hit than miss, bringing gore and menace in October, but reveling in the iconography of December. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Jamie Babbit made her debut with 1999’s “But I’m a Cheerleader,” a sharp, funny exploration of sexual oppression that launched a promising career. Subsequent efforts failed to match the invention of her first film, with Babbit turning to television to hone her chops. She returns to screens with “Addicted to Fresno,” though the true intent of this painful misfire isn’t exactly clear, with much of the movie playing like Babbit’s impression of a Farrelly Brothers production. Crude and poorly written by Karey Dornetto, “Addicted to Fresno” flails wildly to set a subversive tone, only to end up about as dangerous as a Fox sitcom. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com