The first of several upcoming documentaries that are headed here like ballistic missiles from Iraq, Gunner Palace succeeds in hitting home with Western audiences, a difficult task given our increasingly jaded attitude toward war ever since the advent of 24-hour satellite news coverage of the fighting. This film is, if nothing else, a jolting reminder that even CNN filters and censors certain realities of battle. Enter the embedded journalists to fill in the blanks, armed with digital cameras shooting thirty frames a second and total access to the daily lives and deaths of American servicemen.
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NOTE: A quick preface to this piece- unlike most reviewers, I refused to simply perpetuate the underground hype surrounding this band, so I chose my words as objectively and free from hyperbole as I could.

Guitar Wolf is the greatest punk band that has ever played, and the greatest that ever will play. Ever. Any one of their artless alchemical noise experiments-gone-horribly-right is enough to make a straightjacket-bound legal deaf burst out of his restraints in song and dance, a feat of strength which has only been replicated through near-lethal doses of angel dust and/or the sight of an infant trapped under the wheel of an automobile.

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Having just been introduced to the films of Mark Eisenstein, I found myself in the presence of a true outsider artist. His dark comedy The Final Journey of Arnie Schwartz (aka The Electric Chair) features a powerfully honest performance by the late, great Victor Argo as an aging stand up comic, and struck a chord in me somewhere between Lenny and The King of Comedy. Early on in a scene from his latest film, a terrified infantry man approaches his superior:

“What is it, soldier?”

“It’s God, sir. He’s on the other side.”

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With a tagline like “The Corpse Grinders turn the bones and flesh of young lovelies into screaming, total savage blood death!” I knew I would be in for a tasty treat.

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“If You Bring In A Bucket Of Blood To Your Local Theater’s Ticket Booth, You Will Be Given One Free Admission.” Ah, the days when sensational marketing was an art in itself. The owner of this tagline is the 1959 low-budget masterpiece A Bucket of Blood, a twinkling gem in director Roger Corman’s immense oeuvre. The 60s drive-in icon has not been as prolific in recent years (his “niche” market monopoly more or less usurped by both Hollywood and Troma founder and amiable schlockmeister Lloyd Kaufman), but this early entry in his unmatched corpus of work showcases Corman’s creative ingenuity at its best.
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There’s a party in my parachute pants, and everyone’s invited. Reviewed by popular demand, this 80’s time capsule is a bona-fide bargain bin exploitation classic, albeit for reasons the filmmakers never intended. You see, despite the warm fuzzy place many children of the ’80’s have in their heart for nostalgia like this, people seem to have forgotten that this movie sucks ass. In fact, if sucking ass were an Olympic event, Breakin’ 2 would get the gold with 10’s across the friggin’ board.

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Picture that friend of yours who hates “indy” film and music. You know the one. Puts porn on his computer background. Pops his collar. Moves his lips when he reads. The guy who thinks Donnie Darko and Army of Darkness are “underground,” and he’s the only one who’s seen them. The guy you’re really not even sure why you still hang out with, come to think of it, other than you’ve known him since you were kids and that it would be more trouble than it’s worth at this point to tell him to fuck off.
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You’re not alone if you’ve never heard of The Wizard of Speed and Time. This low-budget independent effects opus was in jeopardy of even seeing the end of its problem-plagued shoot. After barely surviving the kind of four and a half year production nightmare usually reserved for Terry Gilliam pictures, it was salvaged virtually single-handedly by its first time director, who then could only watch helplessly as it was doomed to obscurity by Universal’s The Wizard, also released in 1989. That unfortunately-titled (and far inferior) feature-length Nintendo commercial overshadowed what would have been the world’s formal introduction to fx wunderkind and eccentric iconoclast, Mike Jittlov.
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From director Harpreet Kaur comes the most affecting documentary out of India since 2004’s Born Into Brothels. Its title refers to a neighborhood in Delhi that suffered the brunt of the November 1984 massacre of the Sikhs by neighboring Muslims and Hindus. The pogrom was revenge for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, which was revenge for her raid on the Sikh Golden Temple, which was revenge for the Sikhs turning the temple into a paramilitary headquarters, which was revenge for… etc.
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What happens when ten student filmmakers are given a shot at making their own video for an up-and-coming indy band? Read on.
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