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knsjstudiomanager
Reviews
Partners (2009)
Direct-to-DVD, shot-on-video cop film reviewed by Red Letter Media, which is how I found it...
"Partners" is one of those extremely cheap "video films" you either see for sale in the "five dollar" bin at the electronics store or bundled with another DVD and on sale in the supermarket checkout line. Film breaks the rules of regular cinematography (eye-lines are off, extreme closeups to hide things, weird blocking, etc.), the image quality comes and goes (like they switched cameras multiple times), it has bizarre audio mixing errors in certain scenes, and a plot that ends and starts up again because the original run-time was too short. Plot is utterly confusing and full of double crosses and dual loyalties, and one of the characters that is arrested is only introduced at the moment of arrest!
Watch it only if you like confounding cinema in the tradition of "Monster a-Go-Go", "Things", "Suburban Sasquatch", and the Coleman Francis trilogy ("Beast of Yucca Flats", "The Skydivers", "Red Zone Cuba").
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)
The stories about making this film are more intersting than the film....
Literally if you track down the short documentary "Hotel Torgo" and the sci-fi fanzine "Mimosa" which did two articles of interviews with surviving cast and crew, that stuff is more interesting than the actual film, even the new HD version of the final 16mm Ektachrome workprint (because the movie was blown up to full-screen 35mm for theatrical showings) which is sharp and good looking.
In short, this film is a spiritual predecessor of all the '70s horror films where a group of teens go out to a place away from society and get killed by a monster or a cult. In "Manos" it's a family (mother, father, small daughter, her poodle) trying to find a hotel called "The Valley Lodge"; they get lost in their black '65 Ford convertable and instead find a smallish house off a dirt road with a caretaker who might be a Satyr who is named Torgo. He is the servant to an undead magician/cult leader called The Master who worships a god named Manos, and his cult are his undead brides, all dressed in goofy white robes. The Master wears a black robe with the outline of red hands and his facial hair makes him resemble Bill Buckner. The "plot" is the family finding out just how crazy the situation is, and trying to get away. Unlike most horror films of the mid-1960s, it has a downbeat ending.
Why I gave the film four stars was that they shot it on 16mm home movie cameras, on their own time, and it took SIX MONTHS to make a 60-plus minute film. That's dedication. "Manos" had a shadowy run on the Southern drive-in circuit, joined the raft of B-movies sold to independent UHF TV stations in the 1970s, and would have been utterly obscure had not Frank Conniff of "Mystery Science Theater" not found it. "Manos" is the perfect example of the self-financed, independent regional film (El Paso, Tx.), and should be shown in film schools for how not to make those sorts of pictures.
Deti protiv volshebnikov (2016)
This is that computer-animated "Children Vs. Wizards" movie....
....that you can see for free on YouTube. I'm not going to go into the gory details, but the film looks amazingly cheap despite the budget (I don't want to call it embezzlement, but if it barks like a dog....), and it is literally a stealth propaganda film for the Russian nationalism promoted by the Putin government mixed with the Russian Orthodox Christianity that is part and parcel of that quasi-ideology. The design of the characters break every rule of children's animation: the kids do not have large eyes (in fact they are beady and you don't see pupils unless you are close up) and their bodies look like un-rendered first drafts of computer-animated figures. There are car insurance ads with better animation!
Very much this is a Russian right-wing response to the "Harry Potter" books and films and its got the same mentality as the 1980s American anti-"Dungeons & Dragons" and interlinked anti-rock music campaign, except those things were grassroots movements started by Christian fundamentalists and here we have a branch of the State-approved Russian Orthodox Church working with funds from the State film board to create a film about evil wizards in a Scottish boarding school/castle infecting the minds of Russian orphans with occultic powers being opposed by teen undercover commandos from the Suvorov military academy (!), but with loads of violence and stiff live action segments. Russia has done much better in animation even in the 2010s, so the crudity of this film should not be seen as the norm by people who have never seen a Soviet or Russian-animated film.