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Prodigy

Ellie and chessboard. Shall we play a game?

It can be pretty rough being the smart kid. That was my fate in school, and often the other kids only really talked to me when they wanted homework help. Also, I was usually bored with the books that were meant for my age group, which meant that I snuck a lot of my family’s sci-fi and history books to read, which probably explains a lot. But while I was a smart kid, I wasn’t the frightening, possibly preparing to take over the world sort of genius we see in Prodigy, and for that I count myself lucky.

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To the Beat

The adorable twins planning out their next dance moves.

All kids have big dreams. I always wanted to be a famous writer (so halfway there, I guess), though there was also a brief time when I wanted to be a ballerina. That lasted through about three lessons, at which point I realized I had all the grace of a nearsighted, arthritic platypus and that particular dream was shelved. The girls in To the Beat, however, actually have dancing skills, and perhaps more importantly the drive to work for their dreams, which you certainly won’t find in all 14-year-olds.

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4/20 Massacre

The five hikers. Wait until you see what they're looking at.

A lot of people may not realize that even in states like Colorado where marijuana is legal there are still plenty of restrictions as to how it can be used, who can grow it, and how much they can grow. So even in California they have what are called ‘guerrilla growers’, who plant and tend their crops in various hidden spots, keeping well off the beaten paths and sometimes even acting violently to protect their crops.
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Spectrum

The boy and his lacrosse stick. Those come in handy sometimes.

There’s nothing like waking from one of those nightmares that you can’t entirely shake off. No matter how often you tell yourself it was just a dream and it’s over now, you’re still at least half-convinced that you’re not really awake and, in true horror movie fashion, you’re about to discover — probably in some gruesome, horrifying way — that you’re actually still in the dream.

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Hunters Lodge

Harry, contemplating whether or not he's just seen a ghost.

In an isolated part of Canada, there’s a hunting lodge where three little boys grew up together. Peter’s family owned the place and his friends were always there with him, playing at being soldiers. Then, in the late sixties, the three became soldiers for real when they served together in Vietnam and discovered that war was nothing like the games they’d played.

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Dead on Arrival

Hans Dunkel. Would you buy insurance from this man?

A man awakens in a hospital to hear a doctor giving him the worst possible news: he’s been poisoned and has only a few days to live at best. Medical science can do nothing and he needs to make sure all his affairs are in order. Thanks to the 1949 classic D.O.A., this is a familiar premise, one that gets turned around and brought into modern times in Dead On Arrival.

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The Eve

The four friends in happier times, before the body count starts to rise,

Any place can be creepy when it’s quiet and dark, but there’s often something especially poignant and unsettling about a bustling, popular tourist area left empty during the off-season, perhaps still haunted by echoes of happier times. On the island of Nantucket there’s also a stark beauty about the place in winter, and in The Eve it’s perhaps partly this that lures a group of friends there to ring in the New Year.

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Who Is Elmore Dean?

Elmore at breakfast. An absolutely normal day, nothing to see here.

There are few people who have truly risen to the top of their professions. For every athlete laden with awards and trophies, there are thousands of others who never made it past high school glory, and for every Roger Ebert there are a myriad of movie critics like me, who no one has ever heard of. In Who Is Elmore Dean?, the title character (Timothy J. Cox) has undeniably made it big — he’s a somewhat reclusive songwriter about to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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The Rage

Movie poster. This is definitely not a drill.

Catastrophe can — and often does — happen in the blink of an eye, even in places that should be prepared for any eventuality. In The Rage, even a laboratory working with a dangerous virus, one place where everything had better be under strict control, can see all its safety protocols fall apart in an instant, leaving nothing but chaos behind.

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Beyond the Woods

Ger looks at the Holy Well signpost. Hint: There's nothing holy here.

Somewhere in Ireland in a wonderful old stone farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a group of longtime friends gather for the weekend. At this point, given the sheer number of horror movies I’ve seen if I ever received an invitation to an isolated house for any reason I’d turn into a raving conspiracy theorist warning everyone to stay away, but this is why I’ll never be in a horror flick.
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