Director Dennis Iliadis brings his penchant for skin-crawlingly graphic violence to his new indie film +1, but it looks like that’s about the only remarkable quality he has brought to the project. If you saw Iliadis’s 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left, you know exactly what kind of violence is at play when Iliadis is at the helm. And while there are no head-in-microwave-death scenes in +1, there’s certainly more gore than you’d expect from a college party film.
Chronicle: In Case You Missed It
With the advent of Netflix and OnDemand, it takes a really strong recommendation to get me to actually schlep to a movie theater and pay $15 to see a movie. 2012’s Chronicle was one of those cases. When it hit theaters last year, a friend of mine called it “The Blair Witch Project of superhero movies.” Now, I’m not averse to the found footage genre: District 9 and End of Watch are two of my favorite movies in recent years. However, I didn’t see those movies because they were found footage, but because they had intriguing premises. That’s where my friend turned me off Chronicle: I had no interest in sitting through a predictable superhero movie where the hero discovers his powers and then uses them to defeat a villain (and on and on—you know the drill), while also dealing with constant shaky-cam and spastic editing. I did finally see Chronicle via OnDemand, and I can confidently report: this is a groundbreaking, must see movie that you should move to the top of your entertainment to-do list.