FEBRUARY 2 — I’ve been spending most of my free time at the start of 2019 just trying to catch up with as many of the Oscar-nominated movies as possible.
I’ve still got a few more to go to wrap that up but since the Oscars are still a few weeks away, I guess I will have enough time to catch them all and make my usual predictions.
Even with all that going on, plus the unexpectedly exciting offerings that popped up in Malaysian cinemas in January 2019, I still couldn’t help myself from checking out the never-ending flow of releases that come out of the indie horror/genre scene.
And even though we’re just entering February 2019, things are already starting to look good over there.
Here are four new releases that I think are worth your time exploring:
Lifechanger
This may turn out to be one of the genuine discoveries of the year, or at the very least one of the most unique ones in terms of story.
A film that is a body-swapping, serial-killing thriller that’s also a very touching tragic romance, Lifechanger plays a bit like an inspired combination of Fallen, Groundhog Day and Taking Lives.
It tells the story of a body-swapper (or skin-walker or shape-shifter), who kills people in order to survive by taking over their bodies and identities (including their memories).
What makes this one unique is that it’s told from the point of view of the skin-walker himself, which becomes more affecting when we discover his obsession with a woman, whom he keeps returning to and chats with in the same bar almost every night, with the sad twist that almost every new conversation he has with her is in a new body.
Slickly shot, beautifully acted and full of genuine emotions, this might just be writer-director Justin McConnell’s calling card to the big leagues.
Revenger
Revenger is a fight flick, a Korean fight flick at that. So right off the bat let’s just excuse the very basic story (about an island shared by 12 Asian countries that serves as a sort of prison for convicted felons) and the typical mixture of melodrama and comedy that is the hallmark of most mainstream Korean films, and just concentrate on the glorious arrival of a new action star — Bruce Khan (who’s a dead ringer for Donnie Yen) — who also wrote the script.
Out on Netflix now, Revenger is of course not in the same class as the insanely violent The Night Comes For Us or The Raid movies, but it still fares very well when compared to other Asian action classics like the Ong Bak and SPL movies or even DTV classics like Undisputed 3 and Ninja 2: Shadow Of A Tear.
In short, if you like fight flicks, you’ll love this one. In fact you might even wonder, quietly — Bruce Khan, where have you been all my life?
Pledge
I’d watch anything that’s distributed by IFC Midnight, a company that very rarely disappoints, and they’ve got another twisted little gem on their hands with Pledge, which, as the title might already hint at, is about a bunch of college students trying to join a fraternity.
The trio in question here is your usual bunch of nerdy dudes who, after being consistently rebuffed by all the campus frats, suddenly receives an invitation from a beautiful woman to come to a party at an isolated mansion.
What begins as a party then becomes an invitation for them to pledge and join the upper class fraternity, and it’s from here on out that the movie begins to deviate from your usual expectations when it comes to movies about college hazing gone wrong.
Of course you can still telegraph what’s going to happen here, but director Daniel Robbins and screenwriter Zack Weiner (who also plays one of the trio) keeps things fast, twisted and brutal enough that you’ll be entertained right to the end.
Rust Creek
Another IFC Midnight offering, Rust Creek plays like an unlikely blend of survival horror flicks like The Last House On The Left,Wrong Turn or The Most Dangerous Game and more character based US indie rural dramas like Winter’s Bone or Leave No Trace.
It tells the story of Sawyer, a college student heading to Washington DC for a job interview who makes the mistake of taking the small back roads when traffic at the interstate highway is bad.
Long story short, she’ll of course run into two locals who’ll end up hunting her, but director Jen McGowan throws a spanner or two into the works by adding a protector (who is the local meth-cook) and the typical jurisdiction tussle between the local sheriff and the state police to make things more interesting and unpredictable.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
