All in The Archives
Bound to Vengeance is a throwback revenge thriller with a particularly nasty streak. Eve is a young woman who finally finds a way to break free from her captor and escape. When she tries to find the keys for the van, she discovers a huge file of Polaroids of other young women, just like her, captured and chained up by the man she knocked out and chained in her place. Now she’s on a quest to free all the victims and force her tormentor to watch.
In a frontier town in the old west, a criminal drifter comes into town and promptly gets shot in the knee and arrested. By morning, the criminal, the deputy sheriff, and the doctor who spent the night in the jail are missing. The only clue is an arrow made from a human bone. Now the sheriff, the deputy sheriff, a town official, and the doctor’s disabled husband must journey five days into the desert to recover the missing citizens from a tribe of non-verbal cannibals preying on settlers.
Rebound is an indie psychological horror about a young woman, Claire, trying to restart her life. She walked in on her boyfriend cheating on her, dumped him, and kicked him out of the apartment. Still everywhere she looks, she can’t get his image out of her head. She chooses to drive cross-country back to her family in Chicago. Too bad her car breaks down outside a tiny town barely on the map.
Fat Girl is the exception that proves the rule. Breillat presents the masterpiece of the New French Extremism in this unnerving suspense/horror about two young sisters exploring their sexuality on vacation. The older sister, Elena, is a beautiful young woman who falls head over heels for a college student, Fernando. The younger sister, Anaïs, is fat. She is considered a burden by the family and used as a literal anchor by the family. Elena is only allowed to leave the safety of the gated holiday villa if she takes Anaïs with her. Nothing will stop Elena from pursuing a sexual relationship with her first love, even her own sister literally in the room where it happens.
“The iMom” is a satirical horror/sci-fi short by writer/director Ariel Martin. It opens with an infomercial advertising the benefits of a a digital mother surrogate (including actual footage of one of the increasingly realistic androids being developed in laboratories) before shifting to an overtaxed mother trying to connect with her children.
