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Small Town Monsters Delves into the Legend of the Dogman in New Doc

The Land Between the Lakes, a popular wilderness destination, has become the hunting ground for a legendary best. Small Town Monsters‘ gripping new documentary, Dogman Territory: Werewolves in The Land Between the Lakes, explores the creature. This chilling exploration delves into the myth of the Dogman, a werewolf-like creature said to stalk the woods. Host Shannon LeGro collaborates with author Aaron Deese to interview witnesses, researchers, and longtime residents bordering Tennessee and Kentucky. Their quest? To uncover the truth behind a creature that many believe walks among us. Land Between the Lakes has a reputation for the strange and unsettling. Whispers of hauntings, sightings, and mysterious lights in the night paint a picture of a place where folklore bleeds into reality. The ever-increasing reports of Dogman sightings stand out, with law enforcement, campers, hunters, and even passersby all claiming encounters with these terrifying beings. The Land Between the Lakes is located on the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. Not long

Continue reading →
Kelli Marchman McNeely
Jul 11, 2024

Chattanooga Film Festival Offers a Hybrid Eleventh Edition This Month

Chattanooga Film Festival (https://www.chattfilmfest.org/) celebrates its 11th edition with a hybrid edition, so you can catch either in-person screenings from June 21–23 or relax at home with a virtual version from June 21–28, 2024. The lineup is a cornucopia of fright fare and other genre-film offerings. Lots of amazing features are scheduled, from Swedish religious horror In the Name of God to Dutch high-strangeness documentary The UFOs of Soesterberg to the sumptuous French vampire film The Vourdalak, and beyond. I’ve had the good fortune to watch and review four of the fest’s features from previous festivals for Horror Fuel, all of which I can recommend for Chattanooga Film Festival viewing. As always, you needn’t be concerned about spoilers in my reviews. Film descriptions are from the Chattanooga Film Festival website. Blind Cop 2 When an influx of illegal weapons trafficking explodes onto the scene, a grieving blind police officer must purge the city streets or risk mass chaos breaking loose.

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 20, 2024

Spoiler-Free Reviews: “They’re Here” and “The Hongfu Hotel” (Tribeca Festival 2024)

They’re Here (U.S., 2024) Codirectors Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez offer an unusual, thoroughly captivating take on the UFO experiencer phenomenon in their documentary They’re Here. The filmmakers focus on a small group of New Yorkers who claim to have had close encounters with extraterrestrial crafts and sometimes their occupants. Interview subjects include Cookie, a woman who claims to have been abducted by aliens multiple times; Twon, a stand-up comedian who bombs telling jokes about extraterrestrials; Dave, who made the local news by allegedly filming a UFO on his cell phone while under the influence of mushrooms; and Steve, a man who feels that he had a UFO experience but has difficulty remembering any details about the encounter, and who agrees to hypnosis to try to recall what happened. Claridge and Velez approach their subjects with both skepticism and affection, allowing them to fully express themselves knowing that many people don’t believe their stories. They’re Here takes an unusual route

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 18, 2024

Spoiler-Free Reviews: “The Weekend” and “Untitled Tim Burton Docuseries” (Tribeca)

The Weekend (Nigeria, 2024) Good foreign fright-fare gives viewers culturally different spins on subgenres. Daniel Oriahi’s The Weekend certainly delivers the local-flavor goods and the chills with its Nigerian take on in-laws-from-hell eeriness. Engaged couple Nikya (Uzoamaka Aniunoh), orphaned as a young girl and dreaming of having a close knit family, and Luc (Bucci Franklin), who has fallen out with his parents but still talks with his sister, travel — Luc reluctantly so — from their home in the city to his rural hometown with a local holiday approaching. Local criminals who threaten the couple turn out to be the least fearful of dangers that await. Aniunoh and Franklin head up an excellent cast, and Oriahi delivers the shudder-inducing goods as the mystery behind Luc’s family and the reasons for their high ranking in their village are revealed — and the aforementioned holiday serves up its nightmarish tension, too. Sumptuously shot by cinematographer Idhebor Kagho, The Weekend delivers a gruesome

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 12, 2024

Fantasia Reveals Scintillating Second Wave for 2024 Edition

When Fantasia International Film Festival, Canada’s legendary genre film fest, makes announcements, we here at Horror Fuel take notice, and we want to share the good news about the event with our readers. Following is the official press announcement about the second wave of thrillers, chillers, and other fantastic fare for this year’s edition. The Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its upcoming 28th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 18 through August 4, 2024, returning yet again at the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screens and events at Montréal’s Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma du Musée. The festival’s full lineup will be announced on July 3, but in the meantime, Fantasia is excited to reveal a select second wave of premiere titles, along with the recipient of their 2024 Canadian Trailblazer award. OPENING FILM: ANT TIMPSON’S BOOKWORM, STARRING ELIJAH WOOD AND NELL FISHER Fantasia’s 28th edition will open

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 7, 2024

Horror Fuel’s Highly Recommended Fright Fare for Tribeca 2024

New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival is renowned for showcasing incredible films from around the world, created by established filmmakers and new voices alike. Horror and related genre fare are always in strong supply at the fest, as evidenced by its presentation of two of my absolute favorite films of last year, The Seeding and You’ll Never Find Me, along with many other great features and short films. This year’s edition, which runs June 5–16, promises more incredible cinema of the fearful and the fantastic. I was privileged to get an early look at the following chillers and thrillers before the fest, and though I can’t publish reviews until after the films make their Tribeca premieres — watch for my thoughts here on Horror Fuel soon after that — I can, at this time, highly recommend them to fright-fare aficionados as must-see viewing! Read on for press release descriptions for each film — in alphabetical order, by genre — with

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 3, 2024

Il Tempo del Sogna – Dream Time (2023) – Rustblade Blu-ray

There’s nothing that hits quite like Italian horror cinema of the ’80s to mid-’90s. It is often outrageous, spectacularly gore-drenched, surreal and completely one-of-a-kind (even when it lifts elements from Hollywood fright flick blockbusters)… and just as it was rockin’ and rollin’, the wheels came off the cart shortly after the release of Michele Soavi’s kinda-sorta Dylan Dog adaptation, Cemetery Man in 1994. How did this occur? Well, that is precisely what Nocturno magazine’s Davide Pulici aims to decipher in Claudio Lattanzi’s (1988’s Zombi 5: The Killing Birds) documentary Il Tempo del Sogna. Following the journey from Lamberto Bava’s 1985 monsterpiece Demons, with a special focus given to the troubled production of it’s second sequel (which would eventually be retooled into Soavi’s The Church in 1989), on through late-era Fulci, and to late in the game stragglers such as 1997’s The Wax Mask (directed by effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti) we hear first-hand accounts of both the production of beloved fright

Continue reading →
DanXIII
May 19, 2024

Fantasia’s 2024 First Wave Announcement: From the Horrifying to the Hilarious

Canada’s Fantasia International Film Festival brings a drool-worthy feast of genre cinema to Montreal every year, and the first wave announcement for the fest’s 2024 edition — set for July 18 through August 4 — boasts a buffet of amazing features. Following is the official press announcement. The Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its upcoming 28th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 18 through August 4, 2024, returning yet again at the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screens and events at Montreal’s Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma du Musée. The festival’s full lineup will be announced on July 3, but this past Thursday, Fantasia exclusively revealed its first seventeen titles and a first look at its 2024 poster art. Please find the information below. The festival’s 2024 poster art, created by Montreal visual artist Donald Caron, brings back two of the festival’s most-beloved characters from earlier editions, returning

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
May 17, 2024

Movie Review: Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) – Blue Underground 4K

Goodbye Uncle Tom, the subject of today’s revoltin’ review, is brought to us by the demented documentarians Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi… the men behind legendary Italian doc Mondo Cane, who just so happened to have faced accusations of racisim after 1966’s Africa Addio (which detailed the continent’s decolonization). What did the duo do to set the record straight? Make a Mondo documentary all about slavery in America… I’m sure absolutely nothing will go wrong here… In a move as baffling as it is jaw-dropping, Jacopetti and Prosperi seemingly travel back in time and arrive on a Southern Plantation via helicopter after we hear a little history lesson on race relations in the U.S. (and a piece on hippies because it gets more naked bodies on screen)… don’t worry, it gets weirder, more wrong, and absolutely unhinged… Once there they are treated to a fancy dinner in their honor, during which we see (and hear) historical figures espouse their feelings

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Apr 27, 2024

Spoiler-Free Review: “Loch Ness: They Created a Monster” (Calgary Underground Film Festival)

Director John MacLaverty’s terrific documentary Loch Ness: They Created a Monster looks at the personalities involved in the search for Nessie, the legendary monster of Scotland’s Loch Ness, during the heyday of that searching, the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s a fascinating look at the men and women who devoted large parts of their lives to try and discover solid proof of the famous cryptid’s existence. The documentary illustrates the difference in attitudes between then and now, when scientific researchers, businesspeople, photographers, and other professionals had a more open-minded view toward high strangeness including the probability of a large, undiscovered beast living in the lake than today. That was a time when imagination felt stronger than cynicism, and skepticism was not quite as prevalent as it is now. Among the personalities featured in Loch Ness: They Created a Monster — through archival footage and interviews, and modern interviews with family members and colleagues, as well as surviving explorers — are

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Apr 25, 2024

More from Documentaries

Small Town Monsters Delves into the Legend of the Dogman in New Doc

The Land Between the Lakes, a popular wilderness destination, has become the hunting ground for a legendary best. Small Town Monsters‘ gripping new documentary, Dogman Territory: Werewolves in The Land Between the Lakes, explores the creature. This chilling exploration delves into the myth of the Dogman, a werewolf-like creature said to stalk the woods. Host Shannon LeGro collaborates with author Aaron Deese to interview witnesses, researchers, and longtime residents bordering Tennessee and Kentucky. Their quest? To uncover the truth behind a creature that many believe walks among us. Land Between the Lakes has a reputation for the strange and unsettling. Whispers of hauntings, sightings, and mysterious lights in the night paint a picture of a place where folklore bleeds into reality. The ever-increasing reports of Dogman sightings stand out, with law enforcement, campers, hunters, and even passersby all claiming encounters with these terrifying beings. The Land Between the Lakes is located on the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. Not long

Continue reading →
Kelli Marchman McNeely
Jul 11, 2024

Chattanooga Film Festival Offers a Hybrid Eleventh Edition This Month

Chattanooga Film Festival (https://www.chattfilmfest.org/) celebrates its 11th edition with a hybrid edition, so you can catch either in-person screenings from June 21–23 or relax at home with a virtual version from June 21–28, 2024. The lineup is a cornucopia of fright fare and other genre-film offerings. Lots of amazing features are scheduled, from Swedish religious horror In the Name of God to Dutch high-strangeness documentary The UFOs of Soesterberg to the sumptuous French vampire film The Vourdalak, and beyond. I’ve had the good fortune to watch and review four of the fest’s features from previous festivals for Horror Fuel, all of which I can recommend for Chattanooga Film Festival viewing. As always, you needn’t be concerned about spoilers in my reviews. Film descriptions are from the Chattanooga Film Festival website. Blind Cop 2 When an influx of illegal weapons trafficking explodes onto the scene, a grieving blind police officer must purge the city streets or risk mass chaos breaking loose.

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 20, 2024

Spoiler-Free Reviews: “They’re Here” and “The Hongfu Hotel” (Tribeca Festival 2024)

They’re Here (U.S., 2024) Codirectors Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez offer an unusual, thoroughly captivating take on the UFO experiencer phenomenon in their documentary They’re Here. The filmmakers focus on a small group of New Yorkers who claim to have had close encounters with extraterrestrial crafts and sometimes their occupants. Interview subjects include Cookie, a woman who claims to have been abducted by aliens multiple times; Twon, a stand-up comedian who bombs telling jokes about extraterrestrials; Dave, who made the local news by allegedly filming a UFO on his cell phone while under the influence of mushrooms; and Steve, a man who feels that he had a UFO experience but has difficulty remembering any details about the encounter, and who agrees to hypnosis to try to recall what happened. Claridge and Velez approach their subjects with both skepticism and affection, allowing them to fully express themselves knowing that many people don’t believe their stories. They’re Here takes an unusual route

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 18, 2024

Spoiler-Free Reviews: “The Weekend” and “Untitled Tim Burton Docuseries” (Tribeca)

The Weekend (Nigeria, 2024) Good foreign fright-fare gives viewers culturally different spins on subgenres. Daniel Oriahi’s The Weekend certainly delivers the local-flavor goods and the chills with its Nigerian take on in-laws-from-hell eeriness. Engaged couple Nikya (Uzoamaka Aniunoh), orphaned as a young girl and dreaming of having a close knit family, and Luc (Bucci Franklin), who has fallen out with his parents but still talks with his sister, travel — Luc reluctantly so — from their home in the city to his rural hometown with a local holiday approaching. Local criminals who threaten the couple turn out to be the least fearful of dangers that await. Aniunoh and Franklin head up an excellent cast, and Oriahi delivers the shudder-inducing goods as the mystery behind Luc’s family and the reasons for their high ranking in their village are revealed — and the aforementioned holiday serves up its nightmarish tension, too. Sumptuously shot by cinematographer Idhebor Kagho, The Weekend delivers a gruesome

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 12, 2024

Fantasia Reveals Scintillating Second Wave for 2024 Edition

When Fantasia International Film Festival, Canada’s legendary genre film fest, makes announcements, we here at Horror Fuel take notice, and we want to share the good news about the event with our readers. Following is the official press announcement about the second wave of thrillers, chillers, and other fantastic fare for this year’s edition. The Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its upcoming 28th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 18 through August 4, 2024, returning yet again at the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screens and events at Montréal’s Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma du Musée. The festival’s full lineup will be announced on July 3, but in the meantime, Fantasia is excited to reveal a select second wave of premiere titles, along with the recipient of their 2024 Canadian Trailblazer award. OPENING FILM: ANT TIMPSON’S BOOKWORM, STARRING ELIJAH WOOD AND NELL FISHER Fantasia’s 28th edition will open

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 7, 2024

Horror Fuel’s Highly Recommended Fright Fare for Tribeca 2024

New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival is renowned for showcasing incredible films from around the world, created by established filmmakers and new voices alike. Horror and related genre fare are always in strong supply at the fest, as evidenced by its presentation of two of my absolute favorite films of last year, The Seeding and You’ll Never Find Me, along with many other great features and short films. This year’s edition, which runs June 5–16, promises more incredible cinema of the fearful and the fantastic. I was privileged to get an early look at the following chillers and thrillers before the fest, and though I can’t publish reviews until after the films make their Tribeca premieres — watch for my thoughts here on Horror Fuel soon after that — I can, at this time, highly recommend them to fright-fare aficionados as must-see viewing! Read on for press release descriptions for each film — in alphabetical order, by genre — with

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Jun 3, 2024

Il Tempo del Sogna – Dream Time (2023) – Rustblade Blu-ray

There’s nothing that hits quite like Italian horror cinema of the ’80s to mid-’90s. It is often outrageous, spectacularly gore-drenched, surreal and completely one-of-a-kind (even when it lifts elements from Hollywood fright flick blockbusters)… and just as it was rockin’ and rollin’, the wheels came off the cart shortly after the release of Michele Soavi’s kinda-sorta Dylan Dog adaptation, Cemetery Man in 1994. How did this occur? Well, that is precisely what Nocturno magazine’s Davide Pulici aims to decipher in Claudio Lattanzi’s (1988’s Zombi 5: The Killing Birds) documentary Il Tempo del Sogna. Following the journey from Lamberto Bava’s 1985 monsterpiece Demons, with a special focus given to the troubled production of it’s second sequel (which would eventually be retooled into Soavi’s The Church in 1989), on through late-era Fulci, and to late in the game stragglers such as 1997’s The Wax Mask (directed by effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti) we hear first-hand accounts of both the production of beloved fright

Continue reading →
DanXIII
May 19, 2024

Fantasia’s 2024 First Wave Announcement: From the Horrifying to the Hilarious

Canada’s Fantasia International Film Festival brings a drool-worthy feast of genre cinema to Montreal every year, and the first wave announcement for the fest’s 2024 edition — set for July 18 through August 4 — boasts a buffet of amazing features. Following is the official press announcement. The Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its upcoming 28th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 18 through August 4, 2024, returning yet again at the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screens and events at Montreal’s Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma du Musée. The festival’s full lineup will be announced on July 3, but this past Thursday, Fantasia exclusively revealed its first seventeen titles and a first look at its 2024 poster art. Please find the information below. The festival’s 2024 poster art, created by Montreal visual artist Donald Caron, brings back two of the festival’s most-beloved characters from earlier editions, returning

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
May 17, 2024

Movie Review: Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) – Blue Underground 4K

Goodbye Uncle Tom, the subject of today’s revoltin’ review, is brought to us by the demented documentarians Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi… the men behind legendary Italian doc Mondo Cane, who just so happened to have faced accusations of racisim after 1966’s Africa Addio (which detailed the continent’s decolonization). What did the duo do to set the record straight? Make a Mondo documentary all about slavery in America… I’m sure absolutely nothing will go wrong here… In a move as baffling as it is jaw-dropping, Jacopetti and Prosperi seemingly travel back in time and arrive on a Southern Plantation via helicopter after we hear a little history lesson on race relations in the U.S. (and a piece on hippies because it gets more naked bodies on screen)… don’t worry, it gets weirder, more wrong, and absolutely unhinged… Once there they are treated to a fancy dinner in their honor, during which we see (and hear) historical figures espouse their feelings

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Apr 27, 2024

Spoiler-Free Review: “Loch Ness: They Created a Monster” (Calgary Underground Film Festival)

Director John MacLaverty’s terrific documentary Loch Ness: They Created a Monster looks at the personalities involved in the search for Nessie, the legendary monster of Scotland’s Loch Ness, during the heyday of that searching, the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s a fascinating look at the men and women who devoted large parts of their lives to try and discover solid proof of the famous cryptid’s existence. The documentary illustrates the difference in attitudes between then and now, when scientific researchers, businesspeople, photographers, and other professionals had a more open-minded view toward high strangeness including the probability of a large, undiscovered beast living in the lake than today. That was a time when imagination felt stronger than cynicism, and skepticism was not quite as prevalent as it is now. Among the personalities featured in Loch Ness: They Created a Monster — through archival footage and interviews, and modern interviews with family members and colleagues, as well as surviving explorers — are

Continue reading →
Joseph Perry
Apr 25, 2024
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