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Llévame en tus brazos.When the Locarno Film Festival announced that its 2023 Retrospective section would survey Mexican popular cinema between the 1940s and 1960s, it meant not only that the canon of Mexican film history would also necessarily be the subject of major revision—or, at least, debate—but also that a considerable amount of resources would be expended on the digitization and restoration of films long omitted from official histories. The 36-film program, “Spectacle Every Day—The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema,” precipitated new digital versions of many varied genre movies produced between 1941 and 1966, some well-known today, but the majority rescued from obscurity. Unlike previous retrospectives put on by the Locarno Film Festival, and reflecting recent shifts in the accessibility and quality of scanning and restoration technologies, this year’s series primarily featured digital copies of the films with only a few notable celluloid exceptions. When I first perused the festival program,...

The Lord works in injurious ways in “The Church,” a low-budget indie horror meller that traps protagonists in a house of worship where they’re beset by malevolent spirits. Just what those spirits are — whether they’re working for Yahweh or Beelzebub or both, etc. — is among many key questions left murky in a film that lands squarely on the amateurish end of the scale as both pure genre exercise and faith-based entertainment. Ambitiously opening on 30 U.S. screens, the project is best viewed as a training ground for first-time feature writer-director Dom Frank, who can only do better with the already-announced sequel.

The church in question is a historic inner-city Philadelphia cathedral whose flock has long been tended by Pastor James (Bill Moseley) and his ancestors. Lately, it has fallen into disrepair as a dwindling congregation can scarcely fund renovation and the neighborhood is gentrifying, rendering the building less...

Nicolas Winding Refn announced last October he was launching a free curated website of films and essays, and now it’s almost time for that website to launch. The Guardian reports byNWR.com is set to launch later this July, and Refn celebrated his upcoming website debut by telling the publication the first four films that will be made available to stream for free. Refn handpicked Curtis Harrington’s “Night Tide,” Bert Williams’ “The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds,” Ron Ormond’s “The Burning Hell,” and Dale Berry’s “Hot Thrills and Warm Chills.”

The Guardian asked Refn to write a bit about why he chose each title, which provides some very Refn insight into each cult movie. The filmmaker explained the reason for creating a website by saying, “Over recent years, I’ve bought and had restored scores of old movies as a hobby. I wondered what to do with them.

As he gears up byNWR.com, a new curated platform of films and more that’s billed as “An Unadulterated Expressway for the Arts,” Drive helmer Nicolas Winding Refn described the reasoning behind the site, telling me it’s “like a Rubik’s Cube in outer space, full of culture inspiring the world to be a better place.”

In a piece he earlier penned for The Guardian, timed to the July 4th holiday, Refn wrote, “This is a frightening time to be alive,” but “certainly, we have to embrace such an apocalyptic time, because the alternative is hand-wringing inertia and that’s perfect for those in power.” And what’s needed, “is art: good, challenging art, not good-taste art, which is the chief enemy of creativity.”

An expert on cinema of different genres and eras — he’s developing remakes of some classic horror pics — Refn has acquired and restored old movies as a hobby.

As a dictionary-style onscreen definition explains at the start of “Gehanna: Where Death Lives,” that G-word is a long-standing term for a “most accursed place [or] destination of the wicked,” although not necessarily to be confused with Hell. An opening sequence of an old man having his face ripped off by muttering ritual practitioners in loincloths certainly doesn’t make it seem an ideal getaway spot.

Nonetheless, this English-language directorial debut for makeup FX specialist Hiroshi Katagiri sets its protagonists on a sacred burial spot they hope to turn into a commercial resort — something to which the resident spirits take great exception, natch. Trapped in an underground labyrinth, their predicament becomes all too relatable, since the movie itself strands viewers in a dimly lit purgatory that grows interminable, with little in the way of scares or excitement as relief. It’s not a total wash, but the eventually dreary mix of...

In The Overlook, A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky examines the misfits, underappreciated gems, and underseen classics of film history.

It was a buddy who collected film prints of 1970s hardcore porn—a real specialist, a historian—that introduced me to A Thief In The Night, the greatest evangelical end-times scare flick ever made. Or maybe it was my friend who owned the video store. We all lived in the same building then (next to the video store, as a matter of fact), and these sorts of discoveries tended to spread and dissipate quickly, like the smoke, cooking, and pet smells that seeped into the dingy stairwell from our apartment doors. I think we all knew the howling live-action Jack Chick tract If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, the first of several movies made by the exploitation director Ron Ormond for Estus Pirkle, an unhinged preacher from...

This Christian Scare Film about the evils of porn and/or masturbation has been making the rounds for the last few days, and is filled with comedy gold. A heavy-lidded ginger tries to overcome temptation when he’s invited by his bud for an evening of munchies, special buzz juice and … mutual masturbation? Thankfully, his “Professor” is always standing by to provide support.

A lot of people are wondering if it’s some kind of parody, but even though it has been edited down to provide the maximum awesomeness, it is definitely real.

It’s easy to question its validity, as most Christian Scare Films run the gamut from batshit insane to really batshit insane, so who can tell a parody from the real thing anymore?

Let’s take a look back at some of the most famous, infamous, or must-be-seen-to-be-believed CSFs, and for the sake of our sanity, we...