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Bad Grandmas will screen at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar, in ‘The Loop’) on Thursday November 2nd at 8pm. Tickets include a Sliff opening night reception. Ticket information can be found Here. Pam Grier, director/writer Srikant Chellappa, producer Dan Byington, and two of the film’s co-stars, Sally Eaton and Jilanne Klaus, will all be in attendance.

Sliff’s opening night features the world premiere of Bad Grandmas, a St. Louis-shot comedy by co-writer/director Srikant Chellappa and co-writer Jack Snyder, the team behind such polished productions as “Ghost Image” and “Fatal Call,” which were based locally but screened both nationally and internationally. Starring the late Florence Henderson (“The Brady Bunch”) in her final role and the legendary Pam Grier (“Jackie Brown”), “Bad Grandmas” recounts the misadventures of senior citizens Mimi (Henderson), Coralee (Grier), Bobbi (Susie Wall), and Virginia (Sally Eaton). The friends’ quiet life is upended when Bobbi’s son-in-law,...

The one and only Pam Grier will be honored by Cinema St. Louis with a ‘Women in Film Award’ when she’s in town for this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Pam’s iconic movie career began when she moved to Los Angeles in the late ‘60s from her native North Carolina at age 18. After a tiny role in Russ Meyer’s Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970), she landed a job as a receptionist for American International Pictures where she was discovered by Jack Hill, an Aip director who cast her in a pair of women’s prison films: The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972). Soon she was known as the “Queen of Blaxploitation” at a time when film roles for African-American women were, as Grier puts it, “practically invisible, or painfully stereotypical”.

Sliff, which runs Nov. 2nd-12th will kick off with...

Written and Directed by Vanessa Roman

Featuring Marisa Roman, Jilanne Klaus, William Lynn, Haley Busch, David Wassilak, Katie Arnold

I used to love watching the now-cult show Are You Afraid of The Dark?. There’s something deliciously earnest and seriously 90s about that series. It was also for kids, so it doesn't matter that it's silly and dated.

Play Dead, however, aspires to much more. I’m not quite sure what, but it’s definitely reaching for some Spielbergian-level of emotional manipulation. It fails in a spectacular manner, rendering it an ambitious project that doesn't use any of the following tools: logic, consistency or some semblance of realistic dialogue. Actually, if you look at Play Dead as an experimental film, it’s kind of interesting.

But no, it falls into the Are You Afraid of the Dark? category of cheese with special effects that haven’t been used since that...