I’m going to continue with my THE CROW studies but there aren’t many actual THE CROW movies to review, so here’s a little bit of a side mission.
EL MUERTO (as it’s called on streaming, THE DEAD ONE on DVD) is a 2007 DTV movie I always assumed was a THE CROW wannabe. It stars Wilmer Valderrama (SUMMER CATCH) as Juan Diego, a guy who’s really into Day of the Dead and on the way to a Day of the Dead celebration (while wearing skull makeup and a mariachi suit decorated with little white bones) he crashes into a tree and is possessed by Aztec gods. Then when he gets to the celebration he sees a shrine to himself and realizes oh shit, I died and a year has passed and now I’ve come back with supernatural powers. Like THE CROW, except different. Adn on his favorite holiday. What the fuck. (read the rest of this shit…)
GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE is the fifth of the “Monsterverse” movies, and to me the best one. Don’t get me wrong, I kinda liked the attempt at a serious Spielbergian approach in 
The producer I always associate with 
DOWNTIME is a 1997 British film set in a dilapidated apartment building. I feel like somebody might’ve recommended it to me here years ago, but maybe it’s just in my head because the cover says “MOVE OVER BRUCE WILLIS, A BRITISH ACTION MOVIE TO DIE FOR.” I didn’t really think of it as an action movie, but the 
Fairly often I get emails from people who made low budget movies, sometimes they seem to be familiar with me, sometimes they don’t, but they’re trying to do the very hard work of getting people to notice their needle out there in the haystack of what’s available. I sincerely wish every one of them well, but I don’t take very many of them up on it. My fear is that 99.9% of the time it’s not gonna be some hidden gem, or even some crazy failure, it’s just gonna be okay for what it is. And I know I’ll feel bad for them and want to say nice things, but what good does it do them for a niche critic like me to be nice about their movie being okay? I don’t know.
I guess I would classify CATCH THE FAIR ONE (2021) as a thriller more than an action movie, but it’s a certified badass thriller. It’s the first acting role for Kali Reis, the former world champion boxer who recently starred with Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country (her reward for this, I believe). Reis also co-wrote the movie with director Josef Kubota Wladyka.
MOON GARDEN (2022) is a strange little fantasy film from writer/director (and also editor, and sound designer, and production designer, and art director, and visual effects artist, and colorist, and animator) Ryan Stevens Harris. Oscilloscope Laboratories gave it an arthouse theatrical run, and recently put it on blu-ray and DVD, and it’s also on Shudder at the moment, though I wouldn’t really think of it as a horror movie.
After watching 
EL CONDE is a pretty simple idea: what if Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from 1974 through 1990, was in fact a vampire? Sort of the opposite of our “
