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“Alfred J. Hemlock” is a Fiendishly Clever Horror Romp
A small SUV screeches to a halt at the mouth of an alleyway. A man jumps out of the driver’s seat and circles the vehicle to drag his girlfriend from the passenger seat. She is crying and begging him to understand that she was not flirting with his friend at a party. Guy throws Emily to the ground, calling her names, and drives away, leaving her to walk alone through the dark alleyway crying and wishing she’d never been born.
Enter Alfred J. Hemlock…a spirit (or is it demon?) who offers Emily a reprieve from her loneliness, a respite from the horrors of her life. All she has to do is agree to die.
Thus begins, “Alfred J. Hemlock” a brand new horror short from writers Edward Lyons and Melissa Lyons. The duo manage in 14 minutes to do what many recent feature length filmmakers have been unable to do in an hour and a half. They create engaging, original characters that actually leave you craving more when the credits role. In many ways, it’s the perfect storm where exactly the right director, producers, writers, and cast of actors came together to make magic in a film that is both scary and fun.
Tristan McKinnon delivers a gleefully frightening performance as Alfred that manages to be one part Beetlejuice, one part Captain Jack Sparrow, and yet, something entirely his own. In his capable hands, Alfred J. Hemlock is a showman, a huckster selling a treacherous bill of goods, and McKinnon embraces the role, completely disappearing into the top hat wearing villain.
Renaye Loryman stars as Emily, Alfred’s victim and foil, with emotional dexterity. She is fragile and broken but she deftly turns that emotional vulnerability into a weapon against Hemlock’s arguments when he pushes her too far.
As a whole, the film works beautifully. Though it takes place in the here and now, Alfred brings an air of Victorian/Edwardian antiquity to this ghost story. It is gritty and dirty and beautiful due to its talented crew.
Simon Harding, the director of photography, has been a camera operator on a host of films from Star Wars Episode III to The Hobbit trilogy. He brings a keen eye to every shot. Meanwhile, costume designer Sarah Hoke’s previous work has included prop dressing on Mad Max: Fury Road. McKinnon told me himself that while he had a good idea of who Alfred was before filming began, it was Hoke’s costume that really cemented the identity for him and helped him inform the decisions for his performance. Likewise, Joff Bush’s score creates a perfect atmosphere at once playful and bristling.
Meanwhile Edward Lyons has been creating original shorts for over a decade, each with a different feel from the one before it. He is a master storyteller and he brought everything he had to create “Alfred J. Hemlock”.
With all of these fine talents, it’s no wonder that it was a finalist in this year’s iHorror Award for short films, nor that it will be making it’s world premiere in the upcoming Bermuda International Film Festival which runs May 1-7, 2017 in Hamilton, Bermuda. The prestigious festival is an Academy Award qualifier in the category of short subject films. This puts “Alfred J. Hemlock” in a place where few horror movies find themselves.
I cannot recommend this short film enough. Alfred and Emily will be telling their stories in festivals around the world and you owe it to yourself to see this one as soon as you can. To keep up with all the latest new, you can follow “Alfred J. Hemlock” on Facebook, their official website, and on Twitter @AlfredJHemlock. Check out the trailer below!
ALFRED J HEMLOCK – TRAILER from Edward Lyons on Vimeo.
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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