LevelFilm Archives - Awesome Friday!

18 March 202218 March 2022

Interview: Seth A Smith on his Canadian Horror Film ‘Tin Can’

Greetings programs! Welcome to a special episode of the Awesome Friday Podcast in which I sit down with director Seth A Smith to talk about his film Tin Can. Tin Can played at both Fantasia Festival last year and the Vancouver International Film Festival, which is where I originally saw it. It is now getting a wide release from LevelFILM, and Seth and I sat down on Zoom to talk about it.

There are streaming links for the film and an embedded player for the episode after the jump. Join me!

13 December 20218 January 2022

Review: ‘The Boathouse’ cribs from some classics to create an atmospheric horror story

There’s a scene in the middle of The Boathouse in which the characters discuss a case of plagiarism over dinner. One character, a professor, tells the story of a student who copied a work by Joyce and then feigned ignorance. “If you’re going to steal,” he says, “maybe steal from someone more obscure.” This leads into an entire discussion of theft vs influence and how all of that shapes art and literature.

It’s a startlingly relevant scene as well because The Boathouse either –depending on your point of view– borrows from or is influenced very heavily by some classics, most notably the work of Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock. Do you know why these influences are classics, though? Because they’re good.

14 June 202119 April 2022

Review: ‘Akilla’s Escape’ examines cycles of crime

Crime doesn’t pay unless you’re really good at it. Akilla is really good at it. He has a marijuana farm, distribution network, men in his employ, and a friendly relationship with the local crime lord, The Greek. Weed has been made legal though, and rather than continue the cycles of his life Akilla wants out.

After putting all his affairs in order, he goes to inform The Greek, but when he arrives, he’s greeted by the barrel of a gun. That gun is in the hands of 15-year-old Sheppard, who is in the middle of robbing the crime lord with some friends. The friends escape, but Akilla subdues Sheppard and is now faced with a choice: turn him over to The Greek or disrupt the same cycle of crime he got caught in some 20 years before.

19 May 202111 January 2022

Review: ‘Trigger Point’ is a knockoff of better movies.

You’ve seen this before. The normal small-town man with a hilariously comprehensive home security system (which he uses to save stray cats) and excellent hacker skills (which he uses to help kids advance in video games), whose quiet life is disrupted when his history as an elite assassin catches up to him. It’s a classic setup and one that has worked to great effect many times. Unfortunately, this is not one of those times.

12 May 202119 April 2022

Review: ‘Sugar Daddy’; Kelly McCormack is one to watch in this excellent indie feature

What are you willing to do to make it? Will it be worth it if you do? These are two of the questions at the heart of Sugar Daddy. The story follows Darren (writer and star Kelly McCormack), a young woman who moved to the city to work on her music. She has multiple part-time jobs, none of which pay enough on their own for her to survive, and all of which don’t allow enough free time for her to work on said music until she stumbles into a website where older men pay young women to go on dates with them.