Disco (2018) - Movie Review

Most people get their friends together to watch movies. Brad Jones is the guy who gets his friends together to make them, and to his credit, it usually results in product that is watchable outside of his inner circle. With as equal a love for the glory days of exploitation cinema as he does all things 70’s, his homebrew style of filmmaking may not be the most technically polished stuff around but the real-life comradery between him and those around him can be reasonably relied on for something fun. And his latest, Disco, is no exception.

Jesus, Bro! (2017) - Movie Review

In the year of some people’s Lord 2014, something happened. A film by the name of God’s Not Dead was released by PureFlix Entertainment. After seeing the rather intense reactions to it online, I checked it out for myself. I didn’t like it. At all. Here’s my review on just how much wrong is contained within. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: It’s a bad movie, something we get a lot of year-in and year-out. However, this was decidedly different because God’s Not Dead apparently stuck such a chord with both its defenders and its detractors that it spawned, as put aptly by critic and filmmaker Brad Jones, “a golden age of a different kind of exploitation film”.

 

Over the next three years, a slew of similar Christian-oriented cinema began to spring up, from the hardcore apologetics of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas to the seemingly unaware sexism of War Room right down to the furthering of dangerous narrative of God’s Not Dead 2. Brad himself has covered several of these films on video, either in character as the Cinema Snob or just giving his immediate post-watching thoughts for his Midnight Screenings series. However, it seems that his interest in the subject still can’t be sated so he went all-out and made a feature-length production to mock the hell out of this sub-genre. But how did it turn out?

Freak Out (2003) - Movie Review

While the semi-recent phenomenon brought up by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse project, complete with fake trailers that for some reason show some of the best of their respective directors’ work (seriously, I want to see a full-length version of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving), modern-day exploitation is far from a new thing. And long before he’d end up making a career out of mocking old-school cinema involving nuns, Nazis and cannibals, Brad Jones was doing much the same. From his snuff film thriller Cheap to his more recent efforts like the Italian giallo homages in The Cinema Snob Movie, you get a definite impression that the man has a clear admiration for this style of filmmaking. So, in what I’m sure is going to be me playing the long game, let’s take a look at his (available) filmography starting with one of the earliest productions to come out of Stoned Gremlin.