Video blog

Based on the true story of Australian pianist David Helfgott, this delightful movie charts the early and traumatic early years. Telling the story in flashback we see David as he grows up and into a child prodigy while his father abuses him and his siblings with the memory of his childhood in Europe and the loss of his family in the concentration camps. David finally breaks away from his father and goes away to study overseas, he later suffers a breakdown and returns to Australia and a life in an institution. Many years later he is released and through several twists of fate (in reality even more unlikely than film portrays) he starts playing a piano in a bar before finally returning to the concert hall.

Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is writing a paper on urban legends when she hears about the Candyman (Tony Todd), who was once an ex-slave-turned-artist name Daniel Robitaille, who had an affair his client’s daughter. Robitaille’s right hand was sawn off, he was covered in honey, and stung to death by bees. If anyone says the word “Candyman” five times in a mirror, he’ll appear behind that person, a bloody hook as a replacement for his hand, and kill him. A series of unsolved murders is happening in the Cabrini Green projects and Helen is using this to help with her paper. The residents say the Candyman is to blame, but Helen doesn’t believe it. Until she meets the man with a hook for a hand. Now, he’s begun to murder her friends and no one believes her. Can Helen clear her name and stop the Canydman from killing anyone else?

It has been six months since Dorothy has returned to Kansas from Oz and she still can not sleep. She has been going on about imaginary places and people so much that Aunt Em takes her to see a doctor. Dorothy promptly escapes from the mental hospital and wakes up in Oz where her favorite chichen can now talk. There she meets a whole new bunch of friends and they set off to rescue the Scarecrow from an evil Nome King who has found her Ruby Slippers and has used them to lay waste to the Emerald city and take over Oz.

Not all Christmas stories are full of cheer - take the disturbing childhood of Billy Lenz, for example. Born during Christmas, little Billy Lenz suffered from Jaundice because of a liver defect, and was unwanted by his cruel mother (who only saw the husband she’d come to despise when she looked at her son). While she let her true feelings be known to him with beatings and abuse, only his father showed him compassion like a parent should. But on Christmas Eve in 1975, his unfaithful mother gave him one of the most cruelest gifts of all, as she made five-year-old Billy observe his beloved father’s brutal murder at her own hands and those of her lover with a claw hammer. Before burying him under the house, she locked Billy in the attic for good, to hold his silence of what he’d witnessed that night. His only contact from then on was when she came to punish him for making a noise or other such trivial nuisances, while she was with her lover and starting a “new” family. As Billy’s mother fell pregnant with a daughter and treated her with love, which Billy had never experienced with his mother, Billy came out of the attic on Christmas Eve 1991, taking a rolling pin to his mother’s head, and a pointed tree ornament to her lovers eye before leaving his sister as disfigured as he was by blinding her. Before he could finish the job police forced there way in and dragged him off to mental institution and his sister a foster home, whose eye sight was saved in one eye… but not the other. Cut to the present where a security guard has been monitoring Billy’s progress since he came into his care, back in 1991. Knowing full well that during this time for fifteen years, Billy has made a break from this asylum, but never succeeding… until now. Far away, his childhood home is now a sorority house, where nine sisters and their house-mother are celebrating the holiday season together …but tonight they’re about to get a surprise visitor… and it’s not Santa.

On his birthday, Walter Sparrow, an amiable dog-catcher, takes a call that leaves him dog bit and late to pick up his wife. She’s browsed in a bookstore, finding a blood-red-covered novel, a murder mystery with numerology that loops constantly around the number 23. The story captivates Walter: he dreams it, he notices aspects of his life that can be rendered by “23,” he searches for the author, he stays in the hotel (in room 23) where events in the novel took place, and he begins to believe it was no novel. His wife and son try to help him, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes to protect him. Slowly, with danger to himself and to his family, he closes in on the truth.

Igby Slocumb, a rebellious and sarcastic seventeen year-old boy, is at war with the oppressive world of his East Coast “old money” family. With a schizophrenic father, a self-absorbed, distant mother, and a shark-like young Republican big brother, Igby figures there must be a better life out there, and he sets out to find it. After happily flunking out of several Prep Schools, Igby escapes into the bohemian underworld of Manhattan. His darkly comic trip—shared by a deviant cast of characters, including his terminally bored, part-time lover Sookie, his Godfather’s trophy mistress Rachel, and smack-dealing performance artists Russel—veers from bizarre to tragic in Igby’s ultimately noble attempt to keep himself from “going down.”

The psychiatric intern Clark Stevens (Joshua Leonanrd) comes to Cunningham Hall, a mental healthy facility administrated by Dr. Franks (Lance Henriksen), for a training period before his graduation in medical college. He gets close to the resident Sara (Jordan Ladd) and to Ben London, a dangerous patient lodged in cell 44 in the basement of the clinic. Clark becomes intrigued with a boy, who seems to be a ghost, and finds that Dr. Franks does not use real medication in the patients. A further investigation shows hidden dark secrets in the clinic.

A partially handicapped man named Karl is released from a mental hospital, several years after murdering his mother and another person. Karl is often questioned if he will ever kill again, and he shrugs in response saying there is no reason to. Now out of the mental institution, Karl settles in his old, small hometown, occupying himself by fixing motors. After meeting a young boy named Frank who befriends him, Karl is invited to stay at Frank’s house with his mother Linda- who views Karl as a strange but kind and generous man. However, Linda’s abusive boyfriend Doyle, sees things differently in the way rules ought to be run- normally insulting Linda’s homosexual friend Vaughan as well as Karl’s disabilities, and having wild parties with his friends. As Karl’s relation with Frank grows, he is ever so watchful of Doyle’s cruel actions.

Rachel Keller is a journalist investigating a videotape that may have killed four teenagers (including her niece). There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. If the legend is correct, Rachel will have to run against time to save her son’s and her own life.

Written and directed by Eric Forsberg, this unabashedly low-budget sci-fi flick has a young woman being abducted by aliens on a camping trip—and then going through an even harder ordeal when she wakes up in a brutal military hospital for the rehabilitation of abductees.