Happy New Year, dear reader! 2025 is a special year at CineFiles Reviews, as the arbitrary markings of time that we have chosen to organize our lives around dictate that it is this site’s 10th anniversary.
To celebrate, I have ventured to begin a new outlet for film criticism: Bleeding Eye Cinema. There is a category of odd media that I would like to cover but which does not necessarily fit nicely within this site’s coverage of mainly new releases. I have dabbled in it here before, with a short series on psychotronic movies and occasional one-off analysis pieces about wacky misfires like Foodfight!. By and large, though, the style of writing here generally hews closer to the stuffy, boring film criticism voice, where I snidely look down my nose at contemporary cinema and pretend to have what they call “expertise” on the subject.
This is all to say that the writing style at Bleeding Eye Cinema is slightly different, and I think it is best to separate those articles from what I do here. At Bleeding Eye, I want to watch films that make my brain hurt, and perhaps (perhaps!) it will be fun to read about the headaches. If nothing else, I am committed to seeking out a corpus of strange, esoteric movies that either don’t quite compute in the brain or are cult gems that have faded into the background of our Internet film culture. The goal is for the articles to introduce readers to some titles they’ve never heard of before. Real weird stuff. The stuff that makes your eyes hurt.
2025 will be a busy year that I am only choosing to make busier by launching a Substack. To pull back the curtain briefly (oh, so very briefly): between writing a Ph.D dissertation, teaching, doing other odd jobs for extra cash, and now having two publications that I need to keep from going dormant, it seems counter-intuitive to start a new publication. New articles here on CineFiles are already fairly sporadic (if you look closely, you may notice that I have much more free time to write in summer and in December – I wonder why that is…)
I’ll do my best to continue writing on this site, and Bleeding Eye will have (mostly) weekly posts at least through March. I hope you check out the new newsletter (which is free!), and I very much hope you enjoy the new style of content over there.
To give you a sense of what we talk about over there, here is a preview of a forthcoming post, where I watched a truly insane gem, Andy The Talking Hedgehog.
Andy the Talking Hedgehog
… The film begins with a classic bait-and-switch screenwriting cold open: Our hero, a talking hedgehog named Andy, has been kidnapped? How did he get here?! Well, we’ll have to wait to find out! First, we have to go back a few days to when Andy was in the park with his best friend Lilly Mason (Karina Martinez). Lilly made a wish, see, that … oh, wait, what? We’re flashing back to an even earlier point in time? OK. I guess that’s fine.
We back up to earlier that day (?) where we are introduced to Lilly’s family: her mother (Colleen Gentry), father (Dean Cain), older sister Tina (Allison Rowe), and Whiskers, the hairless cat that exists in a strange void space above a cabinet. Over freeze frames, Andy quickly gives us the two-sentence bio on each character.
There is little time to absorb all of this expository information before we jump back to Lilly making the fateful wish, which transports her to a magical world where Tara Reid is a “fairy BFF.” This fairy BFF, despite having never met Lilly before, knows everything about the young girl, which … is strange, but I guess they’re BFFs, so it’s fine … even though Lilly doesn’t know this adult stranger … we haven’t even hit the 10-minute mark yet …
This magical fairy, who is never given a name so I’m just going to call her Tara Reid (it’s better than what Andy calls her: “funny-looking little fairy chick”), grants Lilly one wish. Lilly wishes for “all her friends to talk,” and her only friends are apparently “flowers, birds, and Andy” (I would make a mean joke at Lilly’s expense here, but my New Year’s resolution was to stop bullying children. Something Andy should consider, but more on this later).
I guess Tara Reid mishears Lilly’s wish, as she repeats the wish back to Lilly as “flowers, birds and animals,” which, like, really? I hate birds as much as the next rational human, but they do exist within the category of animals. For a script, it’s pretty redundant. Unless it is meant to be a joke? Is Tara Reid mishearing the little girl and saying animals a scripted joke, or does the screenwriter believe birds and animals are two entirely separate ontological categories of being? It doesn’t help that later a different character says the exact same thing: flowers, birds, and animals. Is this an animal taxonomy thing that I’m too stupid to understand, or am I being gaslit by Joel Paul Reisig into believing that birds aren’t animals?
(We’re at the 6-minute mark).
And I’d say all is well, and that we can continue full steam ahead without needing to pause the Tubi DVD again, but … is the internal logic of this movie already fundamentally confused? Indeed. One of the first lines Andy speaks, in voiceover as he is being kidnapped, is that it is normal that we can understand Andy speaking because “animals talk all the time. You people simply just don’t want to listen.” So which is it? Is it a wish granted, or are humans ignorant of animal speech? …
This post continues in a future installment of Bleeding Eye Cinema, coming soon and available for free on Substack.
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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