Blood in the Snow Film Festival Day 1: "Anything for Jackson" and "The Purgamentum"

Welcome to my blogs featuring and reviewing the films from this year's Blood in the Snow Festival!

My 13 Horrifically Silly Days blog overlapped with some of the festival, so these posts are a little behind. Anyway, take a look at what aired on Super Channel on Wednesday October 28th:

9:00 pm (repeats at 12:00 am) ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (Dir. Justin G. Dyck) (102 mins)

Dr. Henry Walsh (Julian Richings, Ejecta) and his wife, Audrey (Sheila McCarthy, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) are still grief stricken over the loss of their grandson, Jackson, in a car accident two years earlier. They would do anything to have him back including an incredible plan that includes kidnapping one of Henry’s pregnant patients and a ritual that works as a ‘reverse exorcism’. Keith Cooper’s script and the lead performances play it straight for this haunting tale of good people driven to do a horrible thing and facing the consequences.

MY TAKE:  These are not your every day Satanists...not the dark, evil couple you would expect. Julian Richings gives a charming turn as Henry, a bumbling, somewhat scattered fellow, and Audrey, so brilliantly portrayed by Sheila McCarthy, is as incredibly sympathetic as she is fastidious. What a delightful pair of Satanic Worshipers! But the mayhem they unleash in their attempt at a reverse exorcism is a dark and twisted treat -- including a tooth-flossing lady straight out of a dentist's nightmare, a contortionist constantly suffocating and a great effect reminiscent of the wood chipper scene in Fargo.

Opening with the short film THE PURGAMENTUM (Dir. Julie Bruns, Steven Kammerer, Shawn Major) (5:01 mins)

MY TAKE:  Some beautiful and gritty underwater footage! Takeaway -- maybe don't dump so much plastic into our oceans and lakes, huh?