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“A blazingly confident feature debut…
An enjoyably blood-soaked thriller with unexpectedly lyrical interludes…
Strikingly impressive”
–Hollywood Reporter

“Admirably well-crafted … a polished first feature.”
–Variety

“There’s more than a little raw skill on display.”
–New York Times

“Shows promise for its precocious director.”
– The Village Voice

“The film has echoes of Cop Car and Mean Streets,
mixing comic juvenilia with earthy violence…
There’s a confidence and energy to Stray Bullets.”
–Los Angeles Times

“Fessenden displays a sense of parred authority that would be
impressive for older, more experienced artists…
What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films
is Fessenden’s sense of quietness. The filmmaker lingers on images,
informing them with inchoate dread as well as a talismanic sense of wrongness.
… reduces a stock scenario to its primal essence,
informing genre blood sport with pulp transcendentalism.”
–Slant Magazine

“One of the most intense films thus far to be released in 2017…
a methodical character study… utilizes dread and suspense
the way most other crime thrillers would use shootouts and car chases…”
—CinemaSlasher

“the screenplay delivers a few nicely unexpected developments —
including one seriously shattering leftfield jolt —
in a film which foregrounds character and dialog ahead of slam-bang pyrotechnics.
…the director really hits his stride in these latter stages, deploying slow-motion in a mature, sparing fashion, and making particularly effective use of his own haunting, guitar-heavy score”
– Film Journal

“One thing that is particularly impressive is the world that Jack has created
and the collection of fascinating bad guys that inhabit it.
They are people that demand more screen time and easily
could be featured in additional movies in the future.
The acting is exceptional… a devoted character study.”
–Movie Sleuth

“Makes excellent use of its widescreen dimensions…
Jack Fessenden shows he’s already an assured image-maker”
–Chicago Now

“Fessenden’s instincts are right on target…
a pungent, tactile sense of place … de-emphasizes the crime drama
for the sake of character development.”
–J.B Spins

“A pretty great crime film.”
–San Francisco Weekly

2/12/2017
86% Rotten Tomatoes

Glass Eye Pix continues its tradition of providing fans with extensive
Behind-the-Scenes featurettes with the evocatively titled
SWEATING BULLETS: The making of a kid’s movie,
a glimpse into the process of making Jack Fessenden’s feature debut.

check out the Clip Below for a taste!!

iTunes EXTRAS includes an hour-long behind the scenes, SWEATING BULLETS
and the zombie film RIDING SHOTGUN

Click here to check out the exclusive posters…

Jack Fessenden, son of filmmaker Larry Fessenden (who runs indie fright factory Glass Eye Pix and helmed the likes of HABIT, WENDIGO and THE LAST WINTER), didn’t wait long to follow in his father’s footsteps. The teen auteur’s “first serious” production, a short zombie thriller called RIDING SHOTGUN that he made when he was just 13, is commercially available for the first time this week, and we’ve got exclusive words with Fessenden about it.

RIDING SHOTGUN will be visible exclusively via iTunes tomorrow, February 10, in conjunction with Screen Media Films’ theatrical/VOD release of Fessenden’s feature debut, the violent actioner STRAY BULLETS. (SHOTGUN will be included with an iTunes purchase of the latter.) Fessenden and his friend Alex Hoffman wrote the short together, and also star as two friends bickering their way through a postapocalyptic wasteland infested with the living dead. “We developed the story in one day,” the now-17-year-old Fessenden (who discussed STRAY BULLETS in RUE MORGUE #173) tells us. “We were really sort of playing extreme versions of ourselves. The movie depends on our chemistry, and I think it works nicely.”

Read more at Ru Morgue…

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None of which diminishes Jack’s achievement, Yes, his home was a supportive, immersive film school and he grew up watching young filmmakers ranging from Kelly Reichert to Ti West benefit from his father’s mentoring. But he also saw others spend years on movies they never finished, and the takeaway was a hard lesson he was fortunate enough not to have had to learn firsthand: Pre-production isproduction and winging it is a luxury for which low budgets do not allow. Jack went into Stray Bullets knowing that if you’re going to shoot a theatrical feature in 16 days, every minute on set/location has to count.

“Every scene was storyboarded by my dad and myself in the weeks leading up to the shoot,” he explains. “That’s not to say that we didn’t change things on set—we were very flexible—but we allowed ourselves to be flexible because we had that framework in place, which also made to very easy to edit the film.

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Read the whole article here

Fewer and fewer films are made and released with striking and distinctive voices all their own, and Jim Mickle’s vivid post-apocalyptic road film Stake Land from 2010 is such a picture. Written by its lead actor Nick Damici, who plays a tough vampire slayer of few words named Mister, the film is as American as they come with a stark vision of an apocalyptic future where vicious vampires have decimated the population. Damici’s Mister is a surrogate father and teacher of sorts to a young man named Martin (Conor Paulo), and together they form a special bond as they pick up more allies in a world gone wild. The sequel – Stake Land II (a.k.a. The Stakelander) – picks up years after the events of the original, but Damici is back as a rougher, harder version of Mister, and in this interview he discusses his inspirations for his apocalyptic vision, and where he’s coming from as the creator of these two vivid forays into the post-apocalyptic genre.

Read whole article…