When it was announced that the newest film from eighteen-year-old director Emily Hagins, entitled My Sucky Teen Romance, was going to premiere at SxSW, I was ecstatic. Almost every member of our SXSW coverage team either lives or has previously lived in Austin and knows Emily personally. Hell, some of us even donated our time to assist in the movie’s completion. That made it slightly difficult to lend our voices to reviewing the film. So do we decline to review it? Do we expend no words on it at all? Yes…and no. There is a story here, and a damn good one at that, completely divorced from the film itself. Emily’s story. Hagins wrote her first feature-length film, Pathogen, at age 11.  The next year, she earned a grant from the Austin Film Society to produce Pathogen, effectively becoming the youngest recipient of that award. Her tireless dedication to making her first feature film, and the fact that she wasn’t even in high school yet, attracted the attention of a trio of documentary filmmakers who noticed Hagins’s casting call posted on a local website called Austinactors.net. They crafted their 2009 film Zombie Girl: The Movie around her efforts. Between 7th and 8th grade, when the biggest thing that happened to most of us was getting our first kiss at a skating party, she was hard at work on The Retelling, her second feature. And now, here at SXSW 2011, Hagins’s third film played to bright marquee lights and packed houses [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

One of my favorite films of all time turns 35 this week. An early effort from a then unknown director named Steve Spielberg. It was essentially a low budget monster movie set in a beautiful town near Martha’s Vineyard. It featured a few recognizable faces including an older character actor named Robert Shaw. When it was released, it scared the living daylights out of audiences with its “realistic” portrayal of shark attacks. The film was called Jaws, and its legend and popularity have aged like the finest of wines across these three-and-a-half decades.

We’ve been talking a lot about slashers and the fun we have watching them. But is there more to the blood soaked hack ‘em ups? Robert Fure makes the case for the Slasher as Artistic expression.

Everyone owns a few DVDs that they might be embarrassed — nay, humiliated to admit to. With this in mind I have decided to take a stand and say “Yes, I own that copy of (insert name of cringe worthy DVD here) and I am damn proud of it.”