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We are just now receiving word that Paranormal Asylum: The Revenge of Typhoid Mary will make its debut on DVD September 17th.

Directed by Nimrod Zalmanowitz the film, inspired by true events, was scripted by Fred Edison and Gregory Scott Houghton, and will be available to buy at Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Best friends Mark (Aaron Mathias) and Andy (Nathan Spiteri), both aspiring filmmakers, are seeking their next project. They decide to investigate the mystery of Mary Malone, aka Typhoid Mary (Jenny Lee Mitchell), who was sent to North Brother Island, a New York Insane Asylum, to live in a quarantined isolation after she was blamed for spreading Typhoid Fever. 

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Chicago – Five years after earning praise for his directorial debut, “…Around,” indie filmmaker David Spaltro has returned behind the camera to deliver his second feature. The film, “Things I Don’t Understand” may be many things, but a sophomore slump it is not. Its assured craftsmanship, fine performances and provocative themes have made it one of the most buzzed-about pictures on the festival circuit.

Molly Ryman stars as Violet, a jaded grad student who develops a friendship with two outsiders—a mysterious bartender, Parker (Aaron Mathias), and a cancer-stricken teen, Sara (Grace Folsom). Meanwhile, Violet’s eccentric roommates, Gabby (Meissa Hampton) and Remy (Hugo Dillon), struggle to avoid getting evicted from their cozy loft. Beautifully lensed by cinematographer Gus Sacks, the film explores faith, doubt, friendship and the beauty that can be found in catharsis. Spaltro served as writer, producer, director and editor on the picture, which has already garnered various awards this year.

Things I Don’t Understand

Written by David Spaltro

Directed by David Spaltro

USA, 2012

Of the many unanswerable metaphysical questions that surround life, the most confounding, ironically, are those that concern death. Humanity’s pathological and evolutionary imperative to survive has driven us to try and rationalize our collective eventualities, in hopes to both understand and maybe, just maybe, bring about some kind of curative. An endeavor first taken on by philosophers, their eloquent scribblings only conciliate the fact that we still don’t know the nature of death.

Some filmmakers, whom are, what some would argue, our modern philosophers, still strive to enlighten by using cinema as a breakthrough meditative medium. Writer and director David Spaltro comes from this particular school of thought, but, like his forbearers, his contributions to the discourse are fairly nominal.

A film peppered with macabre musings à la Richard Linklater, his aptly titled Things I Don’t Understand,...

Hugo Dillon and Molly Ryman in "Things I Don't Understand"

Someday, everyone you know won’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t matter until it’s today. No one makes it through life unscathed, in one way or another.

These are just a few of the lessons found in “Things I Don’t Understand,” a small indie rumination with big pretensions. In his follow up to his debut feature “…Around” (2008), director David Spaltro gets ambitious and tackles life’s essential questions: what happens when we die? why are we here? what does it mean to love? how can we accept death?

Violet is an aloof grad student hoping to discern life’s indiscernible mysteries through her study of death and beyond. Along the way she’s befriended, challenged and enlightened by a terminally ill woman and a cagey bartender, and faces the realities of adult life with her boisterous artist roommates.

As in his debut “…Around,...

With the fall of some of the early web content studios like maniaTV, 60Frames and ABC/Disney's Stage 9, there were some web series projects that went down with their ships that we thought might never see the light of day. Trenches, a sci-fi action series from creator Shane Felux was one such project. Our last check in with Felux was in August of 2008, when Stage 9 had released its pricey comedy series Squeegees to mixed results. A few months later ABC shuttered its nascent digital studio, leaving Trenches in distribution purgatory. Now the series has found a new home, with Sony Pictures Television licensing the project from ABC to be released starting February 16, 2010 on Crackle. Set in the future on a a distant war torn planet, the story centers around two groups of opposing soldiers fighting against each other only to realize that the real enemy is something else. The 10-episode series,...