Movie Reviews
MOVIE REVIEW: “THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE” is a fantastic deep dive into one of cryptozoology’s lesser-known mysteries – Rue Morgue
By BREANNA WHIPPLE
Starring Bruce G. Hallenbeck, Martha Hallenbeck and Paul Bartholomew
Directed by Seth Breedlove
Small Town Monsters
Whether you are a skeptic or a believer, it cannot be denied that certain pockets of our planet are hotspots for unusual activity. You’d be hard-pressed to find a person unfamiliar with the mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, for example. Furthermore, places like Skinwalker Ranch in Utah have been documented extensively after multitudes of reports of various phenomena – UFOs, ghosts, cryptids, ancient shapeshifting elemental spirits that consume human flesh… it has it all. The Pacific Northwest is another location of intrigue with phenomena ranging from UFOs and cryptids to ghosts and sea monsters.
More often than not, all that is supernatural seems to flow collectively. It’s not at all uncommon for grey aliens to come with a side of poltergeists and shapeshifters. Evidently, where there is smoke, there is fire. And Kinderhook, New York, is one such place ablaze with the high strangeness.
Nestled in the Hudson Valley, Kinderhook is an old town with even older legends. Despite being over 100km from the village of Sleepy Hollow, Kinderhook was the inspiration for Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. (Ichabod Crane was modelled after a Kinderhook schoolmaster; plaques honour this fact in the small community.) At a glance, one can sense an otherworldly ether in this place where the veil is seemingly especially thin.
THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE is a companion piece to The Kinderhook Creature & Beyond: A Personal Reminiscence by Bruce G. Hallenbeck. Naturally, Hallenbeck guides the unfolding events chronicled in the doc. Growing up under the care of his beloved late grandmother, Martha Hallenbeck, in a home surrounded by dense woods, he has memories that read like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. An unseen, incomprehensible, supernatural threat to shock and astound lurks around every corner. Martha was once quoted as saying, “I’d love to live in a haunted house!” Bruce’s apt response was, “Grandma, I think you do.”
“Haunted” feels like an inappropriate description. What happens in Kinderhook is so fantastical that it is difficult to fit under a single umbrella. White, bloblike apparitions are only the tip of the iceberg. A sargantuan beast with red eyes, the doc’s eponymous creature, has been seen stalking nearby. Strange noises emanate from the woods, UFOs have been spotted, objects have levitated and strange dreams have been had… Something is very different in Kinderhook.
To call THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE a wild-ride would be a gross understatement – the film is so full of so many unexpected twists, turns and encounters that it is a curious wonder why the area hasn’t been more widely acknowledged in cryptozoological circles until now. Again, director Seth Breedlove and the Small Monsters team have shone their spotlight on a tiny, strange corner of the world. On top of fantastic interview content, the documentary is chock-full of archival footage. Masterfully edited, THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE is made with love and attentive care, which is much deserved for a field of interest that isn’t always taken very seriously.
Of course, mystery is the source of the allure. As a species, we simply cannot know everything. Not every mystery can be solved, regardless of how advanced we become. Apelike humanoid sightings have been reported for as long as Indigenous people have been recording history with hide and stone. Theorists pore over speculations of time-travelling advanced beings, primitive species, protectors of the forest… It all sounds outrageous to those who have yet to open their mind to the possibility that there are forces at work that we simply cannot comprehend. One can easily write off the Patterson-Gimlin film as a hoax, but how can one explain the similarities in sightings from around the globe, again, for decades, if not centuries? One of the tales told in THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE mentions a sighting of a family of the Bigfoot-like cryptid. A similar occurrence is documented in the 1956 book The Long Walk by Sławomir Rawicz – a dramatic, first-hand account of a group of Gulag escapees in the 1940s that encountered a family of Yeti-like creatures in the Himalayas after fleeing Siberia on foot.
Even in the specific cases presented in THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE, there are curious synchronicities spanning a century. A woman speaks of an instance in 1981 when she and a friend skipped school to pick apples. While biking down a dirt road flanked by corn fields on both sides, they encountered a massive creature that towered above the stalks. Its gait was so wide that it was able to jump across the road with ease, its apelike arms swinging. What the girls likely did not know was that 100 years earlier, in 1881, livestock regularly went missing in the area. Locals eventually found a cave with piles of bones lying outside the entrance. Upon this discovery, they encountered a similar beast. They shot at it, nearly missing it. However, it left a mysterious lock of brown hair behind.
Breedlove has proved time and time again that Small Town Monsters is the reigning champion of quality cryptozoological documentaries. Aside from the obvious fun that naturally comes with investigating strange phenomena, much of the film focuses on Hallenbeck’s relationship with his grandmother. The bond they shared was beyond unique. They seemed to share an abundance of love, joy, fun and an appreciation for the mysterious.
We can learn a lot from these stories, exploring history, fear and curiosity. With THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE, Small Town Monsters again proves that cryptids and the legends that surround them will never get boring.
THE KINDERHOOK CREATURE: IN THE SHADOW OF SASQUATCH is available now on digital platforms.
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
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