“Here's a real UFO, an extremely low-budget, genuinely independent film by a 22-year-old writer-director from Philadelphia that immediately establishes a distinctive and promising voice...
     “...[McElhinney] projects an amazing degree of stylistic assurance and originality.
     “‘A Chronicle of Corpses’ belongs to the small but significant tradition of outsider art in American movies - films like Herk Harvey's ‘Carnival of Souls’ or George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead’ - that reflect powerful personalities formed outside any academic or professional tradition. That most of these are horror films is no coincidence; they are the films that haunt American cinema, pointing to paths that were never taken, to doors that remain firmly closed.”

     "* * * * (Four Stars)
     What's most impressive about McElhinney's highbrow period film is its ability to satisfy snobbish cultural aesthetes while simultaneously fulfilling slasher film conventions. Most of the fourteen-member ensemble cast will have been dispatched by hatchet, knife, rifle, or poison by "Chronicle's" end. Some mysteriously disappear along the sidelines "Blair Witch" style. Others are discovered in a postmortem splatter of blood. Think of it as a caveat to those who secretly wished that Jack Nicholson (in wild-eyed mode from "The Shining") had wandered into "The Remains of the Day" wielding a mallet.
    It's the art film from hell."

    “A Chronicle of Corpses is easily the most peculiar American indie to play New York theaters this year ... [it’s] alternately flamboyant and minimal.

“McElhinney demonstrates a shocking degree of masterful control over the medium. Compositions are well chosen, the lighting is shadowy and absolutely stunning, and the film is intriguingly reminiscent of Barry Lyndon, Bergman's The Silence and, well, Halloween all at once.”

“This is an uncommonly well-photographed film, remarkably lush and opulent in its lighting and shadow play.  Try to imagine if some wise guy decided to combine the scripts for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon with Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 and you may have an idea what A Chronicle of Corpses is all about.  This stately gothic horror drama, filmed in the Philadelphia region by 21-year-old Andrew Repasky McElhinney combines Kubrick’s chilly and icily distinguished period piece with Coppola’s wild tale of an axe-murderer targeting an intensely dysfunctional family.”