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Friday, May 27, 2022

A Hymn for the Red Planet

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I bought a copy of The War of the Worlds (1953, directed by Byron Haskins) during a recent Criterion Collection sale. When my long-suffer...
2 comments:
Sunday, May 15, 2022

Free Falling

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There is an unspoken assumption among some connoisseurs of American pre-Code cinema that the shocking freedom these films enjoyed was so...
Saturday, March 19, 2022

True/False 2022: Wayward Daughters and Hot Volcanoes

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All of the films I saw on my second day at True/False were directed by women and were by and large about women and relationships. I didn...
Friday, March 11, 2022

True/False 2022: People Watching and Shoot 'Em Ups

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I took last year off from my city's annual True/False film festival. It was the first time I'd missed the festival in the seventee...
Saturday, February 19, 2022

Carrying on the Family Business

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Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021, directed by Jason Reitman) is two thirds of a good movie. That two thirds of a film are better than any ...
Thursday, February 03, 2022

The Grant Mystique: The Last Outpost (1935)

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I used to think that Cary Grant could do anything. Comedy? Drama? Action? There's a classic film in almost every category to make an a...
Friday, October 29, 2021

In It For the Kills

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I guess you could call it an epiphany. While I was watching Halloween Kills (2021, directed by David Gordon Green), I realized that the a...
Saturday, October 16, 2021

Going Ape

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I must have been in a bad mood when I saw Kong: Skull Island (2017, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts) when it was in theaters because I di...
Sunday, October 03, 2021

It's Not a Tumor!

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I wasn't expecting much of Malignant (2021, directed by James Wan). The film has received withering reviews from other quarters and m...
1 comment:
Saturday, October 02, 2021

Creature Stole My Twinkie

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Fifty-two horror and mystery movies made before 1948 were licensed for television in 1957, including the Universal horror movies like F...
Saturday, June 05, 2021

A Dragon and His Wrath

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Thou hadst been better have been born a dog Than answer my waked wrath!  --Williams Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, Scene III Guy Ritchie...
1 comment:
Saturday, April 17, 2021

Couple's Therapy

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I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Brian De Palma had cast Barbara Crampton as the lead in Body Double , rather than...
Monday, February 01, 2021

Hammer Time

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In the mostly silent opening of André Øvredal's latest film, Mortal (2020), there is a huge sense of landscape. Even once the film mo...
Saturday, October 31, 2020

End of the World Blues

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The thing about doomsday is that it's always the end of somebody's world. "Eschatology" is a big word for a commonp...
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Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Cuts Like a Knife

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Knife + Heart (2018, directed by Yann Gonzalez) begins with one of the horror genre's better visual jokes. The slasher film and the g...
Sunday, October 25, 2020

Doing the Islands

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Sweetheart (2019, directed by J. D. Dillard) is a model contemporary low budget genre film. It's efficient, it provides all the genre...
Thursday, October 22, 2020

An Unwanted Heirloom

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There's an old interview with director David Cronenberg that has stayed with me in which the interviewer asked Cronenberg wha...
1 comment:
Sunday, October 18, 2020

I Could a Tale Unfold...

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I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like star...
Saturday, October 17, 2020

Departmental Politics

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In 1943, Universal Pictures teamed up with the then-popular Inner Sanctum radio show to brand a series of modest low-budget thrillers. Th...
Monday, October 05, 2020

Burning Down The House

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According to his autobiography and many many interviews over the years, Roger Corman made the first of the Poe films, House of Usher (1960...
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Friday, October 02, 2020

The Saw is Family

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, directed by Tobe Hooper) was always likely to be a fiasco over and above the inevitable comparisons ...
1 comment:
Thursday, October 01, 2020

Tools of the Trade

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I've been thinking about the career of the late Tobe Hooper this month, in part prodded by Catherine Stebbins's yearly top ten pro...
Friday, August 28, 2020

The Grant Mystique: The Eagle and the Hawk (1933)

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In some ways, Cary Grant was a more interesting actor before he cultivated the movie star persona. There's an intensity in some of his ...
Sunday, July 26, 2020

Caged Birds

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Olivia De Havilland died this week at the age of 104. It sometimes seemed to us film fans that she would live forever. She was the last of ...
Tuesday, March 10, 2020

True/False 2020: Lingering Traumas

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This year's True/False Film Festival brings a couple of films about the lingering effects of trauma. This is a constant well of subjec...
Sunday, March 08, 2020

True/False 2020: Tales of Two Cities

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The annual True/False Film Festival went on as scheduled this weekend in my fair city. There was a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling to ...
Saturday, February 29, 2020

Now You See Him

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One of the enduring challenges facing horror movies is finding things that really scare an audience. Most horror movies fail at this, or ab...
Saturday, February 22, 2020

Island Reveries

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I suppose it was too much to hope that a new version of Fantasy Island (2020, directed by Jeff Wadlow) would be something other than a bun...
Saturday, February 08, 2020

Screwed

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"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so pro...
Friday, January 31, 2020

The Darkest Part of the Forest

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“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the...