On the second Friday of 1990, a little less than three and a half years after its immediate predecessor, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was released; the third film in the series, and the third different studio responsible. This time, the honors were done by New Line Cinema, soon to acquire something of a […]

Now, here’s a real summertime treat, especially for a fucked-up little misanthrope like myself: an honest-to-God exploitation flick from the director of >one of the only Lovecraft movies you really need, a black-hearted ripped-from-the-headlines number that looks and feels, except for its modern film stock, like it could have walked out a ’70s grind house […]

The Promotion is a nasty-hearted little film, and in absolutely the worst way for a film to be nasty: it is absolutely convinced of its own warm spirit and generosity towards its characters. Which qualities it possesses, I guess, once you can get past the fact that the protagonist is a spiteful, lying asshole and […]

Comedy being an intensely subjective thing, it doesn’t really do for me to declare that You Don’t Mess with the Zohan isn’t a funny movie and leave for greener pastures. At the very least, the girl sitting in the theater behind me and to the left clearly thought it was extremely funny, and I’d be […]

Whatever else may be said of Kung Fu Panda, I know this much is true: it is by far the most visually appealing film yet released by DreamWorks Animation. They’re certainly not in the same league as the masters of the universe over at Pixar, but they’ve never been closer; but maybe at about the […]

It says something about the inestimable talents of German director F.W. Murnau that he directed not only the single most influential (and almost certainly the finest) horror movie of all time, 1922’s Nosferatu, but also a fable about the the simplicity of pastoral life, 1927’s Sunrise, which also just so happens to be one of […]

Twelve years. That’s how long it took sequel-obsessed, cheap horror-obsessed, and above all in the ’80s, horror sequel-obsessed Hollywood to release a follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Six years after the slasher floodgates opened, five years after the sequel boom started with Friday the 13th, Part 2, five years after Halloween II, and even […]

Although it absolutely does suffer from having as its protagonists a pair of idiots idiotic even by the standard of an Idiot Plot, The Strangers absolutely deserves this much praise: it is a ridiculously well-crafted scary movie. Maybe not good enough to rise to the pantheon (the last film to reach that height, I’d wager, […]

Without having seen any of his work, my understanding of ’90s Wunderkind Harmony Korine was that he was a director of shocking! films that were so edgy! and controversial! as to call into question our very concepts of morality and acceptable representation in film. This preconception may indeed be an accurate one. All I know […]

Once upon a time in Los Angeles, a little girl recuperating in a hospital with a broken arm befriended a crippled silent film stuntman who was trying to kill himself after his girlfriend left him for a dashing movie star. In an attempt to hide from his broken heart, he began to tell her a […]

As much as anybody can be, Jean-Pierre Léaud is the face of the French New Wave, and thus it is well that he so dominates Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece The Mother and the Whore, a three and a half hour monolith that stands Janus-faced as both the last film of that movement and perhaps the […]

Facts are facts, and it’s a fact that everything obvious and a whole lot of things that aren’t obvious about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been said, and anyone with the guts to try adding to that mountain of criticism better have something original, or at least shockingly bold, to say about the film. I’m […]