From among the Video Nasties Thirteen films into the Video Nasties Edition of the Summer of Blood, there’s been a few predominately worthwhile movies here and there, surrounded by movies that are bad enough to be hilariously entertaining and (rather more often) movies that are bad enough to be fucking bad. But all this time, […]
As a general rule for life, I’ve found that if a movie stars Patricia Clarkson (especially since the turn of the millennium), it is almost certainly worth seeing. Not, maybe, a masterpiece; not even, necessarily, particularly good. But Clarkson herself is invariably worth watching, and she’s of that rarefied company of actors who seems to […]
Though the last few years have seen a gradual return to harder and more violent horror movies after about a decade of feeble, teen-friendly thrillers, it’s still hard to be prepared for Piranha 3D, directed by French gorehound Alexandre Aja, from a screenplay by Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg. This is not a film that […]
The blog has been on a bit of an ’80s kick lately, and Adam Bertocci did his part to keep things going when he donated to the Carry On Campaign and requested today’s review. Three cheers for the decade of Reagan, leg warmers,and hair metal! Even for a decade in which the high-concept comedy reached […]
Vampires Suck, according to the MPAA’s notes, has been rated PG-13 for, among other things, crude sexual content. As is typical of that organisation, they’ve gotten it wrong: I disagree in the strongest terms with the implication that this film has anything resembling content. The film is a spoof of the Twilight franchise, written and […]
It kind of feels, even now that I’ve seen it, that The Duel isn’t a real movie – oh, beg pardon, of course I meant Anton Chekhov’s The Duel, as it appears that the film is “really” titled. It probably says more about me than the filmmakers that I find this fact incredibly annoying, but […]
From among the Video Nasties In 1957, director Jacques Tourneur gave the world Night of the Demon, widely agreed to be one of the finest works ever made by that horror-poetry master. It’s a magnificently atmospheric film about an American scientist running into a demon cult in Britain, made with an almost unbelievable level of […]
That the last five years or so have seen a tremendous flowering of ’80s pop culture nostalgia is obvious enough that it hardly even needs pointing out: the result, presumably of the generational cohort old enough to have attended junior high and high school in that decade come to positions of authority in the entertainment […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: while it’s probably the case that no movie has ever matched The Expendables in assembling such a uniformly all-star […]
A more disciplined viewer than I could probably watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World all the way through without constantly thinking about the six-volume comic book series by Bryan Lee O’Malley upon which it’s based; and that viewer would, I suppose, enjoy the film more than I did. And I enjoyed it plenty, given the […]
From among the Video Nasties The first thing to do is to simply identify the movie I’m about to review, which isn’t easily done. It’s one of those Italian exploitation pictures with such a daunting number of titles that the full list runs well into the teens; but an English-speaker only needs to know that […]
Reader JPK couldn’t have possibly known, when he commissioned this review by donating to the Carry On Campaign, that Peter Weir is one of my favorite directors – somehow, I’ve managed to completely avoid mentioning the man in the entire history of this blog. So thanks, JPK, for occasioning the Antagony & Ecstasy debut of […]
