The years 1964-1969 were probably the peak of the Hammer Film Productions wave, popularly if not aesthetically. By the middle of the ’60s, the company had firmly entrenched itself as the world’s best source of tony Gothic horror, and was beginning to explore other genres, finding great success with pirate movies (e.g. The Devil-Ship Pirates […]
The Saw films and I are not buddies, to put it mildly. Though there is hiding within the first one a very good psychological “chamber horror” film, it is not itself a very good film, and the sequels have all in their way proven to be one diminishing return after another. And morally vicious! I […]
Dayna Christensen used her contribution to the Carry On Campaign to ask me to review “a bad horror movie from the last ten years”. I wish I’d been able to come up with something a bit more imaginative for her, but the harder I tried to come up with anything else, to more I was […]
Paranormal Activity 2 is just a lil’ bundle of problems. I’d be inclined to say that it is a perfectly fine film in and of itself, considered in a vacuum, whilst being a completely unacceptable prequel to Paranormal Activity; and this is exactly how I took to describing the film when I first stepped foot […]
The first sequel to the groundbreaking The Curse of Frankenstein – the film that absolutely secured Hammer Studios as the home for top-notch Gothic horror with cutting-edge gore effects in the late 1950s and early 1960s – took scarcely more than a year to reach theaters. A sign of greed, you might think; a sign […]
I maintain that it is tremendously gratifying to have a filmmaker like Clint Eastwood, who at the tottering old age of 80, when most directors have long since called it a career, is still pushing himself to do new things, even when those things work intermittently, if at all. In the last five years, the […]
The Canadian-produced documentary Last Train Home idly, even blandly opens with titles superimposed on a massive crush of people informing us that, during the new year festivities, 130 million Chinese workers travel from their jobs in the big cities to their homes in the country – a once-per-year journey that is the largest migration of […]
There’s something about Australian magical realism that’s just entirely unlikely any other kind of film, and this holds true, it turns out, when said Australian magical realism is written and directed by a French filmmaker, with a French actress in the lead, and backed by plenty of French money. In short, ladies and gentlemen, I […]
The Cold War-era history of Hungary is not a subject upon which I have any particular claim of expertise; for am I an American, and we are required by convention and national fidelity not to give a shit about what happened anywhere else in the world during that period. And for this reason, it took […]
There are a great many legitimate reasons to see Red: to enjoy the cumulative star wattage of one of the most overstuffed above-the-line casts of the year; the desire to see a fun & simple movie in a month given largely to horror, watery Oscarbait, and Katherine Heigl vehicles; to see whether or not it […]
In so many ways, Conviction is a terribly defective movie, far above and beyond the ordinary ways that we already expect prestige season movies based on true stories about tremendous people doing inspirational things. Two central performances that are entirely better than the script deserves – it’s by Pamela Gray, whose last produced film eleven […]
