Part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon hosted by Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies I have a terrible secret, but I trust all of you enough to admit it: I don’t dislike Demons 2. The film has a fairly cast-iron reputation for being a cheaper, stupider retread of Demons – not, in and of itself, a movie […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon hosted by Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies When I decided to review my way through the entirety of the Demons series this weekend, I didn’t realise just how insane a project I was undertaking. When Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava (son of the Italian genre film icon Mario Bava) collaborated […]

“The Haunted Palace” is a great little poem, one of Edgar Allan Poe’s all-time best pieces of verse. Emphasis on little. It’s all of six stanzas long, a total of 48 lines, and its single function is to describe the atmosphere clinging to a palace in a luxuriant valley that was once, generations ago, a […]

The fifth film John Hughes directed, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, is privileged in a number of ways: the first movie he directed that wasn’t about suburban teenagers, the only film he directed that was rated R (and, in point of fact, the last film he was involved with in any way that was rated R […]

If I have it right, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a deliberate half-step away from the teen angst pictures upon which the bulk of John Hughes’s reputation rested in the mid-’80s (and continues to rest), redefining and to a certain extend refuting the entire worldview of films like The Breakfast Club, and serving in all […]

Not since the glorious Halloween devolved into the insipid Halloween II three decades ago has a horror franchise managed to squander all of its early potential in quite as few steps as the Paranormal Activity movies: Oren Peli’s 2009 original* was a simple machine perfectly-designed to be as scary as it possibly could; 2010′ Paranormal […]

To hear first-time writer-director J.C. Chandor tell it, Margin Call is not a message movie about how capitalism is broken. I will allow him to maintain whatever opinion he wants about the intentions behind the movie he made, but if this isn’t an anti-capitalist rant, I have to wonder what Chandor would have done if […]

iIn the heart of every truly creative person who ends up getting pigeonholed as “the guy who does X” is the desire to do absolutely anything at all besides X. I cannot prove this was the case with John Hughes, but it certainly seems that way, for almost as soon as he secured his reputation […]

It’s a parlor game for 19th Century literature freaks and nothing but to speculate on such questions, but let us take a moment to muse upon the most famous short story written by Edgar Allan Poe – that is, name the first Poe story that comes to mind. Ask a dozen people, and I suspect […]

As I mentioned, the third of the AIP/Roger Corman Poe movies, Premature Burial, was something of a failure – not a flop, for it’s hard for a movie produced as cheaply as even the costliest AIP picture to “flop” – and for the fourth movie in the cycle, the second released in 1962, a course-correction […]

If Michael Shannon gives his best onscreen performance ever in Take Shelter, and creates what might well be the finest male character of 2011, it’s not exactly a shocking achievement: the role could just as well have been created for him by Jeff Nichols (and very possibly was), whose only prior work as writer and […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15World premiere: 15 February, 2011, Berlin Film Festival It is with a curious sense of amused embarrassment that I welcome Tarr Béla, one of the most individualistic and incalculably important filmmakers currently alive, to the annals of this weblog with his final film, The Turin Horse. Allegedly, final, of course: […]