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 & 10/15 World 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 […]
