Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies Michele Soavi only made four horror films in a career that wasn’t very long (he took many years off to care for his unwell son), which surely explains why his profile isn’t higher. There’s no good argument, certainly not one based on those of […]

Old man boners. Did you laugh? Because if you didn’t laugh, I can’t think of any reason at all to bother with Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a film for which “old man boners” is very largely the only joke it has up its sleeve. “Old man projectile shits”, as well, but that’s for just one […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies There’s an argument to be made that Lucio Fulci had the most varied career of any director in history. Certainly, among those filmmakers chiefly known for their contributions to the Italian genre machine, I can think of no-one who directed films in such wildly […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies The phrase that I have chosen, “Masters of Italian horror”, doesn’t entirely describe the work of Riccardo Freda, surely not a name spoken of in the same breath as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci. But his historical importance is such that he’s […]

How would you suppose that a film titled Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb would begin? Would you guess that it would be with resolutely generic sans-serif titles over a starfield, all space movie-like? If so, congratulations on your insight, and also, what the hell, because I, for one, was so thrown by the opening title […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies I don’t imagine that Black Sunday – to give the film its standard English title, though strictly speaking that name only appears on the version released by American International Pictures in the 1960s, now thoroughly superseded – needs any help from me in getting […]

The Mummy’s Shroud, Hammer Films’ 1967 entry into their continuity-free mummy franchise, is typically regarded as pretty damn bad – or at least, pretty damn run-of-the-mill and boring, which is surely worse. I can’t help but feel like that’s a pretty unfair way of looking at it; if we want to compare to Hammer’s earlier […]

I do not know, and I doubt anyone could say for certain, when the first movie was recut for foreign distribution. Certainly, it is not a remotely new practice. The last twenty-odd years of Harvey Weinstein holding court and chopping movies apart frequently for no more apparent reason than to make sure everyone was talking […]

There are many ways to begin speaking about 1954’s Godzilla, the film that introduced one of the most iconic figures ever put to celluloid, but I shall chose to start the same way that the movie does: over black, with the sound of crashing noise and something that sounds like the scream of an elephant […]

If the new Carrie teaches us anything, it’s the importance of casting. I don’t know if it’s “officially” more of a new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel, or more of a remake of the Brian De Palma-directed 1976 classic, but nobody could be stupid enough to suppose that people in the audience aren’t […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/21 World premiere: 24 July, 2013, Norwich, UK I have no idea if Alan Partridge, the buffoonish, vain media host played on radio, television, and now in a feature film by Steve Coogan, is well-loved in the United Kingdom or not. I know only that he’s emphatically not well-loved in the United […]

October’s such a busy month: here I am, looking to pack away the Chicago International Film Festival and get to work on Kevin Olson’s Italian Horror Blogathon, and wouldn’t you know it, but I was given an absolutely perfect, gift-wrapped transition from one to the other in the form of Dracula 3D, the latest film […]