There is a place that Universal could have sent its library of iconic monsters to in the 1940s that’s so unbelievably obvious and offers so many opportunities for wonderful weirdness that, in retrospect, it’s astonishing that it only happened once: the European theater of World War II. Imagine a 20th Century wolf man retaining just […]
The notional context for this review of The Invisible Woman, Universal Pictures’ release for Christmas week in 1940, is “let’s look at all the far reaches of Universal horror!”, and yet there’s no movie that ever felt like it might be part of a horror franchise that so obviously isn’t. The Invisible Woman is so […]
A review requested by John M, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. It makes perfect sense for Shakes the Clown from 1991 to be a cult film, so I can only call it a sign of the universe going exactly right that, to the best of my knowledge, it has just such a […]
1940’s The Invisible Man Returns is just about the last of Universal Pictures’ classic horror movies that can unequivocally be called an A-picture. The studio’s other genre films from the same calendar year, Black Friday and The Mummy’s Hand, were made for a fraction of its budget and with nowhere near the same care and […]
The three films made by Jafar Panahi after he was forbidden by the Iranian government from making more films form an intriguing little symbolic arc. 2011’s This Is Not a Film is all clastrophobic realism, a barely-fictionalised diary of Panahi’s own life under house arrest, the director playing himself and his apartment playing itself and […]
It cannot be pointed out too many times that many of the things we think of as the peculiar sins of contemporary cinema are in some ways as old as the medium itself. This is never clearer – and never more important to reiterate, since this is perhaps the most peculiar sin of them all […]
In the week before the movie opened, Hotel Transylvania 2 director Genndy Tartakovsky sat for an interview with animation news site Cartoon Brew that’s breathtakingly direct in communicating his disappointment with the whole corporate structure in which he’s been obliged to work, and his frustration with his writers/executive producers Adam Sandler & Robert Smigel. One […]
A third review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing three times to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Of the many pop culture heavy-hitters in the 1980s, two of the heaviest were the Andrew Lloyd Webber & Charles Stilgoe stage musical The Phantom of the Opera, which premiered in the West […]
