“The feature film directorial debut of former superstar Disney animator Glen Keane” cannot possibly help but be a big deal, even if it’s not a big deal. Apologies for trying to be cryptic right out of the gate, but I’m doing it with a purpose: the unfortunately reality is that Over the Moon – the […]
Asylum might have the single best hook of any anthology film I have seen. The story opens with Dr. Martin (Robert Powell), a young psychiatrist, arriving at a remote insane asylum for a job interview. The man who runs the place, Dr. Rutherford (Parick McGee), seems like a bit of an asshole, the kind of […]
1968’s Hour of the Wolf has perhaps the single least-enviable position of any title in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography: it’s the feature film he made next after Persona. Anything would seem like a step down in ambition and visionary madness compared to that movie, though Hour of the Wolf makes a good-faith effort to stand out […]
I have a serious problem. The more terrible an idea for a movie is, the more I absolutely, postively have to see it right fucking now. This is how I ended up renting 2019’s After, a film adapted from a book series that originated as a Harry Styles fanfiction. In this particular fanfiction, Harry wasn’t […]
Hair There and Everywhere A review by Brennan Klein. I’m not a Black woman, a woman of color, or as a matter of fact a woman of any stripe. I do have a long history of watching horror and analyzing its subtext, so I don’t feel unequipped to approach Justin Simien’s Bad Hair, which is […]
The filmmaking duo of Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson has hit upon a very reliable schema – I will not call it a formula, because it’s not really the same thing every time. But in every one of their films, we see a quiet story about the relationship between two people filtered through a mash-up […]
What Became of Jack and Jill? is the forgotten stepchild of the Amicus Productions filmography, the most obscure of all their horror/thriller films, and the only one that’s been basically ignored on home video (pretty much every version you can find these days is sourced from the same faded, full-frame 16mm print). And this goes […]
These days, when the 1967 Stimulantia comes up – something it is powerfully unlikely to ever do – it’s almost certainly in the context of being the one anthology film that Ingmar Bergman contributed a segment to, right in the heart of his international heyday in the 1960s (it nestles in his career during the […]
It is a truth that I think to be self-evident that 1972’s Tales from the Crypt is the best-known and most widely-seen of Amicus Productions’s seven horror anthology films – maybe even their best-known and most widely-seen film, period. How much of this has to do with the fact that it shares a title and […]
The soullessly glossy new version of Rebecca, paid for and distributed by the soulless gloss specialists at Netflix, lives in the shadows of ghosts. There is the ghost of Daphne Du Maurier’s beloved 1938 novel, one of the pinnacles of inter-war Gothic fiction, still a widely-read classic. And there is the ghost of the 1940 […]
The most interesting thing about I, Monster, a 1971 showcase for the great Christopher Lee released by Amicus productions, is also the most baffling. Not to spoil the surprise – the film has already spoiled itself, quite thoroughly – but the film is an uncredited adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of […]
When people speak of Amicus Productions, what they’re really speaking of, I think, is the set of films beginning with our present subject, 1971’s The House That Dripped Blood. Between 1962 and 1970, Amicus produced 15 films on a variety of subjects, and only six of them were horror films (a number that already has […]
