First the easy, if depressing part: Django Unchained is easily the least impressive feature film yet made by director Quentin Tarantino. Nothing to do with what it does or does not say about racism in America, or the liberties it takes in turning a very tender period of history into a violent exploitation film, or […]
The Paperboy is now the third film of Lee Daniels’s career that can be readily described as “bugfuck insane”; and it is the third film of his career that has, apparently, turned out exactly the way he wanted it to – and if something as balls-out batshit as this movie represents an artistic compromise, than […]
On 22 September, 1995, a movie called Showgirls was released on a tidal wave of hype that could only come with being the first major film to get released under the notorious NC-17 rating from the MPAA; a rating which, coupled with the exploitation-friendly setting of the movie, was widely understood to promise, “this movie […]
Cruising, from 1980, is a rather terrible movie, but we learned from it important things about director William Friedkin, chiefly that he is about as vigorously heterosexual as a man can be,* and that he seemingly possesses a deep, abiding horror of sex. I bring this up because his newest film, Killer Joe, is apparently […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. LIVE AND LET DIEDirected by Guy HamiltonWritten by Tom MankiewiczPremiered 27 June, 1973 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEIn the very first opening sequence in the whole franchise where James Bond doesn’t appear, even in the form of a doppelganger (viz. From Russia with Love), we […]
Mothers, those wonderful ladies who ruin so many children with their demented ways! Let us take a moment to thank them all for their domineering religiosity, their incestuous lust, their Puritanical hatred of sex, their whoring about with a cavalcade of strange men, or just their all-around emotional inaccessibility – all the wonderful things that […]
Hobo with a Shotgun is deliberately meant to be a bad movie. The reason that I know this is that the film is incredibly eager to remind me over and over again, of this fact. And that is why I’m almost tempted to say that it’s bad. I mean, it is bad, but it’s not […]
To All a Goodnight (1980, USA) The creators: Writer Alex Rebar, who’s probably best known as the titular Incredible Melting Man, and director HOLY SHIT IT WAS DIRECTED BY DAVID HESS. It was, in fact, his very first directorial credit and for 30 years his only directorial credit, which is maybe evidence that starring in […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the remake of Conan the Barbarian introduces a new generation to the pop hero of Weird Tales, one of […]
There is a movie about a girl in a hospital who frequently lapses into fantastic reverie, which turns the film around her into an explosion of pure spectacle, the kind usually tagged by joyless admen as “visionary”. The movie itself isn’t so much an exercise in style over substance, but style as substance, huge vistas […]
It’s become a sort of theme week: I get to review movies that I don’t particularly care for at the request of people who loved them. In this case, the Carry On Campaign donation that put this particular movie at my doorstep was courtesy of Jonathan Volk, a good human being and friend who at […]
Drive Angry is above all else a shockingly fetishistic motion picture. It fetishises acts of brutal violence; it fetishises gorgeously preserved early-70s muscle cars; in an extremely distant third place, it manages, just barely, to fetishise naked women. But mostly violence and cars: the former presented by director Patrick Lussier with lingering, worshipful slow-motion, the […]
