One can devote a lifetime to studying the Italian B-movie industry and still never fail to be awestruck by how majestically crude it could be at its most mercenary. The rule there, as everywhere else in commercial cinema has always been that success begets imitation, but while any American hack producer, name-your-favorite Roger Corman wannabe […]
In 1961, Sergio Leone cast an actor from an American TV Western in one of his movies. The actor was Rory Calhoun, and the movie was The Colossus of Rhodes. In 1964, he again cast an actor from an American TV Western in one of his movies. The actor was Clint Eastwood, and the movie […]
Sergio Leone received onscreen credit for directing only seven features, and of that number, five are Westerns. We’ll never know exactly what it was that drove the man to focus so relentlessly on one single genre, but one of the reasons, surely, was that he was really damn good at it. Right out of the […]
Being the first in a retrospective series celebrating the work of legendary Italian genre film director Sergio Leone The name of politician and author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is but poorly remembered now, though he was once one of the most popular English-language novelists in the world in his heyday, back in the first half of […]
Kevin Olson made his donation to the Carry On Campaign a long time ago, but only recently made up his mind what review he wanted. Given our shared love of Italian horror, it’s no surprise he went that direction; but I owe him a debt of gratitude for introducing me not just to a movie […]
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: Thor isn’t just the latest in a long (so long…) line of comic book adaptations, it’s also one of […]
From among the Video Nasties When I hit upon the idea of a Video Nasties retrospective, I had little in the way of a planned schedule, but one thing was always clear, from the first instant: it had to end with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Almost certainly the most widely-banned film in history, and notorious […]
From among the Video Nasties Thirteen films into the Video Nasties Edition of the Summer of Blood, there’s been a few predominately worthwhile movies here and there, surrounded by movies that are bad enough to be hilariously entertaining and (rather more often) movies that are bad enough to be fucking bad. But all this time, […]
From among the Video Nasties The first thing to do is to simply identify the movie I’m about to review, which isn’t easily done. It’s one of those Italian exploitation pictures with such a daunting number of titles that the full list runs well into the teens; but an English-speaker only needs to know that […]
From among the Video Nasties Along the sliding scale of cinematic viciousness, there are certain projects which have the tang of notoriety about them from an entirely conceptual perspective. You do not need to see a Nazi sexploitation flick, for example, to know that “Nazi sexploitation” probably describes a pretty sleazy, trashy affair (you would […]
I Am Love, a film birthed out of years and years of conversations between actress Tilda Swinton and director Luca Guadagnino, is a basket of contradictions: it is at once a heaving mess of hugely melodramatic situations and emotions and visual cues that are at times presented with inordinate subtlety, and it all hinges on […]
From among the Video Nasties “But at least it wasn’t directed by Joe D’Amato.” With those words I ended my most recent Video Nasties review, of the heinous Nazisploitation picture SS Hell Camp AKA The Beast in Heat AKA La bestia in calore. I did not do this accidentally, for even then did I know […]
