Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A second review requested by Andrew Milne, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It is, for me, an article of faith: the key to making a great parody is, above all things, love. One does not effectively parody even the lowliest form through mockery: it takes an […]

The gap between what a film wants to be and what a film is doesn’t get much finer than it does with Deadpool, which I suppose makes it a success? It’s hard to imagine a film less prone to leaving audiences disappointed: the thing you walk into it expecting it to be is completely and […]

My instinct to say of Hail, Caesar! that you will love it if you fall into the enormously specific niche of people who adore Studio Era Hollywood but are still totally okay with making fun of it, and also consider themselves somewhere firmly entrenched in the Leftist-Socialist-Marxist end of the spectrum but are still totally […]

A second review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing twice to the ACS Fundraiser. The 1936 propaganda film Tell Your Children, known far better under its re-release title Reefer Madness, is almost too easy to take cheap shots at. It’s the most infamous of the peculiarly robust cycle of anti-drug films in the […]

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a 2015 movie (it’s been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good […]

A review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Two things at least can be confidently stated about Meet the Feebles: it’s a movie that goes to great lengths to be the most fully-expressed version of itself possible; and Peter Jackson’s career would have been […]

A review requested by Pip, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The story goes that J.J. Abrams, along with other chief creative minds involved in the making of the 2009 Star Trek reboot, claimed that one of their collective favorite films in the series up to that point […]

As the Hollywood Century takes us into the 21st Century and thus near to the present day, I shall find myself increasingly hard-pressed to do much good situating the films I’m discussing in any kind of historical context: we’re still in that historical context, for the most part, and it will take a few more […]

You know how in slasher movies, sexually active teenagers are killed? Congratulations, you have all the information you need in order to have written Student Bodies, a slasher movie parody from 1981, the earliest year in which “slasher parody” is something we could even conceivably talk about (added bonus points for being released by Paramount, […]

Camp is one of the hardest things in pop cultural discourse: hard to quite grasp which of a dozen almost identical, but in some crucial way contradictory definitions, cuts to the heart of what it is; hard to explain it once you’ve seen it, and demonstrate how and why it works the way it does; […]

If it had done nothing else to distinguish itself, 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre would stand out in the crowded glut of early ’80s slasher films by virtue of being written by a feminist. Not, please understand, the kind of everyday feminist that anybody could be who believes in equality between the sexes and calls […]

The blogger having been an unusually lazy homebody this year, Antagony & Ecstasy’s annual marathon of movies we missed out on during their theatrical release shall begin extra-early this year. And what better place to start my catalogue of the movies I missed in 2013 than with the very first movie I missed in 2013, […]