The best thing to do with complex topics, I have found, is to ease into them simply. So: House. This is, apparently, what you get when an experimental filmmaker, Obayashi Nobuhiko, who turned to making TV commercials to make ends meet, was given the chance by a big studio to direct what it hoped would […]
We now hit the point where Stanley Kubrick, Methodical Auteur, turns into Stanley Kubrick, The Hermit Artist. Four years, almost to the day, separated the premieres of 1971’s A Clockwork Orange and 1975’s Barry Lyndon, not quite enough to make it the biggest gap in his career to that point; and given the complexity and […]
Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies Michele Soavi only made four horror films in a career that wasn’t very long (he took many years off to care for his unwell son), which surely explains why his profile isn’t higher. There’s no good argument, certainly not one based on those of […]
The word “gimmick” almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result. This is not a hard-and-true relationship. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be […]
Inevitably, “the first movie ever rated R just because it’s so damn scary” creates expectations that cannot be met, not by The Conjuring, probably not by anything. In fact – allowing that “scary” is the only thing even more personal and subjective than “funny” – I don’t even suppose that The Conjuring is the scariest […]
From among the Video Nasties The making and production of The Evil Dead has become a legendary campfire story in its own right: writer-director Sam Raimi, looking to make his first feature, creating a demo short and forcing it upon potential investors; borderline-inhumane working conditions for most of the cash-strapped location shoot; a rapturous, career-making […]
How much easier life would be – or at least, the composition of this essay – if Evil Dead was as consistently bad as it has every reason to be. It is, after all the remake of a truly iconic original, Sam Raimi’s 1981 debut feature, and horror remakes as a class are not terribly […]
The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/13 & 10/15World premiere: 11 March, 2012, South by Southwest Film Festival No film that opens with as big a moment as Citadel does can possibly be written off entirely: a young husband, living with his wife in a virtually uninhabitable public housing building too-ironically named “Edenstown”, has just stepped […]
You don’t get to be a horror fan without developing a strong defense against crappy filmmaking, but holy hell, Chernobyl Diaries is absolutely not a satisfying viewing experience. Not that it was going to be great, or anything. But the intense, overriding degree to which it is not-great and in fact anti-great is still surprising: […]
I can’t even remember the last time that we had a horror movie that became such a talking point across such a wide range of cinephiles, so praise be to the long-delayed The Cabin in the Woods for that reason all by itself; though whether it’s actually categorically responsible to refer to The Cabin in […]
Two films starring Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley, premiered on 21 January, 2011, at the Sundance Film Festival. One of these was Martha Marcy May Marlene, and it was so buzzed-about and well-regarded that it was snatched up and given a nice awards-baiting berth and gifted by Fox Searchlight with […]
