This seems to happen about once a year - a film is released that receives heavy critical acclaim, I go see it, and I walk out scratching my head as to what exactly it was that so impressed the masses. Usually it’s a foreign film, and I chalk it up to pseudointellectuals with a [...]
ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING (1987)By Shannon Roberts, 02-13-09
I don’t get embarrassed very easily or very often. On the few occasions when I do end up feeling any sort of shame, I suffer from a very odd response. Remembering embarrassment, replaying scenes of humiliation or shame, fills me with an overwhelming need to do backflips, or any sort [...]
By Terry Smith, 04-19-09
The tag line for Attack of the Puppet, people, is “Terror Comes in Small Packages.” But don’t let the title of this 1958 ‘cash-in’ on the box office success of The Incredible Shrinking Man fool you - the puppet people are not doing the attacking, as much as they are being [...]
TEN REASONS YOU KNOW YOU’RE WATCHING A 70′S SEXPLOITATION EPIC
1. Your film is called AVERE VENT’ANNI (TO BE TWENTY), and your heroines are two scantily clad teenaged girls, one of whom kind of looks like Tanya Roberts as a Xanadu muse, who are hitchhiking across Europe to “get laid.”
2. Within minutes of [...]
BLACK DEVIL DOLL***
It says a lot about the effectiveness of a trailer when it makes enough of an impact that, sight unseen, you decide not only to screen the film as part of your midnight film series, but you line up one of the greatest rappers in history to open the evening. And folks, if you [...]
***1/2
If the invaluable power of strong word-of-mouth has proven itself over the weekend with the amazing success of ultra-indie sleeper Paranormal Activity, let the buzz begin - fingers crossed - for Scott Sanders’ incredibly hilarious and dead-on spoof of the blaxploitation classics of the 70’s, Black Dynamite.
Trailers for this comedy have been circulating for what [...]
Released as part of After Dark Films’ 8 Films to Die For series, Zev Berman’s Borderland rises above its gringos-in-a-strange-land peers (Hostel, Turistas, etc.) as a surprisingly suspenseful and entertaining yarn. Movies this brutal and graphic generally tend to trade in quality and characterization for gore, but this movie maintained an impressive level of [...]
BREEDERS (1986)**1/2
Despite it’s sweeping and utter ineptness, it’s failure to illicit scares - or even basic laughter, it’s frighteningly sexist point of view, and the fact that it is more aggravating than listening to Uncle Mortichi’s post dinner sleep apnea fits, Breeders holds a special, squishy, warmishly tepid place in my heart. Why? Pure [...]
****
A volcanic blitzkrieg of sight and sound, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson lashes out onto its audience like an unleashed hound from hell; ferocious, uncompromising, violent, and loud, it is the single most audacious and stylish depiction of violence since Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange - and the comparisons don’t stop there.
The recipient of the [...]
***1/2
In their 2006 comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, director Larry Charles and writer-actor Sacha Baron Cohen delivered what was that year’s (and perhaps, up to that point, the decade’s) most shockingly outrageous cinematic visual: a nude wrestling match between Baron Cohen and actor Ken Davitian, during which [...]
It’s been 12 years since Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-winning Fargo, and while they’re subsequent films have ranged from stoner classic to Bluegrass musical to black-and-white classic noir, one theme remains throughout - if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. The Coen’s roster of heroes and antiheroes - Raising Arizona’s H.I. [...]
CAT’S EYE**1/2
After the successful adaptations of his work by both visionary filmmakers (DePalma, Kubrick) and horror mainstays (Cronenberg, Hooper), and before Mick Garris and his made-for-tv schlockurama’s cornered the market, Stephen King found his novels (and short stories, and beat poetry, and grocery shopping lists) translated to the silver screen by a diverse group of cinephiles [...]
**1/2
When a dose of disposable income comes my way I consistently find myself grappling with the same dilemma. Should I piggy bank those few extra cents? Should I don my pragmatist’s hat and work on those pesky student loans? Do I feed my caffeine and alcohol addictions? Should I branch out [...]
****
You can keep your Silent Nights, your Deadly Nights, and your Black Christmas’s; Santa Clause can visit those Martians until the cows come home, and the Governator can jingle all the damn way for all I care; because when the yuletide season rolls around there is only one perennial favorite I want stuffing my [...]
Shroomers of the world, rejoice - Coraline has arrived, a dazzlingly whimsical work of intoxicating eye-and-ear-candy that’s gorgeous enough on its own, but mind-blowingly beautiful in 3-D.
True to Neil Gaiman’s original dark fairy tale, director Henry Selick’s (The Nightmare Before Christmas) film is more dream than cartoon, long on visuals and atmosphere, shorter on traditional [...]
Josh Eisenstadt’s 2008 slasher-horror/ghost story/comedy Dark Reel is a film of many surprises. This tale of a haunted film shoot, in which scantily-clad actresses are picked off one by one by a masked killer (or is it a ghost?), is smarter than your average straight-to-DVD horror flick, and twice as much fun. [...]
DAYBREAKERS***1/2
It’s so rare that any movie - particularly a horror movie - lives up to the promise of a great trailer, so what a thrill it was to start 2010 with the Spierig Brothers’ fantastic futuristic vampire film Daybreakers. The benchmark has been set incredibly high for this year’s slate of horror films.
Elegantly paced at [...]
***1/2
It truly is remarkable how everyone behind District 9, director Neill Blomkamp’s new sci-fi/action opus, got everything exactly right. Let’s start with the marketing campaign - long before we’d seen the first trailer, the inconspicuously placed industrial hazard-style signs were everywhere.
Immediately evoking everything from today’s “No on 8″ billboards to the “No Coloreds” signs [...]
DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE (1980)One of the wonderful things about Netflix is that you can rent a movie like Don’t Go in the House and, although technically you paid for it, you can still sort of convince yourself that you didn’t waste any money on it.
Time is another thing. The time, yes, is gone - gone forever. [...]
***1/2
Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you - Drag Me to Hell heralds Sam Raimi’s successful (and long-overdue) return to horror, with revolting gore and hair-raising shocks intact. Loud, fast, scary, and surprisingly hilarious (Raimi’s a king at cartoonishly gory violence that tickles the ribs as it turns the stomach), Drag Me To [...]
***1/2
A pulpy noir masterpiece with a surprising number of twists and surprises for an 88 minute film, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows has been given the Criterion Collection treatment with a pristine restored high-definition digital transfer, as well as a new and improved English subtitle translation, new interviews, and several other great special features. [...]
Well I sure as shit am glad I finally got to see Eraserhead in a movie theatre… A few viewings on DVD (this after years of watching it on a worn out VHS bootleg I got when I was 14, with a ubiquitous white line scrolling up the screen every 30 seconds or so…) never did [...]
EVIL CLUTCH (1988)Ahhh, Troma…
Who else would have the distinctive vision to pick up Evil Clutch, a grimy 1988 Italian Evil Dead rip-off that’s as poorly dubbed as it is awesomely splattered in late-80’s attire. When your heroine is an Asia Argento lookalike who rocks monochromatic-striped leggings and a matching hot-pink-Chucks-and-headband ensemble, and your back story is [...]
**
A semi-decent exploitation schlockfest redeemed by a You’ve never seen anything like it factor and a particularly gory final act, director Brett Leonard’s Feed is a nasty piece of work that dares you, from pretty much the very beginning, to keep watching though the proceedings get increasingly more disturbing and near-unwatchable. Consistently campy and chock [...]
**1/2
Remember what a big deal it was when that guy’s eyes popped out in Friday the 13th 3D? It was all we could talk about for a week – “DUDE! Jason grabs this guy, and…and he squeezes his head and crushes it, and…his EYES COME FLYING OUT IN 3D!! It was totally [...]
*
Please indulge me as I take the much-deserved piss…
Seriously, filmmakers of Fingerprints, as well as other recent B-horror releases (House of Wax remake comes immediately to mind): what is up with this need to develop character and back-story in movies where we’re clearly tuning in for anything but!?
Here’s a movie about a group of kids [...]
Oh, how the mighty have fallen…
I’ll immediately give Marcus Nispel’s “remake” Friday the 13th some credit for not taking the Prom Night and Alien Vs. Predator route of abandoning the signature gore of its source material for a teen-friendly PG-13 rating, a decision that seems to have worked given the film’s record-breaking $45 million opening. [...]
This truly has been a great year for performances. Just when I’d decided that I’d be fine with either Sean Penn or Mickey Rourke picking up the Best Actor Academy Award this month (I’m leaning towards Penn), along comes Frank Langella with his phenomenal performance as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, director Ron Howard’s riveting [...]
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN (1985)By Shannon Roberts, 04-11-09
So there’s this girl. She loves to dance. There’s a television show featuring the hottest dancers that she loves to watch. Lo and behold the show announces a contest to find a new couple. Our heroine, with the help of her wacky friend and against the will of [...]
Another satisfied (and Jack Daniels-soaked) night at the Grindhouse.
Tonight started in typical Grindhouse fashion - waiting in line outside, chatting with the natives about Bob Clark-this and Herschell Gordon Lewis-that, defending myself from an incredulous New Yorker who couldn’t quite comprehend how it was I’ve never seen Clark’s 1974 classic Black Christmas. I promise him that [...]
By Andrew Roberts, 04-07-09
Australian politics take a turn for the weird in 1980’s Harlequin (aka Dark Forces), a stylish and intermittently campy supernatural thriller based on the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin’s unusual relationship with Tsar Nicholas II and Nicholas’ wife and son. Senator Nick Rast (Tsar spelled backward, just in case you missed it,) [...]
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the second installment in the Jones series in which our hero finds himself leaping from a plane on an inflatable raft, going psycho after drinking the dreaded Blood of Khali, and winning a fist fight while dangling from the strands of decrepit collapsed bridge, has long been my [...]
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS****
Whether or not Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s “Best Film,” the fact that such a thing is possible speaks volumes. If ever there was a “There’s no way he’ll ever top…” film, it’s 1994’s Pulp Fiction, the Cannes-winner that launched a new wave of indie film making – for better and for worse [...]
Entertaining, unique, and ultimately inspiring, the documentary Zombie Girl: The Movie is the behind-the-scenes story of the independent horror film Pathogen, and of its writer-director, Emily Hagins. Pathogen is Emily’s first feature-length film - an ambitious undertaking for anyone, let alone a sixth-grader. I truly enjoyed Zombie Girl: The Movie - read my review [...]
INTERVIEW: RENA RIFFEL TALKS TO MONDO CELLULOID - PART 1Rena Riffel is experiencing the perils of the Red Carpet life firsthand. Looking stunning in a dark ensemble that speaks to both her class and her playfulness, she is realizing that, striking as they may be, the Vic Matie shoes she has been given to wear do not get along with her feet… [...]
INTERVIEW: RENA RIFFEL TALKS TO MONDO CELLULOID - PART 2We continue our interview with actress Rena Riffel at the Paranoia Film Festival premiere of Dark Reel, as well as the trailer for her directorial debut, Trasharella. Rena continues her discussion of her Mulholland Drive shoot…
Our call time was really early that morning, and I was all showered and made up, and David Lynch walks [...]
Leave it to a Mondo Celluloid contributor to end up on a reality television show…
Terry F. Smith, who used to work at The Art Theatre of Long Beach (where we host our midnight series) and who contributed a few articles to the site last year, surprised us with news that his recent disappearance was due [...]
**1/2
On paper, this premise sounds like it could be kind of funny: Joe the Plumber, fresh off the heels of The McCain campaign, is re-invented as a monster ass-kicker, taking on both Harryhausen-esque creatures and Robert Englund as a blobish, tendrilled troll puppet! Even more appealing: the director’s decision to retroactively embrace the [...]
Just when you thought there were no possible cinematic surprises left, along comes co-writer/director Mabrouk El Mechri’s phenomenal JCVD.
For starters, we now know that yes, it is possible for the expectations raised by a great trailer to be met - moreover, surpassed - by the film. I’d been looking forward to seeing JCVD since [...]
There’s something to be said for big budget popcorn fare with Ideas - sometimes it works (The Matrix), sometimes it doesn’t (Wild Wild West), and sometimes you get a film like Knowing that lies squarely in the middle - ridiculous, but admittedly, just as entertaining.
Certainly the film opens with quite an intriguing sequence - on [...]
**
Though not a complete disaster, director Scott Stewart’s Legion nevertheless suggests a new drinking game: let’s take a shot every time a film recalls another - and, superior - film.
In the case of Legion, the first chug goes to the movie it most immediately echoes: 1995’s underrated The Prophecy. Witness descriptions found on [...]
There really is something to be said about going into a movie blind, as I did tonight for the Swedish film Let the Right One In (Lat den ratte komma in), so I won’t spoil the experience for the rest of you by saying too much. What I will say, without exaggeration, is that it [...]
LEVIATHANBy Jasper Oliver, 06-01-09
Leviathan is that rare gem that works on multiple levels in spite and perhaps because of it’s unapologetic thievery of imagery and plot points from more acclaimed sci-fi horror actioners. Thinking I was in store for one of the many Jaws rip-offs littering the terror library I plugged into the atmospheric, [...]
**1/2
After years of faded VHS bootlegs and even grainier torrent downloads, the good folks at Troma have finally released Carlton J. Albright’s (writer of 1980’s toxic kiddies epic The Children) somewhat infamous directorial debut, 1990’s Luther the Geek!
The premise of a deranged killer who clucks like a chicken, especially when paired with the Troma label, [...]
Yeah, sure. We all remember the big ones. We can all quote The Breakfast Club, we all remember Nicholas Cage’s bizarrely coiffed chest hair in Valley Girl, and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that although the name Wallace Shawn may not mean that much to you, the exclamation “Inconceivable!” most certainly will. [...]
MARTYRS****
Grotesque, disturbing, and surprisingly brilliant, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is a stunning and brutal 2008 French-Canadian film that defies the restrictions of genre assignment: it’s almost too fantastic and heady to be considered simply a “horror flick,” and to classify it as “torture porn” is instantly insulting. Still, by all accounts if there were [...]
*
You know those zero-budget sci-fi B-movies that come along every once in a while that are redeemed by unintended camp value? MegaFault isn’t one of them.
MegaFault - yes, a film of the earthquake disaster variety - warns the audience of what’s in store with the first of its opening credits: SyFy Presents….A Film by [...]
****
Recently I was lucky enough to catch a special screening of Christopher Nolan’s now-classic thriller Memento, originally released in 2000. This is a movie that should not only be studied by film students but also seen by anyone who wants to have their mind blown for two hours by a director and cast that have [...]
It’s a testament to the state of studio horror films, or perhaps to the spirit of independent filmmaking, that the three best horror films I’ve seen this year - the brilliant vampire drama Let the Right One In, the surprisingly hilarious dark comedy Otis, and yes, Eben McGarr’s fantastic Sick Girl - were low-budget, scarcely-marketed [...]
MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-DTHE SLASHER FLICK IS BACK!
All hail My Bloody Valentine 3-D, as unrelentingly violent, gory, and ridiculous as any slasher film I stayed up late to watch as a sick kid in the early 80’s. Almost instantly, director Patrick Lussier announces that his film will not be another PG-13 horror-lite retread - with not one [...]
Rotten Tomatoes recently posted an article called Eli Roth Presents the Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen, seven films that Roth claims “had some effect” on him. As I’m always up for suggestions from other people with sick minds (and as I’d love to see what may have inspired Hostel’s wonderfully [...]
ONE-EYED MONSTER (2008)**1/2
I really, really expected to write a bad review for this movie…
Witness the premise - a group of porn stars, led by superstar Ron Jeremy (as Ron Jeremy!), head out to a cabin in the woods to shoot an adult film. Soon after arriving, Ron gets zapped by some sort of evil alien meteor, which [...]
***
There’s something wrong with Esther. For about a month now, one only had to look up at billboards while driving or check out the side of a passing bus to know this - Warner Bros. spared no expense on its ad campaign for Orphan, plastering actress Isabelle Fuhrman’s creepy little Esther all over L.A. with [...]
***
It’s been ten years since The Blair Witch Project evidenced the power of clever viral marketing to become the indie-horror-film-that-buzz-built and ultimately gross 4,000 times its minuscule budget. The inevitable comparisons are flowing as first-time writer-director Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity - a film with no stars, virtually no special effects, and a mere $11,000 [...]
***
At ten years old, Emily Hagins most likely did not have a conscious understanding of the symbolic meanings attributed to water. Purification. Innocence. Life. I imagine that she still didn’t grasp this concept another two years later, when at age 12 she completed the screenplay for Pathogen, her first feature-length-film. [...]
PROM NIGHT (2008) + THE RUINS
I know, I know… Why did I even try, right? Between the two movies, that was about $37, factoring in popcorn and soda. Oh, then there’s gas, too, so maybe $40-ish. But look, it’s horror, it’s new, and I hate to judge a book by its [...]
It’s been five years since the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (Gin gwai) scared the shit out of me, and I’ve been losing love for the directors ever since - seemingly stuck on Retread, each of their Eye sequels got worst as they went along, there was that terrible Jessica Alba remake (not their fault, to [...]
REPO MAN (1984)By Andrew Roberts, 04-10-09
As embarrassing as this is to admit, I had never seen Repo Man until I was assigned to review it, and now that I’ve seen it I’m embarrassed that it took me this long. For those out there who are still laboring under the same deficit, the plot of Repo Man [...]
Hmm…
I’m still sort of scratching my head on this one.
Repo! The Genetic Opera has had a strange effect on me - it’s an aftertaste I haven’t experienced since watching Showgirls thirteen years ago (shit, has it really been thirteen years??). I walked out of both movies feeling I had just sat through something pretty terrible…
…but [...]
**1/2
As much as the Resident Evil films have been a guilty pleasure of mine since that great elevator death in the original, I’d never played the games and had no idea until tonight how little those films had to do with their source material. At tonight’s premiere of Resident Evil: Degeneration, the crowd [...]
****
It seems this year’s Halloween offered more options than any I can remember (probably helped that it was on a Friday), but for weeks leading up my plans were set: I was watching Santa Sangre at the Egyptian. I was open to anything before or after, but attending that screening was a must, and [...]
***
Prior to its release, one didn’t have to dig deep to find reasons to prematurely dismiss Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. For one, it’s directed by Guy Ritchie, once-promising director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch turned much-derided director of Swept Away and Revolver. For another, critics are quick to [...]
By Logan Crow - 06-02-09
Sex + Violence = David Cronenberg. Sex & mutilation (Crash and Dead Ringers and eXistenZ), sex & television (Videodrome), sex & typewriters… Truly he has something to say, and whether he’s telling a new story or adapting a literary work (some of his best works - including Crash , [...]
***
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is not a horror movie, though its misleading trailers would have you believe it is. While there are some effectively spooky sequences and a chilling atmosphere of dread to the surroundings, the film was no doubt a difficult film to market without suggesting something far more thrilling and terrifying than [...]
It’s a rare thing when buzz as strong as is being heaped upon Slumdog Millionaire is so richly deserved. Directed by Danny Boyle with all the urgency and passion of Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, and with the rich scope and precise attention to nuance and detail of Meirelles’ City of God, Slumdog Millionaire seemingly [...]
SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMABy Jasper Oliver, 05-31-09
In the mood for some 80’s terror sleaze heavy on the T & A, but light on style, substance or sense? Then have I got a recommendation for you! Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama starring scream queen Linnea Quigley of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers fame (that’s right, fame) isn’t really [...]
Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s new film Southland Tales doesn’t come out until November 14, so needless to say, if you are sensitive to plot spoilers, stop reading right now. I won’t give away anything major, but you know, some of you don’t even want to know what a film is ABOUT before you go [...]
SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974)Sun Ra made weird music, so it’s no surprise that his motion picture is pretty damn weird too. Space is the Place is like The Seventh Seal meets Up In Smoke meets The Day the Earth Stood Still, with an esoteric Afro-centric jazz score and a Black Power philosophical gloss thrown in for good [...]
STAR TREKBy Eric Diaz, 05-08-09
Right now the world is heaping praise upon JJ Abram’s reboot of Star Trek, and I’m here to say that this time, everyone is right. The new Trek is exactly what everyone says it is: Fucking Awesome. Having seen it just scant few hours ago, I’m sitting here thinking how I can’t [...]
Saturday, February 20th, was quite an eventful day in Long Beach. According to The District Weekly’s “5 Things to Do Today” events page, there were at least two festivals, a Mardi Gras parade, a wine tasting, and the Long Beach Comic Expo.
Guess where we ended up!?
With the success of the 1st Annual Long Beach Comic [...]
By Andrew Roberts, 04-05-09
Pete Brady (Dan Shor) has a problem. Actually, he has several: His dad the sheriff is a bummer, he’s having a hard time scraping up the money for his college application, his classmates are being inexplicably murdered, and Tangerine Dream music follows him everywhere he goes. In an attempt [...]
Takashi Miike is a very busy man.
Churning out more films per year than any other director I can think of - IMDB shows him as having directed no less than five films in 2005 alone - it’s hard sometimes to sit through films like 1998’s Andromedia and his latest American release, Sukiyaki Western Django, two [...]
By Shannon Roberts, 02-23-09
Teen Wolf is silly. It’s just…silly.
Michael J. Fox is a teenage werewolf who plays basketball. This is a ridiculous premise. I mean, wouldn’t the interscholastic basketball association have some rules about a player being a wolfman?
Here’s how it breaks down: Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) is unpopular and [...]
Vagina dentata
What a wonderful phrase!
Vagina dentata
Ain’t no passing craze…
It was hard not to hum this diddy along to myself while watching “Teeth,” the new film from first-time writer-director Mitch Lichtenstein. The words quickly found the melody, and Disney did the rest.
Teeth is what might have happened if David Cronenberg directed “Saved!,” or if Todd Solondz’ [...]
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIANFirst Iron Man, and now The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian… Aren’t summer blockbusters supposed to suck??
From its opening scene, you know this is not going to be your standard Disney pander-to-the-kiddies, gutless twee fantasy - credit Disney’s deep pockets for the film’s PG rating. Opening with an assassination attempt reminiscent of the corruption-in-the-castle goings [...]
What a grand and sweeping mess The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is. Almost instantly it achieves the distinction of being perhaps the single perfect example of a fatally flawed masterpiece: a visually striking, sumptuously stylish fable that emerges like a glorious epic poem, only to abandon all magic and linger tediously for two [...]
THE FOURTH KIND**
“Hello, my name is Olatunde Osunsanmi, and check out all the neat tricks I learned in film school…” No, whereas writer/director Osunsanmi does not make this statement directly to the camera in his new fact-based horror film The Fourth Kind (though he does appear as himself - sort of??), actress Milla Jovovich does introduce [...]
Thanks to Mondo Celluloid friend Eric AD for submitting this review! Friends, feel free to send in your reviews - I’ll happily post ‘em!
Hulk Smash!!! Marvel Studios is 2 for 2 this Summer
It’s almost prophetic that the producers of the 2003 version of this particular Marvel Comics Icon chose to simply title their movie Hulk, [...]
**
Ostensibly a B-horror filmmaker, with such gory cult hits as Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead under his belt, director Peter Jackson turned heads in 1994 with Heavenly Creatures, a mesmerizing, expertly crafted film that recounts the true story of a brutal murder in a small New Zealand town. Nominated for an [...]
****
Ever have one of those “Where’s this movie been all my life” moments?
Based on my appreciation of Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris, the cosmic algorithmic Gods of Suggestion at Netflix recommended William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration, a 1980 film that, despite being hailed as “The finest American surrealist film ever made” by [...]
It’s been almost twenty years since the fantastically subversive Pee Wee’s Playhouse closed its shiny candy-apple red doors; this year also marks the 25th anniversary of Pee Wee’s big screen debut in Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Of course, some legends never die - the advent of DVD resurrected the television show and [...]
THE RAGE (2007)***
GORE GORE GORE!! Makeup effects artist Robert Kurtzman has worked on acclaimed dramas like Pulp Fiction, Vanilla Sky and The Green Mile, though he seems to be most at home when working knee-deep in rivers of gore, as evidenced by his work on horror classics like Evil Dead II, From Dusk Till Dawn, Scream, and [...]
Put simply, The Reader is Oscar-bait: a Holocaust movie with fancy production values and Big Themes, filled out with a cast of reliably excellent actors and surprising unknowns. What sets it apart from the usual WWII Weepy is its setting (postwar Germany), its primary focus (an…ahem…unorthodox relationship), and its frank yet careful exploration of [...]
THE ROAD***
Based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning mega-seller novel, The Road finally hits the big screen in one of the most anticipated films of the fall season. The last McCarthy book adapted for the screen, No Country For Old Men, was a massive critical and commercial success, and won four Oscars including Best Picture. So [...]
**1/2
En route to a friend’s wedding, a hipster, a nerd, a jock, and a chick run their car off the road and seek help at the creepy farmhouse up the way. Everything is fine until the hipster goes exploring in the spooky barn and the foursome find themselves under attack by a swarm of vampire [...]
The Spirit had potential: the cinematography and art direction were killer, the cast was made up primarily of attractive women, and the titular hero (played by Gabriel Macht) gets to live out every adolescent boy’s fantasy of derring-do, sexual magnetism, and indestructibility. So far, so good. Had The Spirit been a silent movie, [...]
THE UNBORNIt’s hard to tear a horror movie apart when it actually makes you jump out of your seat a few times; if the primary goal of a horror movie is to deliver some thrills and chills, then by all accounts David S. Goyer’s The Unborn is a success.
Still, critics have been merciless, and the reason seems [...]
**
Somewhere between the lush period opulence of 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the B-movie splatter of 1985’s Silver Bullet lies The Wolfman, director Joe Johnston’s big-budget update of Universal’s 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. classic. Starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Emily Blunt, The Wolfman raised eyebrows when its release was rescheduled several times, [...]
If you are a child of the 80’s, wrestling is part of you. Even if you didn’t watch the matches you were bombarded with the toys, the Saturday morning cartoon, or those Macho Man Slim Jim ads. Darren Aronofsky’s latest opus The Wrestler prays on that fact.
Since Pi I have been a fan of [...]
THIRST (Bakjwi)**1/2
After his incredible “Vengeance Trilogy” that climaxed with the triumphant Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi), the promise of a horror film - let alone a vampire film - from director Chan-wook Park has been feverishly exciting. Stylish, original, and unapologetically violent, Park’s films have tended to rise above those of many who are considered to [...]
Yes, I Really Watched That, Case File 1705: Tinker Bell
By Andrew Roberts, 03-02-09
The opening of Tinker Bell informs us that fairies spontaneously generate: The laughter of a baby calls them into being, you see, and it is just such a sound that impels a dandelion seed to Never-Never Land where (as luck would have [...]
TOBY DAMMIT (Suggested by Eli Roth, Part IV)
If you told me that on a fateful day in 1969 somebody took Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gilliam, Alan Parker, and Ken Russell to a movie theatre, showed them Toby Dammit, and then said “Now…go out and make a movie,” I might believe you.
I didn’t know [...]
***
The wealth of buzz and hyperbole that has followed Michael Dougherty’s TRICK ‘R TREAT since it first hit film festivals in 2008 has seemed to rise to a height not seen since The Blair Witch Project - at least for those who follow horror cinema, this was a film we’ve been hearing a lot about. [...]
There is always danger in making a book into a movie. More often than not the result is disappointing; the characters don’t look the way you pictured them, they leave out important scenes, it’s just not as good as the book. But what if the books aren’t all that great to begin with? [...]
UNA SULL’ALTRA / PERVERSION STORY (Eli Roth, Part V)UNA SULL’ALTRA / PERVERSION STORY (Suggested by Eli Roth, Part V)
I was starting to get worried as I finished watching Lucio Fulci’s 1969 UNA SULL’ALTRA (called Perversion Story and One on Top of the Other here in the USA) that I would be unable to complete my mission to watch all seven in [...]
UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANSUnderworld: Rise of the Lycans is a surprisingly ballsy wide release. Being a tale of vampires and werewolves, it’s not a horror film; the third in a series of thrillers packed with gun play and acrobatic fight sequences, it’s not really an action film; and being essentially the depiction of a tale already laid out [...]
UWE BOLL’S POSTALBefore sharing 100 guilty, gleeful minutes with the other 7 people who’d decided to spend a Saturday afternoon with Uwe Boll’s Postal, I had never seen a Uwe Boll film. Of course, I am nevertheless familiar with his work - or rather, with the contempt that many filmgoers have for him, and with [...]
VISITOR Q (2001)A young Japanese schoolgirl lies on a warmly lit bed, coquettishly flirting with a nervous older businessman standing at her bedside. The whole scene is quiet and still, no score, no sound but their conversation and the beep of her digital camera as she takes numerous snapshots. For a while they chat trivially, [...]
WALKABOUT (1971)****
A true piece of they-don’t-make-them-like-they-used-to 1970’s auteur cinema, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout - like his later classics Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth - is a provocative work of art that transcends its otherwise simple plot with splashes of surreal visuals, evocative editing, and, courtesy of John Barry, a magnificent score suggesting [...]
Our film opens to a barren, seemingly post-apocalyptic wasteland. Pull back to reveal a landscape that suggests New York City, but covered in a thick and endless blanket of flith and debris, its only surviving biological life a single cockroach. Enter a lone robot with the Sisyphean task of cleaning up the debris, [...]
WATCHMENA lot has changed since 1986, when Alan Moore first released his comic book limited series Watchmen and famously deconstructed the superhero mythos: his warts-and-all approach no longer seems novel (subsequent films like Mystery Men and The Incredibles, to lighter effect, showed us that superheroes wipe their noses like the rest of us); the [...]
WATCHMEN: TAKE TWOEditor’s Note: We’ve already posted a review of Watchmen, but thought it might be a good idea to get the perspective of someone who hadn’t read the comic book series. Here’s Andrew Roberts’ take:
Watchmen, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Blue Cock
This writer is not a big reader of comic [...]
Still a bit high from my screening of Night Train Murders (which I find myself appreciating more the more I think back on it), I decided to press on in my quest to view and review every film in Eli Roth’s Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen, and decided on Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s [...]
WITHNAIL & IA grey and cloudy Sunday afternoon, recovering after a long adventurous Saturday, and there is no better film than Withnail & I.
There is something therapeutic about Bruce Robinson’s 1987 comedy, essentially one long hangover shared by best friends Withnail (Richard E. Grant in his greatest - and very first - screen role) and Marwood (Paul [...]
ZOMBIE GIRL: THE MOVIE****
Like Hearts of Darkness and Burden of Dreams before it, Zombie Girl: The Movie is a documentary exposing the chaos of a tremendous cinematic undertaking, complete with the familiar images of a frustrated producer, exhausted cast, and an obsessively dedicated filmmaker determined to bring their vision to light. What is unfamiliar, and where this film [...]
I’ll say it without shame, and with great surprise: Zombie Strippers is really, really good!
The film’s Myspace page proudly announces “It’s horror! It’s comedy! It’s political satire! It’s a statement about the absurdity of the human condition! It’s INSANELY beautiful women! …and it’s rotting flesh!” Ambitious words, especially for a film starring Jenna Jameson, but [...]
***1/2
They’re Coming To Get You, Woody!!
Blood! Gore! Guns! Zombies! Do I have your attention yet? Well, if you’re part of the audience Zombieland is after, I had you at Blood. Gallons of the gooey stuff are splattered across the screen in debuting director Ruben Fleischer’s satisfying, tongue-in-cheek, undead comedy romp. Is it flawless? Of course [...]
