I’ve been on something of an unplanned Ken Russell kick, after going for years after not having seen any of his films – indeed, having never even heard of him until I saw Kyle Kallgren’s review of The Devils. Continue reading
Category Archives: film
Anime Review: Holmes of Kyoto
Invoking the name of Sherlock Holmes sets a lot of expectations for a series. It sets the expectations that your series is going to be a mystery series, where the way the mysteries will be solved will be through the detective using deductive reasoning and through keen powers of observation – and also that the detective will have an audience-perspective sidekick who is intelligent and perceptive, but not as much as the detective. Holmes of Kyoto is, occasionally, that. However, just as much of the time, it’s a relationship drama, and not necessarily a well-executed relationship drama. Continue reading
Film Review: House (1977)
We conclude our collection of horror films with a Japanese horror film that… is a little tricky to show on the channel without giving away all the great visuals. Continue reading
Film Review: The Visitor (1979)
The Visitor is a very different animal where Italian horror films are concerned. It’s not a giallo or an offshoot of giallo like The Black Cat or Argento’s Three Mothers series. It’s not a zombie film at the least. I’d describe it as fitting closer to Italian Satanic horror films – films inspired by or seeking to mimic Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, and other similar films. These films rely less on plot cohesion and more on mood and tone. It doesn’t quite matter if the motivations of the characters are clearly spelled out or the narrative beats are coherent so long as the emotional beats are. Continue reading
Film Review: Altered Space
Altered Space is something of a horror film that isn’t quite a horror film. In a way, it’s difficult to describe – this is my first time watching a film by Ken Russell, but his reputation has preceded him. Specifically, his reputation for psychedelic, religious, and psychosexual imagery. All of those things are present in Altered Space in spades – with subject matter that is fundamentally horrific but is never presented in that manner. Continue reading
Film Review: Bad Times at the El Royale
I’m a fan of film noir, and I’m definitely coming to enjoy modern neo-noir. When I saw the trailers for Bad Times at the El Royale come up on my YouTube subscriptions, my interest was piqued.
Film Review: Mother of Tears (2007)
Almost 20 years after Dario Argento released the middle installment of his “Three Mothers Trilogy” he made the final installment of the series – Mother of Tears. As with most series that take this long between installments, there is a sense that what you’ll get with the final installment can never live up to what expectations you’ve set for it. However, even then, Mother of Tears is particularly disappointing. Continue reading
DVD Review: Cheezy Horror – Vol. 1
One of the interesting things I like about the boom of interest in Exploitation film after Grindhouse, along with the rise of DVDs as a media format is the rise of the Trailer DVD – a DVD chock full of trailers for various exploitation films from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. They make for a great snapshot of a moment in time, showcasing both how films were sold (and what you could get away with in trailers), along with the movies being sold. Continue reading
The macabre house hunting expedition continues with an Amicus Anthology film featuring Donald Sutherland, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee. Continue reading
Movie Review: Sugar Hill (1974)
“Blacksploitation”, is something I’d describe more as a cinematic movement more than a genre. This is because it spans just so many genres of cinema – action films, gangster movies, science fiction films, and horror movies – and sometimes even multiples at the same time. Such is the case with Sugar Hill. Continue reading
Film Review: Don’t Breathe
One of the issues with modern horror films, particularly those with a human antagonist, is the filmmakers feel the need to give a grounding to their villain’s methods that they feel believable, and they have the same need to make the protagonists just unlikeable enough that when bad things happen to them, things don’t feel overly cruel. The problem is that when this goes wrong it comes across to a degree like victim-blaming – and leads to a toxic message like the one put forward in your standard ’80s slasher film. Don’t Breathe manages to avoid that – barely. This review will contain a few spoilers. Continue reading
Movie Review: Inferno (1980)
Suspiria was what I’d describe as one of the best films Dario Argento ever made, with a tremendous visual esthetic, particularly through the use of color in the film, combined with the excellent score by Goblin. So, it’s not surprising that Dario made a semi-spiritual sequel. The second film, Inferno, introduced the thematic series that Argento named “The Three Mothers” trilogy, with the films based around three witches drawn from Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. Inferno aims to basically be “like Suspiria but more so,” but it doesn’t quite work. Continue reading
Film Review: Suspiria (1977)
When it comes to giallo, the work of Dario Argento is something of a gap in my knowledge, which is a shame since he, like Bava and Fulci, are legends of the genre. Indeed, Argento probably had the greatest mainstream penetration of any work of Italian horror, through this work – Suspiria.
I start off my October House of Horrors with a look at Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic “The Fall of the House of Usher” Continue reading
Film Review: Krull
Krull feels like a film that is trying to cash in on a variety of trends. It’s a fantasy film like Conan. It’s a grand heroic epic like Star Wars, but it doesn’t quite pull all of them off. However, Krull has its strengths that make it worth watching. Continue reading
This week I’m covering the last Hayate series to date, with Hayate the Combat Butler: Cuties. Continue reading
Anime Review: Girls Und Panzer Der Film
Girls Und Panzer (which I reviewed at Bureau42, not here), was a show that I absolutely loved. It had a sports anime plot for a sport that didn’t exist in the real world, Sensha-do, the art of Tankery: the art of crewing and maintaining a tank, and succeeding in combat using that tank – though Sensha-Do competitions are not to the death. Continue reading
This month I’m wrapping up a few loose ends, as I review the two Hayate TV series I hadn’t previously reviewed. First off is Hayate the Combat Butler: Can’t Take My Eyes Off You! Continue reading
Anime Review: Record of Grancrest War
One of my favorite works of anime fantasy is Record of Lodoss War. It’s a show that I try to watch at least once a year, and due to my appreciation of that, I’ve sought out the various works by its creator, Ryo Mizuno, which have gotten a US release, from the Lodoss series onwards. In any case, when Record of Grancrest War was announced, and that even more it was related to a tabletop RPG that Mizuno had created, I was definitely onboard to check this out.
Film Review: Fall of the Roman Empire
The Roman-Period Epic was something of a staple of cinema in the 1950s and ’60s, and one of the films of that genre that tanked the hardest was The Fall of the Roman Empire from 1964, which is a bummer because it’s really not that bad. Continue reading
Movie Review: Night of the Lepus
The movie Night of the Lepus is a something of a joke in horror movie circles. While that is somewhat deserved, those reasons strictly lie with the film’s budget and some of the film’s effects. The rest of the film is put together incredibly well. Continue reading
Movie Review: Terror in Beverly Hills (1989)
When it comes to bad action movies, there are some names in action films that can be reasonably taken as a warning sign that the film you are approaching is a stinkburger. Frank Stallone is one of those names. Frank Stallone started his career as a musician and composer and has had a reasonably successful career at that. However, as his older brother Sylvester became one of the action juggernauts of the 1980s and ’90s, Frank kept also getting action movie roles, presumably on the basis that he looks enough like Sly, that if you put “Stallone” in large enough letters on the poster, people won’t look closer and recognize that it’s actually Frank. Continue reading
Anime Review: Akiba’s Trip – The Animation
Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed was an interesting RPG & brawler with something of a novel concept – that it was set in a re-creation of Akihabara with a level of detail that was just short of being on par with the level of detail that the Yakuza series puts into not-Kabuki-cho – by which I mean that there were some loading screens dividing up areas of the game, not much in terms of real-world alcohol to drink (because your protagonist is underage), and sadly no playable arcade games. Continue reading
Film Review: Stop Making Sense
Live music is theater. Yes, live music is often seen in a theater, but they the act of performing music publically is, in some manner or another, theatrical. It’s a performance that seeks to tell a story or convey an emotion through music. Some genres of music try to lean away from this, like folk or punk (though arguably punk leans so far away from theatricality that it ends up accidentally leaning into theatricality). Others, like metal, prog, and some parts of pop lean into it, either through telling a deliberate story or through the presentation. Stop Making Sense definitely fits into the latter category. Continue reading