We have a new live-action manga adaptation in theaters. How did it turn out!
Film Review: Alita – Battle Angel
Anime Review: S.S.S.S Gridman
These past few years have been interesting for anime and manga re-imaginings of Tokusatsu series. There’s been the Netflix Godzilla anime series of films, there was the Ultraman short that was part of the Japan Animator Expo, and there’s the Ultraman reboot manga that is also getting adapted to an anime this year (2019). And there’s S.S.S.S. Gridman, from Studio Trigger in a co-production with Tsuburaya Productions, based on the live-action Gridman: The Hyper Agent from the ’90s (released in the US as Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad).
Read moreVlog: 6 RPG Recommendations based on Video Games and Anime of 2018
In this episode (with its light novel adaptation length title), I give some recommendations for tabletop RPGs based on various video games and anime from the last year.
Film Review: Haxan (1922)
When it comes to horror and documentaries, in the sense of horror films that are deliberately planned to be documentaries, you have two main stripes represented by two big names. On one hand, you have Legend of Boggy Creek, a historical reenactment heavy documentary about a Texarkana cryptid that effectively recounts a variety of local myths and legends in an uncritical manner. On the other hand, there’s Haxan, the film I’m covering today, which is not only a very early work in the documentary genre, it’s also a work that is also very critical of historical accounts of witchcraft.
Film Review: Humanoids From The Deep
Roger Corman is widely recognized as a producer who launched the careers of numerous writers, actors, and future directors. He’s also widely recognized as a producer who churned out numerous exploitation films of a wide variety of stripes almost like clockwork, on the cheap, and without much concern about the craft.
This leads to the problems with Humanoids from the Deep. Part of this film is a very well done horror creature feature, with incredibly suspensefully shot sequences, and is a film that is willing to straight up kill off a kid and several dogs very early in the film. It’s also a film where Roger Corman decided to fire the film’s original director, Barbara Peeters, because he wanted the film’s rape scenes to be more explicit – so he handed those sequences off to the second unit director, and the film is lesser because of this. Read more
Editorial: My 6 Anime Holy Grails (as of 2018)
In 2018, a handful of my Anime Holy Grails getting licensed and released. It’s time to replenish the list.
Film Review: Electric Dragon 80,000V
It’s been a while since I watched what I’d call a “Weird Japan” movie – a Japanese film with a degree of creativity and un-reality that is uncommon in Western cinema – and indeed is generally rejected outright in Western independent cinema (see Dogme ’95 and Ethan Hawke’s comments about superhero films). Instead, these films openly embrace science fiction, fantasy, and horror concepts in a way that Western independent cinema (outside of horror) fails to do.
Film Review: Lair of the White Worm
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
Film (Video) Review: Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors
The macabre house hunting expedition continues with an Amicus Anthology film featuring Donald Sutherland, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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.
Film Review: House of Usher
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” Read more
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. Read more
Anime Review: Hayate the Combat Butler – Cuties
This week I’m covering the last Hayate series to date, with Hayate the Combat Butler: Cuties. Read more
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. Read more