It’s interesting having viewed the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers after I’ve seen the remake. It’s interesting to see how many beats the remake cribbed from the original, but which executes on them so very differently, with a different emotional payoff. Read more
What’s worse than a horror film that’s bad? A horror film that’s bad because it’s boring and annoying. This is the issue with Death Valley, a slasher film with an interesting concept, that fails in the execution in multiple respects. Read more
Phase IV is an underrated, very weird film – the only dramatic film directed by Saul Bass, who is best known as designing the movie posters and opening credits sequences for the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Read more
Dark Angel (originally released as I Come in Peace in the US) is the film I wish Predator 2 was. Read more
This Halloween we have a review of another Cronenberg film, with The Brood. Read more
This film is not good. Read more
There’s a bit in an episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip where the characters on the series serial-numbers-filed-off version of Saturday Night Live are working on a sketch for Thanksgiving where the turkey spurts absurd, Army of Darkness levels of blood when carved. The bit is not shown, only talked about – with one of the characters commenting about the Prop guy thinking the level of blood is unrealistic with the comment”If it’s just a realistic amount of blood, then it’s… extremely disturbing…”
That is, perhaps, Blood and Lace‘s greatest strength, and its weakness. Read more
There’s a new Godzilla film out (for a limited release) and I saw it in theaters. Here are my thoughts! Read more
Johnny To, as a director, has two extremes. On one end is gritty crime thrillers like the Election duology – which may have an action scene or two, but which otherwise are generally grounded in the real world. On the other end is Exiled, a film which has a fight scene early in the film where several characters in a firefight cause a table to flip and spin end over end with their bullet hits, but ultimately both come out of the fight uninjured. In the middle lies The Mission. Read more
Barbarian Queen II is, basically, a somewhat nihilistic gender-swapped version of the Robin Hood story – princess is heir to throne, king has gone off to war and is presumed killed in the field, with the King’s evil brother planning to usurp the throne, princess flees to forest and builds a band of bandits to fight back against Not-Prince-John. Read more
This film is freaking weird. Read more
Deathstalker II is a fun dumb movie. It’s the kind of film where there is a title-drop in the film that incorporates the number (sort of – the line being: “I’ll have my revenge, and Deathstalker too!”). It’s got a soundtrack by Casio, exterior sets from a Renaissance faire, pants made out of pleather because they ran out of their leather budget, and female characters who wear as little as possible in the hopes that the audience won’t pay attention to any of the rest of the film’s shortcomings. Read more
Man, this movie is freaking weird.
I should mention in advance, that I should give a trigger warning for this film. The movie has extensive scenes of domestic violence, both physical and psychological, caused not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence. Read more
There are some genres of cinema that have been lost to technological developments and rise of global interconnectivity. One of these genres is the “Italian knockoff of an successful American film.” One of the more impressive parts of this cinematic sub-genre is the science fiction film Starcrash, directed by Luigi Cozzi under an American pseudonym to conceal the film’s true nature. Read more
When it comes to the “science and technology” part of Science Fiction, there tend to be three axis of thought, that end up forming into a sort of spectrum-ish thing – like those charts used in some video games where your character’s stats are portrayed in context of a geometric shape, with portions sticking out in different directions based on how you’ve chosen to weight things. There’s a technical term for this, but I don’t know what its. Read more
“$NAME_OF_FILM” on/in a “$LOCATION_OR_VEHICLE” is a pretty good reductive way to describe some films. Under Siege is Die Hard on a Battleship. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Starship Mine” was pitched as Die Hard on the Enterprise. The Magnificent Seven is The Seven Samurai in the old west. While it’s reductive, it’s not necessarily bad, nor is it necessarily a derogatory way to describe a film. Thus, don’t take it as a minus when I say that Fury is Das Boot (which I’ve previously reviewed) in a Sherman Tank. Read more
Sometimes, science and scientific concepts make for great story hooks. Time Dilation – the idea that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down for you while moving normally for everyone else – is one of those concepts. One of the few high points of Flight of the Navigator was how it used time dilation to create pathos with the main character’s family having out-aged him. Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star did it with a couple being separated by not only distance, but time (a theme that would carry over to much of Shinkai’s other work). Interstellar does this with a parent and child. Read more
Gravity is, quite possibly, the tensest film I’ve ever seen, and is one of the most profound combinations of imagery and music (chronologically) since the Star Wars films and Koyaanisqatsi, and only eclipsed by Mad Max: Fury Road. Read more
When it comes to comic book films, and adaptations of comic books to the screen, there are questions about how you adapt certain comic book concepts to the screen, and as cinematic universes get more involved, there is no question that has lingered in the background more than “How do you clean up a cluttered universe?” How do you not only pull a retcon, but a big universe altering one?
Days of Future Past not only attempts to pull such a retcon, but succeeds, by creating a situation where the X-Men films can change course to a new path different from the first 3 films, while still giving credit to where the earlier films worked. Read more
Inglorious Basterds is a film that is not, in spite of its marketing, its posters, and its trailers, an action film. It’s a thriller. It’s a film that moves from incredibly tense dialog scene to tense dialog scene the way that John Woo goes from gunfight to gunfight. Read more
This time we conclude “The Yakuza Papers” with Part 5 – “Final Episode” Read more
Ridley Scott is a director who is fantastic at building worlds. In Blade Runner it was the future of Los Angeles. In Gladiator it was Imperial Rome. In Kingdom of Heaven, it’s 14th century Jerusalem and Palestine. Read more
Edge of Sanity is an interesting, but flawed film, taking the Jack the Ripper case, and combining it with Robert Lewis Stephenson’s classic work of Victorian horror – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Read more
Dark City is a gloriously wonderful film, which pays homage to Film Noir from the ’40s and ’50s, German Expressionist film of the 1920s and ’30s, and (to a degree), psychic battle manga like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and Domu, along with the series Locke the Superman (which in turn inspired the first two works). Read more