Chris Makepeace has returned from his first year of college to discover, as so many have in the same situation, his mother has completely changed his room.  But she didn’t make it into a craft or workout room.  No, it is still technically his room, except it has been overhauled in a motif of entirely […]

Menacing robots and cute robots.  Obvious aspirations for intelligent sci-fi ala 2001, devolving into a bunch of PEWPEWPEW laser gun fights that are clumsily edited and hard to follow.  1982’s The Black Hole was Disney’s leap into what they thought was sophisticated science fiction, except they made a film that could only possibly appeal to […]

These Severin box sets of folk horror films continue to pay rich dividends, especially as concerns titles based in locales I would not normally associate with the genre.  Consider the southern U.S.  I am well aware of the genre of southern gothic, but 1984’s The Enchanted has challenged me to wonder if some works I […]

It’s a William Castle film written by Psycho scribe Robert Bloch and starring Joan Crawford as an axe-wielding maniac.  This is 1964’s Straight-Jacket and I was entirely onboard with this before seeing a single frame of it. It opens with Crawford arriving home to find hubby Lee Majors (in his first screen appearance) and Patricia […]

1955’s Shack Out on 101 is a weird, oversexed and undercooked noir with an odd cast.  It feels aimless and takes a long time to get to where it’s going.  Even then, I’m not sure it ended up where it intended to go. Terry Moore and Lee Marvin are always at odds with each other […]

1969’s Double Face is a suspense thriller that is an Italian-German co-production, making it both a giallo and a krimi.  Given the first scene has a car exploding into flame after colliding with a train, I am actually going to call it a Krispy Krimi. Klaus Kinski stars in this, thus making it a Kinski […]

I didn’t have many comics when I was kid, and I attribute that largely to the years when my Baptist upbringing was at its most conservative.  Desperate for entertainment, I was allowed Jack Chick’s The Crusaders series, which is as lousy and batshit as anybody would imagine it is.  Curiously, I also had issues of […]

1972’s Who Fears the Devil follows a hillbilly troubadour on a journey on which he has several strange encounters.  It was also released under the title The Legend of Hillbilly John, which makes more sense.  Really, it is like some weird sort of Appalachian spin on The Illiad, so I think the best possible title would […]

There may be times in one’s life when you realize some sort of sea change has happened to your psyche.  Maybe you find religion after a lifetime without it, or perhaps you part ways with a spiritual belief system with which you have been associated your entire life.  Or maybe you suddenly realize your sexual […]

A cabbie greets us as we prepare to enter the office of an unlicensed plastic surgeon.  I say “us” because what we are seeing is shot from the first-person perspective, giving this the feel of one of those horrible FMV (full-motion video) computer games of the 90’s.  Much like that format, the characters also dump […]

I was at the perfect age for the first wave of the 80’s videogame craze, so I had a few issues of magazines such as Video Games and Electronic Games.  There was one memorable ad inside the back cover of one such periodical, selling a poster of a blonde woman wearing a cut-off top and […]

The ways music has been categorized over the years often amuses me.  Today, we have such niches as dream pop, vaporwave and whatever Pitchfork decides will be a thing for usually only the next month of so.  I feel a particular bemusement concerning the category of “yacht rock”, a term so loosely defined and so […]

There is something about Bob Hope that inherently makes me want to laugh at whatever he is about to say or do, though few movies seemed to use him to his full potential.  Such is the case with 1952’s Off Limits, a film funnier than I expected to find a Hope picture of which I […]