Tim Burton has a lot to answer for.  What was once so startlingly original in his early films soon became a lazy visual shorthand to communicate “weird”.  It is used to be lazy filmmakers would lift from Dali or Escher before Burton become the default.  The dreamworld in which the big finale of 2024 Imaginary […]

2023’s The Unheard is a curious beast in that it wants to be three or four different films.  Unfortunately, it not only has insufficient connective tissue between those disparate elements, but it has barely enough material for a one-hour movie.  Alas, the runtime of this is two hours, five minutes. The plot is, ostensibly, about […]

Funny how all the ghosts in 1964’s Danza Macabra keep telling the protagonist Georges Rivière they are spirits, yet he doesn’t believe them.  I have to concede I also would not believe them.  And yet, I kept waiting for our hero to realize he’s surrounded by gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts!!! and then one of them to respond, “Well, […]

Survivor’s guilt is good fodder for a horror movie, being used well in fare as diverse as super-low-budget 1962 classic Carnival of Souls to 1981’s The Survivor to the Final Destination series of this century.  I think it is odd that a shared feeling among most people who survive a traumatic event believe they didn’t […]

Have you ever watched an Ingmar Bergman movie and wished Max von Sydow would drive an axe into Liv Ullmann’s head?  If so, what’s wrong with you?  Regardless, there turns out to a movie for you and your odd fantasies, and that is 1970’s The Night Visitor. Filmed in Denmark and Sweden in winter, the […]

We live in an age where artificial intelligence is designing medications that nobody can determine how they actually work. While very few in 1974 could have anticipated this development, that year’s The Questor Tapes has an android who can do very advanced machine learning, in addition to being able to physically modify, and do surgery […]

Through cinema, one can learn about the funniest little quirks of other cultures.  It isn’t the big differences between people that fascinate me.  Instead, it’s all the little things—the kind of things people don’t even think is odd.  Apparently, apple ice cream is a big thing in Argentina.  That’s a flavor I’ve not heard of […]

“Now, if the sweater has a reindeer on it, Or is a funny color like yellow, You can’t get away with a sweater like that” — Meryn Cadell, “The Sweater” One of the many guys in 1979’s Screams of a Winter Night wears a sweater at one point that has a deer of some sort […]

Having been burned twice before, one would think I had learned to avoid the films of Amando de Ossorio, yet here I was again, watching 1974’s crummy The Ghost Galleon.  This was the third film in his series of horror films featuring zombified Knights Templars from the 16th century.  I had become curious about watching […]

I have seen many movies because they were directed by a particular person, or starred an actor I especially like.  There are some films I have seen because a particular effects person worked on it.  Heck, I’ve seen some movies just because of the soundtrack’s composer.  But 2011’s The Devil’s Business is the first time […]

I suspect most people think of Susan Sarandon as an intelligent actress who has made all kinds of films, but is generally regarded for her more serious work.  So, it is always startling to see some of her early films.  It seems her appearance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is largely accepted today.  But […]

Before we even get to the opening credits of 1995’s Mute Witness, we see a woman in a typical slasher film setup get stabbed by an escaped mental patient wearing a stocking mask over his head.  The woman who is his victim proceeds to stumble all around the room in her death throes, knocking over […]

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a 1983 3D comedy with a very apt title.  It stars Steve Guttenberg, who, as I have written previously, consistently plays deeply bland roles—incredibly inoffensive nobodies whose favorite color is probably beige.  I saw a lot of beige while watching this, or at least varying degrees of some sort […]

1986’s Gothic is an exploration of what could have transpired over the course of the first night Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron in Geneva in 1816.  It was during that summer Mary formed the idea for what would become her novel Frankenstein.  Another guest at the mansion is Doctor Polidori, Byron’s alleged […]