Budget studio American International Pictures made a great many contributions to what was dubbed the Blaxploitation genre.  I was surprised I had not known about 1976’s J.D.’s Revenge until recently, as I have watched many films in this niche and I also try to watch every AIP release I can find. Many of the pictures […]

Heist, British, early 1960’s, crisp black & white photography.  1961’s Payroll would have to be spectacularly bad to disappoint me.  I won’t bury the lede: this movie definitely did not disappoint.  The film opens with what appears to be an armored car heist but is actually a test of a new security system.  I found […]

Synchronicity is a Jungian concept I won’t pretend to comprehend but, in my uneducated take on it, it is our innate ability to detect patterns in coincidence and occasionally bestow great significance upon those.  I experienced that sensation recently when I saw two movies two days apart that had the same batshit idea at their […]

My grandmother on my mother’s side loved to sing, and she did so frequently, joyously, and loudly.  Alas, also poorly.  I’m not sure she was ever aware she sang badly, as I don’t know if anybody ever told her.  I know I didn’t.  On the other hand, I bet I cringed a lot when she […]

You can learn the weirdest things in movies.  For example, the ending of 1976’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane showed me one should never enter a staring contest against Jodie Foster.  Not only will you lose, but you run the risk of your eyeballs drying out and the shards falling out of […]

To describe the 2006 anime film Paprika is like trying to describe a dream, which is appropriate because this story concerns people dangerously blurring together the dreaming and waking worlds via a technology that records dreams.  After I went to a thesaurus and failed to find any synonyms I especially liked for the word “dream”, […]

David Lynch has repeatedly said he is more interested in questions than answers.  1992’s The Music of Chance isn’t a Lynch picture; however, it has an intriguing premise which left a few threads entirely resolved at the end. But this is the rare kind of movie where I accepted the lack of complete closure.  I […]

While watching 1973 UK horror film The Mutations, I couldn’t help but think of the theme to The Residents’s Freak Show album: “Everyone comes to the freak show/to laugh at the freaks and the geeks/Everyone comes to the freak show/but nobody laughs when they leave.” There are real “freaks”, or people with various birth defects, […]

I didn’t know what to expect from this movie, but I doubt it is what I have just seen.  Actually, I’m not entirely certain what I saw, though I had a great time watching whatever it was. First thing I didn’t expect is this is a musical.  Actually, almost all the musical numbers except one […]

I have only been to Memphis once.  Primarily, it was to make the sacred pilgrimage to Graceland.  While there, we also went to the Stax Museum and Sun Studios, which are also amazing.  Then I started wondering if was possible to see Ardent Studios, where many amazing albums were recorded. The Replacements recorded Pleased to […]

Jimmy Stewart flew 20 combat missions in WWII, so he seems a natural choice as a pilot in 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix.  What doesn’t seem so natural is this is a rougher, harder Stewart than we have seen before. Before this picture, there had been glimpses of a range beyond his “aw shucks” persona.  […]

2022 “horror” movie Enys Men stars Mary Woodvine, in what is nearly a solo performance as a scientist losing a grasp on reality in her study of an isolated group of strange flowers, on a very deserted island (if you don’t count all the ghosts and/or figments of her imagination).  For this essay, the critic […]

Many years ago, I had the misfortune to have my hearing go awry for a couple of months.  I have always loved music even more than movies or books, so it was especially devastating to have songs I knew every note of turn into these nightmarish cacophonies.  Still, I forced myself to listen to music […]

A couple of years ago, a Danish show for children ages four to eight made news around the world because the title character had a prehensile penis that he employs as various tools.  This came to mind when as I watched 2022’s Moloch, a folk horror movie about a curse handed down though generations of […]