The original Friday the 13th has a lot to answer for, not just for itself and its own lousy sequels, but for all the imitations spawned in its wake.  I may be a fan of horror, in general, but the slasher is one of my least favorite sub-genres. 1983’s The Final Terror is not the […]

The feature-length experimental film Anti-Clock starts out promising, as the opening credits are filmed off an extremely staticky monitor.  There is a strange beauty in that image distortion, something I imagine wasn’t as appreciated in 1979 as it is today, with the current nostalgia for analogue video. Much of this film by Jane Ardern and […]

Hammer Films of the late 50’s, and throughout the 60’s, had one of the most solid track records for horror and thriller pictures of any studio of any era.  Then the 70’s came, and things unraveled quickly and thoroughly.  The early Hammer horror films outraged British censors and shocked audiences.  Most of them were given […]

1989’s The Dream Team is a comedy about four mental patients who have to work together to rescue their doctor after an incident on a field trip from the asylum.  I feel it would be too easy to make comparisons to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and yet this feels roughly like a comedic […]

A small propeller plane flies over a vast wasteland of felled trees in the Canadian forest.  In a scene which reminded me of the opening of The Wicher Man, it touches down on a lake in what is obviously a very isolated area.  A man steps out of the plane, wades to the shoreline and […]

The actor Audie Murphy was the most decorated combat soldier of WWII, receiving the Medal of Honor and awards for bravery from France and Belgium. I mention this because I didn’t believe him as a boxer a single second of 1956’s World in my Corner.  This is the third and last movie in a Kino […]

I miss those Director Series DVD collections of music videos, each dedicated to a different director.  Music video collections met their demise largely because of the advent of YouTube, which is a shame.  Not sure why the length of a film warrants whether or not it should also be on physical media.  I don’t believe […]

I don’t like boxing, wrestling and similar sports, so I am amazed by the hypocrisy when a crowd yelling “KILL HIM” turns on a fighter when their opponent perishes in the ring.  It says something sad about human nature that people can go from blood-crazed to sanctimonious at the drop of a hat. In 1955’s […]

If you’re a hitman, don’t get an eye exam on the same day you’re scheduled to do a job.  This is an important lesson I learned watching 1991’s Diary of a Hitman.  In the meantime, I learned another lesson: there really isn’t any reason to spend 90 minutes watching Diary of a Hitman. The movie […]

Rob Savage was the writer/director of Host, my favorite movie of 2020.  That horror film breathed fresh air into the genre of found footage, which was growing staid.  Most pleasantly surprising to me was it was only as long as it needed to be, clocking in at 57 minutes. So when I heard Savage was […]

It rarely happens, but sometimes I see a movie that seems to rip-off ones that came after it. Such is the case with 1973’s Messiah of Evil, which somehow has the unique look of 1977’s Suspiria and elements of 1981’s Dead & Buried.  I seriously doubt either of the later films was influenced by the […]

A 12 year old girl is in a waiting room.  A man walks past her, does a double-take and orders her to stand up.  He also demands she turn around.  Has the proper reaction to this ever not been to knee the jerk in the balls and run? Sally Ann Howes plays Fennis Wilson, a […]

In the first few years of the MPAA’s rating system, an X didn’t have the stigma that eventually led to it becoming equated with pornography.  Many serious films were initially given that rating, only to be re-rated as R later.  Films like Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange and Medium Cool.  It isn’t often movies from […]

I recently watched National Velvet for the first time, which starred a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.  Watching that film, I was surprised to see how confident she was at so young an age, and a bit disturbed by how she looked like my mental image of adult Taylor just shrunk down in size. And, yet, I […]

Even before the opening credits, you can tell 1959’s I’m All Right Jack is going to be an odd duck.  We are introduced to an old man complaining about being woken from his nap by the revelry outside, which just happens to be public euphoria over WWII ending.  A narrator informs us we will never […]