A couple of days after watching 1987’s Hidden City, I’m wondering how it could have gone so wrong.  There’s actors I like in the cast, such as Charles Dance, Bill Paterson and Richard E. Grant.  The plot centers around a forbidden film, a literary and cinematic trope I’m a sucker for.  There’s even a government […]

2022’s Moon Garden is movie that wears its many influences on its sleeve.  I’m not sure it was directly inspired by any or all of these, but I saw similarities to the more imaginative, but rather dark, films of the 80’s that were centered around children, such as Time Bandits and Paperhouse.  There’s stop motion […]

1956’s Forbidden Planet was a minor hit, growing in stature over the course of a decade or two.  The film had been hugely popular with kids, and it isn’t like they loved it because it had roughly the same plot as Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  No, they loved Robby the Robot, an element of the film […]

In 1953, the movie studios were terrified by the threat television posed to their livelihoods.  I have seen many films from that era that took satirical jabs at the medium, but that year’s The Twonky is the first time I have seen an anthropomorphic TV set appear as a villain. Hans Conried is perfectly cast […]

In the book Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, Katharine Coldiron explains how hard-to-follow logic in some bad films makes them tiring to watch.  I almost fell asleep watching 1944’s The Lady and The Monster, and I believe it was because of that.  Here is a cheapo horror film which pairs a Frankenstein type plot […]

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 […]