I don’t remember recently losing the will to live and, yet, I willingly watched two feature-length visual poems about the human condition, each of which was scored by members of separate, legendary prog-rock bands.  I suspect vastly more people have heard the soundtrack for one or both pictures than have seen the movies either accompanies. […]

1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a huge success, reinvigorating the careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.  Davis was even Oscar-nominated for it.  Today is seems to be regarded largely as camp, but I think it is an amazing film which I enjoy without any ironic regard. Two years later, the director […]

When a movie shows prostitutes of 19th century London’s seediest neighborhoods, I imagine them marketing their wares as if they are vendors at a baseball game: “Get your hot seh-fuh-lisss heeer-yuh! HOT syphilis!” In 1982’s The Missionary Michael Palin plays the title role, a seemingly decent man who has faithfully served the Church no matter […]

1983’s The Lift is a Dutch horror film.  I didn’t know that going in so, once I started seeing names like Willeke van Ammelrooy in the opening credits, I thought I had suddenly gone dyslexic. As one would expect from the title, this concerns a murderous elevator.  Or maybe that’s elevators.  It’s a bank of […]

There are good reasons why British children’s television of the 70s has a cult following.  As somebody who did not grow up with such shows, many of these have an appeal transcending mere nostalgia.  They tend to be darker and stranger than what we were raised on in the colonies. One of the best examples […]

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 […]