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 […]

I was somehow completely oblivious to the existence of 2011’s Priest, a big-budget action/vampire (note how I didn’t use the word “horror”) movie.  It is unlikely I failed to miss all advertising for it at the time of its release, and yet I have zero recollection of it.  Courtesy of a budget twofer bluray release […]

Back-to-back Stanley Kramer movies—what was I thinking?  It wasn’t a conscious decision, as I actually grabbed two discs more or less at random.  At least, I didn’t realize at the time they shared the same director. Many directors have a signature style, but I have trouble finding consistency across Kramer’s body of work.  Here I […]

I wish I could review just the first half-hour or so of this 2 ½ hour film.  The Music Man starts out strong from the first frame.  Miniature marching band figures animated through stop-motion are used in the opening credits.  Columns of the figures spell out some names.  For some titles, they form outlines of […]

1997’s Hysteria is the kind of movie which I feel justifies my purchases of cheap discs at places like Hamilton Books.  If it hadn’t been for seeing this bluray in one of their monthly drops, I like would never have been aware of this title.  And this is a deeply weird, thought-provoking film I’m glad […]

It has long been difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff on Shudder, especially when their original content is concerned.  I intermittently subscribe for a month or so, eventually run out of promising things to watch that I don’t already have on disc, and end my subscription again.  I joined the service again recently […]

There are movies where I despise the main characters and wish they were instead about one of more of the secondary characters.  1955’s I Am a Camera is such a film. Oh, how I wish we could have followed the German couple played by Shelley Winters and Anton Diffring.  Instead, I found myself stuck with […]

Supernatural forces using modern technology rarely works for me.  Not sure why as, if I can believe a demon in a movie can communicate through a Ouija board, it isn’t much of a leap to have them manipulate computers and cell phones. In 1981’s Evilspeak, Clint Howard uses an Apple II to decipher an ancient […]

Horror isn’t just the inexplicable and terrifying happening to one person, it is also the effect on those who care about them.  Secondhand suffering, if you will.  In some movies, what happens to those concerned about another is worse than what is experienced by the one directly impacted. Consider The Exorcist: at the end, Linda […]

Oof.  This may be the most daft film noir I actually enjoyed. The movie begins with a priest getting stabbed to death in a dark alley.  Tony Curtis was a ward of the orphanage the priest ran.  Now a motorcycle cop, Curtis presses his superiors to let him go undercover to investigate a hunch he […]

“Sadists never understand why nobody else is enjoying his sadism as much as he is.” We are only a few minutes into the 2022’s Resurrection when Rebecca Hall delivers this line.  It is obvious her character was at some point on the receiving end of such behavior, as she is trembling with barely restrained rage. […]

Heartbreakers stars Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt as mother and daughter con artists. The mother ropes wealthy men into marriage, the daughter then seduces the new husbands into compromising positions where they will be discovered by the mother, and the duo walks away with large settlements. Hewitt longs to set out on her own, […]