Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Thought forever lost, Sam Woods’ 1922 melodrama Beyond the Rocks was recently discovered in a Netherlands museum with only two minutes of footage found to be beyond repair. Restored and screened at this year’s 43rd New York Film Festival, this unique piece of silent cinema is notable for pairing two of the era’s biggest stars,…

Atom Egoyan attempts to expose the seedy underbelly of glamorous 1950s showbiz with Where the Truth Lies, somehow not realizing that few still retain any illusions about their matinee idols’ moral spotlessness. Pill-popping Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and sex fiend Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) are a Martin and Lewis-style tag-team who, twenty-odd years after their…

Ecumenical courtroom debates about the existence of God and the Devil take center stage in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a pedantic supernatural hybrid of Inherit the Wind and Audrey Rose in which a priest is tried for causing the death of the titular college student during a Catholic rite to rid her of tormenting…

There’s barely a brainwave in Undead, a tongue-in-cheek zombie-E.T. hybrid sculpted in the stale Evil Dead/Dead Alive/Shaun of the Dead mold. In the Australian outback, a local beauty queen, a gun-crazy former alien abductee and a group of similarly annoying Aussies confront a zombie invasion (sparked by a meteor shower) that increasingly appears to have…

My Bloody Valentine opens promisingly, with a sexy blonde (sporting a red heart tattoo above her breast) sensually stroking the tube on a miner’s gas mask mere moments before the gentleman hacks her to pieces. After this instance of perverted pre-coital murder, however, George Mihalka’s slasher film quickly devolves into a piece of hackwork, aping…

Both a traditional horror movie and a parody of the genre, Club Dread is one confused – and confusing – film. Conceived by the Broken Lizard comedy troupe responsible for Super Troopers, the film involves an island resort run by a drunken Jimmy Buffet-style singer/songwriter named Coconut Pete (a charmingly lackadaisical Bill Paxton) whose hot-to-trot…

Years after the eviscerating events of Slumber Party Massacre, horny Courtney (future Wings star Crystal Bernard, replacing Jennifer Meyers) is still traumatized by the driller killer’s rampage. Yet having not learned her lesson from the bloodbath that left her sister Valerie in a mental hospital, Courtney goes away for her own inaugural slumber party in…

Despite his shortcomings as a storyteller, Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci certainly had an eye for concocting entrancing supernatural imagery, a fact verified by 1981’s The Beyond. Long-heralded as the director’s masterpiece, the film is like a black magic tome illustrated with seductively creepy sights, from a panoramic vista of an automobile approaching a rigid…

Cannibal Holocaust’s title is something of a misnomer, as a more appropriate name for Roggero Deodato’s stomach-churning, banned-across-the-globe exploitation “classic” – what with all the authentic wildlife murder mixed in amongst the staged bouts of rape, mutilation and mayhem – would have been Animal Holocaust. A strong constitution is certainly required for watching this early…

There’s a scene in Full Metal Jacket in which Matthew Modine’s Private Joker and his fellow soldiers-in-training are ordered to bestow their rifles with female names, a symbolic intertwining of violence and sex that spoke to the inherent carnality of war. If you can imagine that scene expanded to feature-length, performed by goofy young adults…