Category: Reviews – Blog Only

(Originally posted on 2/25/04) Sam Fuller’s films are raw, gritty, emotionally turbulent, and vicious, and his 1950 noir potboiler Pickup on South Street is 80 minutes of breathless genre fun infused with pure, uninhibited passion. Fuller’s tight close-ups capture the sweaty, wild-eyed emotions of his characters, and his energetic camera’s quick, jarring zooms and pull-backs…

(Originally posted on 2/25/04) Holy anti-Americanism, Japan! After the violent delirium of Battle Royale, director Kinji Fukasaku — along with his son Kenta, who finished the film after his father passed away in 2003 — returns with the despicable Battle Royale II. It’s three years after the first film’s schoolchildren were forced to hunt each…

(Originally posted on 2/24/04) A metaphor for adolescent angst? A satiric look at 21st century Japanese society? Or merely a twisted, trashy black comedy about kids forced to murder each other? Either way, Kinji Fukasaku’s hilariously energetic Battle Royale — a jazzed-up hybrid of Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, and “Survivor” based on…

(Originally posted on 2/28/04) As the Austrian countryside zooms by in an indistinct flash outside their train window, two strangers (scruffy American Ethan Hawke and dainty Frenchwoman Julie Delpy) strike up an intimate conversation in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. As in 2001’s Waking Life, Linklater’s preoccupation is the magic of conversation — a notion verbalized…

(Originally posted on 2/12/04) A young boy, no older than five, his face scrunched up in an expression of exhausted, hopeless misery, pushes a carousel in a circle along with a handful of similarly despondent kids. His repetitive, circular path offers no chance for escape, much as the Mexico he inhabits, teeming with abusive or…

(Originally posted on 2/10/04) Now here’s some suburban paranoia about rural America for you. In the wretched Wrong Turn, homicidal mutant cannibals in the West Virginian backwoods hunt pouty Eliza Dushku and her group of Abercrombie & Fitch buddies, with the unavoidable implication being that rural America is nothing but a breeding ground for monsters…

(Originally posted on 2/10/04) Jeepers Creepers 2 fares relatively well as a follow-up to its 2001 predecessor, itself little more than an over-hyped monster movie blessed with some seductively shadowy cinematography. Director Victor Salva’s widescreen compositions and digitally enhanced color palette are eerily beautiful, especially with regards to the film’s abundant golden cornfields, which are…

(Originally posted on 2/6/04) The unabashed laziness of mainstream horror films need not be recounted here, but even given the recent degradation of the genre, I’d be remiss in not singling out House of the Dead as both last year’s crappiest film ( it would have made my Worst of 2003 list had I seen…

(Originally posted on 1/15/04) Is there an actual character in S.W.A.T.? A plot? A single intelligent or exciting sequence? If so, they must have made an appearance while I was watching my cats sleep, because all I saw was the second straight crappy Colin Farrell movie (after the Mamet rip-off The Recruit) to feature the…

(Originally posted on 1/15/04) Japan’s Takashi Miike has become a filmmaking phenomenon for his ultra-violent Dead or Alive trilogy, the nightmarish Audition, and for this film, a sizzling, orgiastic celebration of bloodshed and depravity. Ichi the Killer follows platinum blond mobster Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), a ruthless masochist searching for his missing crime boss, as he…