(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…

(Originally posted on 1/14/04) Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, made in 1997 but released in the US in 2001, is — with the possible exception of Takashi Miike’s chilling Audition — the single best horror film I’ve seen this century. Kurosawa (who’s not related to that other Japanese filmmaker), is a genre specialist, and he instills Cure’s…

(Originally posted on 1/14/04) Having been bitten by the documentary bug, I finally saw Pumping Iron, the 1977 bodybuilding documentary that gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his first taste of the mainstream spotlight. Yet besides a few revealing moments of Schwarzenegger on the road to his sixth (and final) Mr. Olympia title, the film is a rather…

(Originally posted on 1/14/04) Biggie and Tupac, Nick Broomfield’s tantalizing investigation into the rappers’ murders, is short on concrete evidence but long on compelling insinuation. Released shortly after Chuck Philip’s Los Angeles Times report fingered a possible gunman in Tupac Shakur’s death, Broomfield sets his sights on the killing of Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, whose…

(Originally posted on 1/14/04) On the cusp of seeing Monster and Nick Broomfield’s new documentary Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, I revisited Broomfield’s sterling 1992 documentary on the country’s “first female serial killer,” Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Unlike the two newer releases, Broomfield’s original doc focuses less…

(Originally posted on 1/10/04) What do you get when you cross The Matrix with Blade, The Mummy, and countless videogames? Why, you get Underworld, a film so derivative that it barely registers as a film unto itself. Rarely has a film “borrowed” from its genre predecessors this wantonly or profusely, with everything from its color…

(Originally posted on 1/9/04) Don’t call it a comeback. Sharon Stone returns from moviemaking purgatory — actually, for anyone who’s seen 2000’s god-awful Beautiful Joe, it was more like cinematic hell — with Cold Creek Manor, a worthless thriller about a rich New York City family who buy a house in the sticks and, in…