Recycling Maniac Cop’s slasher flick formula for anti-war satire, director William Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen unearth the grotesque underbelly of Fourth of July jingoism with Uncle Sam. The corpse of chopper pilot Sam Harper – burnt to a crisp during the first Gulf War – is returned home to small town U.S.A, where the…

Aspiring photographer Jack Early (Howard Duff) so desperately craves success that, like a modern-day Yojimbo, he pits two rival crime bosses against one another in an elaborate scheme designed to catapult him to the top of the journalistic food chain. Alas, Early is such a smug little twit that it’s difficult not to wholeheartedly root…

Bodyguard begins with Lawrence Tierney delivering one crackerjack line after another – the best of which is his calling an interfering butler “Dracula” – but ends in pure tedium, its 62-minute running time feeling more like three hours. Featuring a story by 23-year-old Robert Altman, Richard Fleischer’s succinct noir finds Tierney’s insubordinate cop Mike Carter…

Robert Wise’s noir is like a proficient but soulless cover song – the eventual Sound of Music auteur knows which black-and-white cords to strike but little idea how to inject his cops-and-crooks tales with an authentically fatalistic mood. Nonetheless, Born to Kill (based on James Gunn’s novel Deadlier Than the Male) has just enough malevolent…

Terry Zwigoff is a bitterly droll misanthropist, and Art School Confidential – his latest pairing with Ghost World collaborator (and famed graphic novelist) Daniel Clowes – finds the director once again taking acidic aim at the socially petty and pompous. Unfortunately, poking fun at the self-important inhabitants of the academic art world is about as…

Of all the objectionable aspects of Poseidon, Wolfgang Peterson’s remake of 1972’s disaster classic The Poseidon Adventure, the most noxious is the revelation that Kurt Russell’s Robert Ramsey – aiding survivors aboard the titular luxury cruiser after it’s flipped upside-down by a “rogue wave” – happens to be a Giuliani-esque former mayor of New York…

Two days after seeing United 93, I remain somewhat unsure of how to write about it. This isn’t because there’s nothing to say about Paul Greengrass’ recreation of the tragic events onboard the titular 9/11 hijacked plane – as well as the surprise, confusion, and incompetence that characterized the responses at various ground control centers…

Abel Ferrara teamed with B-horror legends Larry Cohen (who co-conceived the story) and Stuart Gordon (who co-wrote the script) for Body Snatchers, a second remake of Don Siegel’s 1956 classic about extraterrestrials’ plans to conquer the planet via the creation of pod people. Yet despite its seemingly can’t-miss creative trio, the film turned out to…