Decadence, treachery, murder…and Satan! Such are the dearly beloved passions of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price), the 12th century villain of Roger Corman’s delectable Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death. Very loosely based on its source material (as well as Poe’s short story Hop-Frog), this campy Corman classic is brimming with the…

Based on Charles Bruce Millholland’s celebrated play, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century purports to champion the noble theater over the base cinema, yet this seminal 1934 screwball comedy is nothing if not a shining example of moviemaking magnificence. Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) is a Broadway maestro whose newest Pygmalion, Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard), is given the…

John Carpenter’s neo-Western Assault on Precinct 13 (loosely based on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo) is as formally compact and rigorously efficient as anything the genre filmmaker ever made. The story of a police station that, the night before its closing, is besieged by a mysterious gang known as Street Thunder, Carpenter’s early career triumph –…

Is it too easy to say that one should hide, and never seek out, Hide and Seek? Probably. But there’s still no getting around the atrociousness of John Polson’s thriller, which pairs the once-great Robert DeNiro with the always-awful Dakota Fanning as a father and daughter trying to cope with their family matriarch’s suicide. DeNiro’s…

Wet Hot American Summer, a parody of late ‘70s/early ’80s horndog comedies like Porky’s and Meatballs, undertakes the task of spoofing the seemingly un-spoofable. However, its satire is so deliberately stupid and scattershot – and its random, self-referential sketches so clumsily constructed – that the goofy film also functions as a meta commentary on parodies…

Saying The Toolbox Murders (a loose remake of the 1978 grindhouser) is the finest Tobe Hooper film since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – or at least since The Funhouse – isn’t saying much. And given its nonsensical plot, its inexplicable fiend, and its spotty cast, there’s not a lot to praise about the director’s latest…

Fudoh: The New Generation seems comparatively tame when compared to Takashi Miike’s later shock cinema classics, but the body fluid-loving director nonetheless drenches his teenage yakuza story – about a high school gangster’s revenge against the mobster father who murdered his brother – in all sorts of gonzo nastiness. Riki (Shosuke Tanihara) is out for…

Ironically, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers – a special effects-infested sci-fi saga about humanity’s war against a race of giant bugs – is more effective as a satire than as an action extravaganza. Like in Robocop, Verhoeven employs the basic trappings of genre as a ruse to sneak in cynical criticisms about contemporary society, and his…

1997 was a bad cinematic year for the President, who was implicated in two different films as the prime suspect in the murder of a pretty young blond. And though Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power was a star-studded dud, it was still leaps and bounds better than Murder at 1600, a thoroughly ridiculous Wesley Snipes vehicle…