I was 19 going 20 when Bad Santa hit DVD, several months after a bootleg copy made the rounds among my extended family back in the days of tangible film piracy. Twenty years later, I still stubbornly watch that same DVD with “interactive menus”, despite HD streams at my fingertips, and with each viewing my …
As fate would have it, my exploration of classic Mexican cinema continued the same day as my favourite Mexican restaurant, Arriba Cantina, re-opened after two long burrito-deprived years. After narrowly avoiding a food coma, I pressed play on this “Mexican Horror Classic Double Feature” comprising of Ladron De Cadaveres (aka the Body Snatcher) and El …
I first came to hear of Baa Baa Black Sheep while watching a YouTube upload of Battle of the Network Stars. An episode in which its star and Captain of ‘Team NBC’, Robert Conrad, suffered irreversible damage to his legendary ego when Gabe Kaplin (Welcome Back, Kotter) impressively out-sprinted him. When I saw that Via …
101 Films treated horror fans to a once-falsely-advertised obscurity late last month, right in time for Halloween, in the form of Meatcleaver Massacre, a title that rose from the bowels of the mid-1970s. Supposedly the feature is co-directed by Ed Wood, a myth yet to be busted. When a college professor is left in a …
Development Hell: Meatcleaver Massacre (1976) – review Read More »
Imprint Films have the ability to weed out the classic titles that would normally be filed under “Movies You Probably Haven’t Heard Of” and the latest in that category is Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, released back in August. Robert Altman protégée, Alan Rudolph, directs this very sociable biography drama, centred on writer, poet, …
Speakeasy: Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) – review Read More »
For many years, Christopher Nolan’s Memento held a firm position among the Top 10 of IMDb’s Top 250 Movies but has since been pushed down the ranks in favour of the director’s later works like The Dark Kight, Inception, Interstellar, and most recently, Oppenheimer. That’s not to say the passing of time has influenced the …
When we think of 80s America, images of California often spring to mind. The west-coast American state seemed to exist in an almost hyperreality, especially when viewed through the lens of cinema. Los Angeles, in particular, served as a pop culture epicentre during the rad decade. One of my earliest brushes with the Golden State …
I remember the trailer for Searching for Bobby Fischer being very dominant among my VHS rentals of 1993 and 1994, but as I was far more interested in Demolition Man, Jurassic Park and Speed, a drama about chess didn’t even move the needle. Thirty years later, I’m still none the wiser when it comes to …
Blu-ray Review: Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) Read More »
Five years between sequels is a while these days, especially for horror movies, but I have a sneaking suspicion that COIVD kept The Nun II banished from production, which opened in theatres earlier this month, following up on the 2018 original. Naturally, the demonic force, Valak, who masquerades as a nun, has returned to unleash …
As an Australian who has never ventured into the Outback, cinema has on many occasions provided the experience, whether it’s been the hyper-reality of Mad Max 2 or a sombre trek through cultural extremes like Wake in Fright. However, it was Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek in 2005 that advised us to manage our expectations as …