“Can pornography kill?”

Like many of the films in the [unrelated] mondo and Brucesploitation genres, Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy is pretty much indefensible on moral grounds: it’s a film made to capitalize on the tragic suicide of twenty year-old adult film actress Shauna Grant. It feels like the hardcore version of Star 80 by way of Fist of Fear, Touch of Death. It’s directed by exploitation/porn filmmaker Roberta Findlay, but it’s hard to make any case for this, even with…

“I met tramps and bootleggers and bishops, and reporters and gunmen and… and borough presidents, and you — you come a-tellin’ me I didn’t get to know New York.”

Bud Reeves (Eric Linden), a naïve Indiana hick, comes to the Big Apple with $1100 and a dream, falls for a chorus girl (Joan Blondell), and quickly ends up with the wrong crowd. On the run and running out of money, he finds out firsthand how unforgiving life in the big…

For the first third I was enjoying this even more than Lenzi & Baker’s first collab, his filmmaking was just a total delight to behold and Trintignant struck me in a way his other outings hadn’t before. Around the thirty-minute mark, something snagged and the film seemed to lose some of what made that first half-hour crackle. Not much happens in the middle thirty, and Lenzi’s filmmaking talents stood out less.

The back of the Blu-ray sort of spoils where the…

Summer’s on its way, so naturally I felt like revisiting this hot-summer-in-the-city action ride. It’s not as tight as the first film, but McTiernan’s filmmaking is so invigorating and the chemistry between Willis and Jackson is a thrill to witness. I miss when movie productions would tear up NYC. Like Die Hard 2, this revisits some of the beats and imagery of the first film, but the setting (McClane’s own turf) is a nice change of pace from the claustrophobic…

The best and scariest digital nightmare since Inland Empire. 

This movie’s helping me realize how foundational the aesthetics of Fire Walk With Me and The Return are to the current digital filmmaking scene. Borderline cheap effects and transgressive editing can make something feel more impactful than you’d expect, and the schizophrenic stylings of Spirit Riser assault your senses and never let you go until the very end. Dylan Mars Greenberg was such a gracious presence at the Philadelphia  premiere at PhilaMOCA tonight,…

I had forgotten so much about this movie since seeing it approximately ten years ago — I thought it opened with the tea house shootout. The three big action sequences were still in my mind, but all the in-between was forgotten. Shame on me, ‘cause that stuff rules also. Chow Yun-fat chatting with Woo himself at a jazz bar. Tony Leung folding cranes. CAT III King Anthony Wong as the main triad boss — hopefully showing this to my girlfriend…