At 35 years old, T2 has held up “like gangbusters,” as Billy Friedkin might say. The CGI may have been technically primitive by today's standards, but the "liquid metal" concept contextualizes and hides the limitations. And although the budget here was 15x that of the first Terminator, T2 still retains much of the original's B-movie spirit, only opened up and elevated—not least by Ahnold's superstar charisma, which had reached stratospheric heights by the time this was made. What also has…
This RC Cola Star is Born—notoriously 'the film that killed Richard Marquand'—is a ditzy, amorphous mess with about as much depth about the music industry as a Saturday morning cartoon. The songs are uniformly terrible; a drab cover of "Tainted Love" by Rupert Everett opens the movie and is the best song in it. And yet, Hearts of Fire is not hard to watch and is even largely likable, thanks to adorable Fiona Flanagan—and no thanks to Bob Dylan, whose…
79-year-old Bob Dylan performs thirteen of his early songs with listless vacuity, in mockups of smoky bars and cafés like the spaces where Dylan performed at the beginning of his career. It's pure artifice, like Dylan's persona. The microphone is most often positioned in front of Dylan's face, blocking his mouth during his vocals, to obscure the nevertheless-obvious fact that none of the sound is live.
Waxwork is a particularly cozy nostalgia watch, which I'm sure accounts for why it's become a minor (very minor) classic of 1980s popcorn horror in spite of it being no great shakes. Anthony Hickox, whose first feature this was, is going for the kind of cinephilic self-referential camp of Fright Night or Return of the Living Dead, but he doesn't quite have the chops of a Tom Holland or a Dan O'Bannon (or even a Fred Dekker). You can sense…
Few other artists succeed at fusing such a stale, dusty, sickly, and outright vomitous aesthetic with alchemical surrealist magic quite like Jan Svankmajer, whose work I've always preferred to the dainty and alienating self-preciousness of the Quays. Svankmajer's fluidly and persistently dreamlike Faust is one of the great surrealist works of 90s cinema, and it was only the second full-length feature made by then-59-year-old Svankmajer. It showcases Svankmajer's extraordinary imagination and humor, and also his discipline, without which his ideas…
This howlingly stupid erotic thriller, the sole directorial outing from prolific Canadian producer Don Carmody, stars Art Hindle and Shannon Tweed as a troubled married couple who turn to sex surrogate Carole Laure to reinvigorate their chilly sex life and get more than they bargained for. Perhaps their forward-thinking therapist has a point when she hisses "What did you expect a sexual fantasist to do? Come over for cake and coffee?"
Heavy hitters like Michael Ironside and Jackie Burroughs appear…
This one caught me by surprise in the best way. I went in prepared for typical early 70s drive-in fare only to be blindsided by a bleak and uncompromisingly misanthropic kidnap thriller that instantly kills any redemptive arc as soon as any character starts to develop one. At a certain point, it becomes clear there are no guardrails here and anything can happen. A bona fide white-knuckler.
At tonight's post-screening Q&A with writer/director/editor/cinematographer/casting director/music director/accountant/craft services caterer/actor Neil Breen, the first audience question for Breen was "Who's your favorite director?"
Breen's answer: "Next question."
There's little evidence across Breen's singular 7-feature filmography that he's ever watched another movie from start to finish. He's the kind of guy who'll tell you he's seen "bits and pieces" of things, and you wonder if he's not referring to the TV ads. His latest film is called "Dire Duplicity," which is…
Although Faces of Death was made in 1978, it remained virtually unseen—outside of a single NYC grindhouse engagement in 1982—and unheard of till the mid 1980s, when the burgeoning home video market provided the ideal landscape for this (and its sequels) to flourish.
Rotten.com and the Internet age may have ultimately been bad for business as far as Faces impresario John Alan Schwartz was concerned, but you don't have to be jaded to find Faces of Death lame. This was…
A disconnected nothing of a movie masquerading as surrealism, originally marketed as horror and now oversold—since its Blu-ray release—as some sort of buried treasure. I checked out of this early, once it became clear how empty it all is, and the remaining 70 minutes felt endless. Throughout the movie, the director exploits the widescreen frame in a self-conscious, film-school-y fashion while failing to conjure up a single interesting visual idea. Meanwhile, the awkwardness of the actors and their post-dubbing throws a wrench into whatever mood the filmmaker is going for. Watching this made me nostalgic for the relatively unpretentious and hypnotic Satan War.
This is everything you'd hope the nearly 90-year-old Doris Wishman's penultimate movie, sporting such a title, would be: the softest softcore, wholesome, charmingly naive, inadvertently surreal, and—it being newly unearthed—a time capsule from early 2000s Coconut Grove. This wildly succeeds on its own terms (it's my favorite Wishman film of those I've seen) and, like the best outsider cinema, is so far afield of the rulebook that it transcends any conventional measuring stick. Tonight's screening at Brain Dead Studios was reportedly this unreleased movie's L.A. premiere, and it was a great time at the movies indeed.
A great Texas hangout movie, feeling loose and easy most of the way, but then its structure, poetic weight, and elegiac tone—reminiscent of, even perhaps complementing, The Last Picture Show—sneak up on you. As it ended, I immediately wanted to watch it again. Pennell's influence on Linklater is especially visible here.