Of their generation of horror filmmakers, it’s Cronenberg and Carpenter who are known for their practical effects, but with Altered States Ken Russell steps up effortlessly to rival either master. Dr. Edward Jessup’s (William Hurt) arm and torso ripple like jacuzzi water as his genet...
2021-05-09 19:49:16 +0000 UTC View Post
The unspoken punchline of every “Florida Man” joke and public interest story about a gator snatching someone’s miniature poodle is that Florida is a shithole, a federally neglected state hacked up into political incoherence by centuries of gerrymandering and plagued by police violence, inad...
2021-05-07 16:58:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Early on in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, struggling teenage loner Casey (Anna Cobb) walks out of her house by lantern light, a quiet voyage across the snow-covered lawn to the underworld of her family’s barn. Inside, she contemplates a high-powered rifle before returning it...
2021-05-02 18:28:54 +0000 UTC View Post
“When you're scared all the time,” says mid-level Yakuza gangster Murakawa (Takeshi Kitano) to his much younger girlfriend Miyuki (Aya Kokumai), “you reach a point when you wish you were dead.” Murakawa says it half-jokingly, but the truth of it rings through the entirety of Sonatine<...
2021-04-30 22:05:26 +0000 UTC View Post
“This whole country is built on bones,” family patriarch Zygmunt (Andrzej Grabowski) chuckles nervously, waving a dismissive hand at his new son-in-law Piotr’s (Itay Tiran) insistence that there’s a skeleton buried on the grounds of the family’s pre-war property. While seldom discussed ...
2021-04-28 19:35:30 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something uniquely crushing about the final shot in Ingrid Goes West, Matt Spicer’s 2017 black comedy about mentally ill 30-something Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) and her parasocial turned parasitic relationship with Instagram starlet Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). Awakening from ...
2021-04-28 13:39:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone! While I'm in final edits on my novel, Manhunt, the weekly column and a few In the Flesh reviews (Mortal Kombat, Devil) are going to be delayed for a little bit. No more than a week. Thank you so much for your patience and understanding <3
2021-04-23 17:35:57 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s so much going on in Sion Sono’s Antiporno, which plunges headlong into subject matter ranging from masculine self-congratulation over their own art about women to the inability of parents and children to understand one another as sexual beings. It’s an intelligent film, sel...
2021-04-19 15:09:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Imagine Vertigo, Hitchcock’s classic exploration of the things men read into women, the ways they demand a continuous and ever-changing performance from the women in their lives. Now imagine everyone in it is some kind of weird robot person reciting their lines like a room full of brok...
2021-04-17 23:40:16 +0000 UTC View Post
The dad fantasy is well-trod cinematic territory. You’ve got Taken, in which Liam Neeson lives out your shitty uncle’s fantasies of shooting foreigners for menacing his daughter; Breakdown, in which an office drone gets to prove to his wife that he’s actually a sweaty hunk...
2021-04-17 02:53:52 +0000 UTC View Post
You will never in your life want to get out of a structure as much as you’ll want to get out of put-upon college senior-cum-sugar baby Danielle’s (Rachel Sennott) aunt Sheila’s house in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Using anamorphic lenses, Director Emma Seligman and cinematographer Maria Rusche are ...
2021-04-13 22:32:55 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a scene early on in Little Marvin and Lena Waithe’s THEM in which Henry Emory (Ashley Thomas) recounts having mustard gas tested on him by his own superiors during his tour of duty in the second World War. Henry’s traumatic memories are triggered by, of all things, a piece ...
2021-04-11 04:30:56 +0000 UTC View Post
“He killed each of them using his signature move; a move only he knew and which he never taught anyone, not even me. He punched through their skulls with his index finger. He was the greatest man who ever lived.” As delivered by “Sensei” (Alessandro Nivola), this bizarre eulogy for the la...
2021-04-09 15:49:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Sexual anxiety has been an animating force of the horror genre since its inception. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's’ 1812 collection of European children’s stories, is stuffed to the gills with incest, bride theft, and all manner of unsavory undertones, all ...
2021-04-05 19:46:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Cronenberg’s work in the mid to late oughts is a fascinating puzzle, outwardly at odds with his seminally grotesque 80s and 90s filmography, inwardly pursuing many of the same ideas in quieter visual language, the things he spent decades sublimating into a noxious, swirling cloud condensing onc...
2021-04-04 17:58:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Eastern Promises opens with a barber forcing his developmentally disabled son to kill a Russian gangster in the middle of a haircut. It’s a heart-rending moment, this callous man’s brutality toward his child, his impatience with the young man’s fear and hesitation, and then the gro...
2021-04-03 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a moment in Godzilla vs. Kong when everything snaps together, when the blur of crumbling skyscrapers and massive hills of muscle, fur, and scales resolves into a coherent ballet of movie magic as Godzilla completely shithouses the ape. It lasts about twenty-seven seconds and oc...
2021-04-01 05:26:41 +0000 UTC View Post
The Mummy is such a good action flick, big and shaggy and brilliantly scored by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Some of its CGI hasn’t aged well, it trades freely in embarrassing racist stereotypes, and its mythology is a little convenient and convoluted, but as a coda to both the romantic h...
2021-03-30 00:10:18 +0000 UTC View Post
A sniveling salaryman deformed by parasitic metal implants lurches through his living room, a huge priapic drill jutting from his groin as he alternately blubbers at and berates his girlfriend for being repulsed by his appearance. Like all of Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s bodily imagery, the ...
2021-03-29 05:40:39 +0000 UTC View Post
“You know that child’s game?” asks cult pastor Arthur Parsons (the inimitable Stephen Root). “You say your own name enough times and it becomes just… gibberish. But if repetition alone has the power to reduce it so, then which is true: your name, or the gibberish?” The Empty Man 2021-03-27 23:18:21 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s so much worse to see a promising movie take a hard right into predictable mediocrity than it is to see one fail ambitiously. Border, Ali Abbasi’s 2018 fantasy film about Neanderthal-like trolls living unknown to themselves and one another in modern-day Sweden, pushes boldly into...
2021-03-25 21:26:21 +0000 UTC View Post
“It could be a person who, in his own loony way,” says police lieutenant-cum-serial killer John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) to photographer of the glamorous obscene Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway), “feels your work is promoting porno and decadence… and he has a mission to clean up the world.” <...
2021-03-22 19:54:36 +0000 UTC View PostFour hours, two minutes, and thirteen seconds. Zack Snyder’s Justice League clocks in a full half-hour longer than Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, an hour and fifteen longer than Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and edges out Jackson’s Return of the King cut by nearly tw...
2021-03-18 22:34:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Never in my life have I heard sound design as bad as the Foley in The Guest, Adam Wingard’s not-quite-weird-enough thriller about a handsome, clean-cut young man who shows up on the doorstep of a family’s house and insinuates himself into their lives. There’s an audible “whoosh...
2021-03-18 04:18:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Few movies have the balls to flatly state that actor Peter Falk descended from on high to live a mortal life, trading in his wings and holy armor for a rumpled raincoat. Wings of Desire is one such film. Its balance between solemnity and easy, natural humor transforms what might in hands...
2021-03-14 00:26:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Come True isn’t the sort of movie you’d expect to leave you shaken afterward. Its pace is glacial, its story minimal, its characters fairly thinly sketched. The horror comes from the intense pressure it exerts through careful guiding of the viewers’ eye and the slow, inexorable mom...
2021-03-13 02:49:15 +0000 UTC View Post
“I’m not like you,” says Karen (Otmara Marrero) to her much older ex-lover, D. (Sonya Walger). The older woman arches an eyebrow. “And what am I like?” Karen’s reply is to the point, her voice and expression cold with disdain. One word. “Old.” Clementine, Lara Gallagher...
2021-03-08 18:44:13 +0000 UTC View Post
I went on Annie Rose Malamet's Girls, Guts, and Giallo podcast to talk about Julia Ducournau's RAW, a brilliant cannibalism movie about thinness, white femininity, and eating.
2021-03-05 20:26:48 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something ratlike about Tom Ripley. It’s not Matt Damon’s square, all-American features, nor his ever so slightly effeminate body language, nor his eloquent but parrot-like way of speaking. It’s something about his eyes, which become panicked and flat like an animal’s whenever s...
2021-03-05 16:40:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Stage performer Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance as the titular maid in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc is the stuff of cinematic legend. Her wild stare and tremulous body language, her naive and yet deeply dignified devotion; she never took another major...
2021-02-25 22:26:09 +0000 UTC View Post