Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I have never felt any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze. You know the ones: the…

Filmmaker Joe Begos knows what a certain breed of horror audience wants out of genre cinema and isn’t afraid to deliver it. He has an adoration for the genre—particularly horror from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—and is making the kind of films that—I imagine—he would have wanted to see…

Danzig is for the children…or at least the 16 year old boy in all of us. It feels a little disingenuous reviewing VEROTIKA. So far the film has only screened last night as part of this year’s Cinepocalypse Genre Film Festival at Chicago’s Music Box Theater. Danzig himself was on…

A special rock ‘n’ roll contribution from the greatest singer from your favorite band, I Love Rich…   I have to say that I am, un-ironically, a big fan of Jon-Mikael Thor. I like my metal ridiculously over the top and absurd, and Thor’s music hits that bullseye for me….

  Filmmakers come and go, and while some of them manage to make some fantastic films, very few are lucky to have a style — something that makes their names and their films synonymous with each other — something that, if you’ve seen previous films from that same director in the…

  Sequels disguised as reboots seem to have redefined the word ‘reboot’ itself, to the point where no one actually understands what the word means anymore. Twenty or thirty years ago, a ‘reboot’ would’ve been what you would have had to do when your computer had ceased to function properly,…

    Video Violence is a weekly column dedicated to genre films recently released to home video. This week’s column takes a look at the latest Liam Neeson revenge thriller, COLD PURSUIT.     The movie: COLD PURSUIT boldly assumes we haven’t grown tired of watching Liam Neeson beat everyone’s ass;…

    Suffused throughout with a light touch that can best be described as genuinely tender, Maia Kobabe’s Lion Forge-published Gender Queer: A Memoir comes across as anything other than the seismic shift it is in terms of consciousness-raising — and maybe that’s what makes it one in the first place. Eschewing…

    I’ve only ever written about one of Rob Zombie’s movies, but I’ve seen them all, and I’ll keep on seeing them all as long as he’s making them. There hasn’t been one yet that I’ve loved as much as I’d wanted to, but I’m an easy dreamer and…

    Video Violence is a weekly column digging deep into the lesser-known genre films recently released to home video. This week’s column takes a look at the underseen turn-of-the-century slasher KOLOBOS.     The movie: KOLOBOS arrived either too late or too early when it quietly snuck onto video…

  The horror anthology film has a long and varied history, but generally, the genre can be summed up in one TV Guide-friendly sentence: Through a framing device, three to five short stories are presented, each with twisty or macabre endings. Until recently, few anthology films have bothered to make…

Despite the presence of the always reliable Peter Cushing as the titular mad scientist, FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN moves at a shockingly slow pace for a Hammer Film—especially one directed by Terence Fisher. It takes nearly an hour for the promised “creation” to occur, leaving not much time for the wrap-up of an…

    Despite rampaging through dozens of horror franchises over this long and broken life, I can’t say the LEPRECHAUN franchise was ever one of them. Having seen and shrugged at the first film a couple times, I only ever saw bits and pieces of the next two sequels before…

The trailer for THE ENTITY concludes with a tagline claiming that it is “based on a true story…that is still happening.” That should be your first clue that no matter how good the film is for most of its runtime, the ending is destined to be underwhelming at best, unsatisfying at worst….

MANGOSHAKE is coming to the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn! Spectacle is one of our favorite spots in New York, and this movie, a low-budget coming-of-age story, will be playing there for a limited engagement. We’ve got an exclusive clip for you to check out!     MANGOSHAKE is reminiscent of…

I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I have never felt any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze. You know the ones: the…

Fred Walton’s 1979 thriller WHEN A STRANGER CALLS exists in that great little slit of time in between HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th, when the slasher film became popularized but before it settled on a very specific structure. The film is best known for its opening reel, in which a series of threatening…

The new crop of films coming from the Fangoria magazine—the reborn horror rag that flourished in the ‘80s—share a certain aesthetic. The films are overlit and at times look remarkably cheap, which is surprising particularly coming from an outfit that takes the genre so damn seriously. There’s also lots of…

    There’s a sense you get from page one of Nina Bunjevac’s new graphic novel Bezimena (presented in an oversized, lavish hardcover by publisher Fantagraphics) — the idea that this is no mere foray into the depraved mind of a sexually-charged psychopath. That there’s quite a bit more going on…

    Try to picture this, you young whippersnappers: there was once an era in Hollywood’s long reign when superhero movies hardly ever came out. I’m talking…hardly ever. If you Google “1990s superhero movies,” you’ll see peculiar results like DARKMAN, ORGAZMO, (something called THE METEOR MAN), and even Jim Carrey’s…

      Early last month, Vogue threw its annual Met Gala event where beautiful and/or rich people try to outdo each other to exemplify the theme of the night. This year’s theme was “camp” — which seems like a pretty dick move to challenge Celebrity Brands to nail an idea…

How many filmmakers honestly have a distinct style that when their name is attached to a film—no matter the genre—audiences know what they’re going to get?Jim Jarmusch is one of those directors, a master of slacker hangout cinema who, somewhere along the way,made friends with the original slacker, Bill Murray….

    I’ll say one thing for the proverbial “third act” (actually, it might be more like the fourth or fifth) of Peter Bagge’s cartooning career — he picks some interesting subjects for his “graphic biographies.” From Margaret Sanger to Zora Neale Hurston to, now, Rose Wilder Lane, the women…

  GODZILLA films are rarely balanced affairs between their kaiju stars and human counterparts. The vast majority of Big G movies (excluding the original 1954 entry, 2016’s SHIN GODZILLA, and maybe a couple of others) have scant amounts of monster action in between long stretches of inane human drama populated…