Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

It’s always a tricky proposition to know what to say about Jim Woodring’s work simply because the depth and scope of his creative vision is both deeper and wider than the ability of mere language — even superlative-laden language — to keep up with. Which, yeah, is a roundabout way…

  Punk is not just anti-corporate, anti-consumerism; music and mohawks. Punk is about being authentic to yourself – finding out who you are on your own terms and staying true to that person, no matter who tells you to change. With this ideology steering its course, DINNER IN AMERICA is…

  [Contains minor spoilers.] When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend named Mr. Suit. I called him that because of the old looking clothes that hung from his tall and lanky body, completed by a matching bowler hat and a beard so thick that Grizzly Adams would’ve…

  In 2008, Bryan Bertino emerged in the horror genre with THE STRANGERS, a haunting twist on the home invasion. Then, MOCKINGBIRD in 2014 and THE MONSTER in 2016, two very different films that each showcase the destruction of the domestic space and the American dream. His work is bleak…

  Subscribe to DG on Patreon and get articles like this one before the rest of the world does!     SKIN: A HISTORY OF NUDITY IN MOVIES is a new documentary that chronicles the history of birthday suits in cinema, from the days of Thomas Edison up to HBO…

UNHINGED opens over a series of flashes. Cars crash, fists fly, and ordinary, everyday folks tussle, as commentators and newscasters and talking heads breathlessly intone about the stress and anger and seething, to-the-brink rage of modern life. These are real images, culled from news reports and viral videos, an apocalyptic…

    “I’ll figure it out!” ”You always do!”   May (Brea Grant) is a successful self-help author navigating an uncertain time in the publishing industry. Still, she has a wide fanbase thanks to her blog and popular book “Go It Alone,” plus a gorgeous house that she shares with…

Subscribe to DG on Patreon and get articles like this one before the rest of the world does!   One would think a movie called the “best horror film of the year” by Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune would end up on countless “greatest horror films” lists. Yet COUNT…

There’s something especially comforting about a pop-culture documentary that laser focuses on a topic the viewer is personally passionate about, more so when that subject is a bit off the beaten path. Thanks to the fans of the horror genre tending to love what they love hard, this is none…

Okay, before I jump into why I love THE VICE GUIDE TO BIGFOOT so much, I need to spell out a few things from my past and how I became to be such an avid lover of cryptids.   When I first graduated from college, I got a job at…

  [This review contains spoilers. You’re welcome.]     By now, whether we want to know or not, it’s become depressingly clear the industry that produces the movies we love, which enables us to lose ourselves in worlds of fantasy and engage with other like-minded movie fans, is filled with…

  I tend to avoid falling victim to trends – not because I’m the rebellious hipster type, but because I genuinely don’t understand most of them and feel like even more of an outlier because of it. (I still don’t know what fidget spinners are and I never want to.)…

During the finale of AMERICAN RICKSHAW, which takes place in a television studio, a producer in the control room looks out on the events unfolding on the stage – where Donald Pleasence’s Reverend Mortom is snorting uncontrollably like a pig and the stage’s television screens at his back are showing…

  Media finds its way to us when it should. SHE DIES TOMORROW, a meditation on the inevitability of death, isolation, and contagion, has found us all in the midst of a global pandemic. If SHE DIES TOMORROW was released post-vaccine, post-return to normal, it would warrant eye-rolling. Too on…

    For a decade now, Daily Grindhouse has been covering the world’s most offbeat films, and the most mainstream films in the most offbeat ways, with a roster of terrifically talented and profoundly knowledgeable contributors and the occasional celebrity cameo. It’s time for a next step. Today we are…

            Johnnie To’s CHASING DREAM, Vincent Paronnaud’s HUNTED, Jorge Michel Grau’s PERDIDA, Daria Woszek’s MARYGOROUND, and Tran Thanh Huy’s ROM are among the wealth of final titles announced for Fantasia’s 24th edition August 6th, 2020 // Montreal, Quebec – The Fantasia Film Festival announces today…

[Contains spoilers for both seasons of Castle Rock.] If anyone deserves the shared-universe approach to a large, accumulated body of work, it’s Stephen King. The author of over ninety novels and who-knows-how-many short stories and novellas has spent the last forty years creating a rich and intricate history with his…

  Robert Martin came onto my radar when I picked up Fangoria #9 – in a grocery store, of all places. The magazine was full of gory photos from the horror movies just out, or still in production. But balancing the grue was a sharp and satiric sense of humor, courtesy…

  In a crucial scene during the first act, Meryl Streep’s Madeline Ashton saunters out of her mansion shared with her husband, Ernest (Bruce Willis), whom she stole from Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), to meet up with a young stud for a routine tryst, only to see that the man…

    There’s truth in packaging, and then there’s this: Oakland-based cartoonist Mara Ramirez’s recently-released debut graphic novel, MOAB — which comes our way courtesy of Freak Comics — is formatted to look like a sketchbook/diary with a lush moleskine cover because, well, it is a sketchbook/diary with a lush moleskine…

    Critics like to say that the horror genre was basically dead in the ‘90s, with most long-running horror franchises like HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13th, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET going dormant, replaced by quiet direct-to-video stuff or the bigger glories going to prestige thrillers like THE SIXTH…

  THE RENTAL’s greatest crime isn’t that it constantly reminds viewers of other films, but that it borrows so many elements in order to combine them into meaning so little. Watch enough movies and people will start noticing more and more recycled plots, characters, shots, and other beats. Sometimes this…

        Disney’s THE BLACK CAULDRON was released 35 years ago today on July 24th, 1985. The rare Disney film to have an army of the undead and a horned necromancer, it stood out as possibly too dark for some audiences. To celebrate this undervalued ghastly gem, what is…

      Whatever your opinion on ’90s horror may be, it can’t be argued that it was distinctive, in its extravagant, largely-CG special effects, extraordinarily attractive casts, and stubborn commitment to distancing itself from “traditional” horror. In keeping with this were a number of in-name-only remakes of horror classics,…