Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

I owe a lot of my film knowledge and appreciation to my father. When I was younger, I would often wake up to find him in the living room, watching movies. I was introduced to many genres of film from simply waking up and joining him on the couch. One…

The old fable of the dog with two bones tells the story of a dog who, upon seeing another dog with a bone in its mouth, opens its own mouth to try and take that bone, too, and loses both, realizing too late that he was only looking at his…

  Asylums are so endemic to horror and drama at this point that their inclusion borders on parody. They’re dark, decrepit places devoid of all life, home to nothing but monsters and stereotypical portrayals of the insane meant to disturb and frighten the “normal” members of society. It is a…

  Some jobs can be very dull. After all, they require you to do the same thing every single day. It could quickly become frustrating to follow such a strict routine that allows virtually no room for variety, especially with your boss’s looming presence. In Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s fantasy drama EARWIG,…

  The recent handful of films that utilize a style called “Screenlife” — real-time looks at a character’s desktop or smartphone display that tell a story through various social media apps — have so far been the best representative of the way we communicate and navigate our lives, especially when…

  James Wan has arguably been the most influential force in American horror during the 21st century. Not only has he shaped three popular franchises, but he’s also inspired Hollywood to pivot its genre fare alongside his success, whether it was SAW ushering in a wave of ultraviolence or the…

  In 1596, painter Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio was commissioned by diplomat Francesco Maria del Monte to paint a gift for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. It was to be a decorative shield that commemorated the Grand Duke’s achievements in battle. Caravaggio’s final product would become the iconic painting entitled…

  The rule of thumb used to be — and still is, for the most part — that genre films were the best way to address thorny real-life issues that may be too sensitive to deal with directly. Yet the more horror tropes and mythological characters are utilized, the more…

    INCEPTION, with all of its cold clinicality, gave us dream worlds with stoic leads, blue gray sharpness, and military precision. In STRAWBERRY MANSION, the world created by writers and directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney exists on the other end of the spectrum: soft, warm, emotionally entangled, and…

  We here at the DG are always excited to present the world with new opportunity paying homage to 42nd Street and grindhouse cinema, and I, of course, have a special soft spot for the intersection of exploitation film and literature. So imagine our delight to be able to bring…

We as a culture tend to mythologize serial killers and the people who try to catch them. In both cases, the mythologized figure is usually a white man. Entertainment is filled with stories about an evil genius and the only man brilliant enough to bring him to justice (generally defined…

If you truly love something, you have to admit its flaws. That’s a maxim my wife told me early in our relationship that’s always stuck with me . The way she sees it, blind love is exactly that- a senseless infatuation, uncritical admiration of an imaginary ideal purely of the…

“Grief” and “trauma” have become horror movie buzzwords as of late, even though they’ve been forever intertwined with the genre. Haunted houses have historically been appropriate spaces for exploring loss, with their cavernous empty spaces reflecting the chasms left in their inhabitants’ lives, these lost souls desperately seeking to fill…

  NOTE: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided Daily Grindhouse with a free Blu-ray copy for review purposes. The opinions shared are that of the writer.   And THE CONJURING train keeps chuggin’ along! After four spin-offs of varying quality following the release of THE CONJURING 2 in 2016, THE CONJURING 3:…

Outside of a comic store and a Ghostface Killah album, folks weren’t really talking about Iron Man before 2008; he was a solid character with great potential that could act as a gateway into this larger more fantastic universe—one that was mostly populated by other B and C-tier (at the…

Anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can see how much inventiveness is possible in filmmaking these days. While YouTube, Tik Tok, and other such platforms don’t necessarily provide opportunities for narrative depth given their typically bite-sized runtimes, many users demonstrate time and again that there is a ton…

    I hated THE CELL when I saw it back in 2000. To be fair, I haven’t seen it since. To be even fairer, screenwriter Mark Protosevich also wrote the most vivid script I feel I’ve ever read, which was his adaptation of I AM LEGEND (which became a Will Smith vehicle in 2007…

    Seeing as how most classic cinematic horror characters come from European myths and legends — the vampire, the werewolf, and so forth — it’s easy to forget that North America has its very own horror creature of ancient legend: the Wendigo. The creature comes from Native American roots,…

  Director Richard Bates, Jr. makes weird movies for weird people. From EXCISION to TONE DEAF, they’re beautiful, gross, and all about trying to find yourself in a world where you feel like you don’t belong. In his latest film, KING KNIGHT, which premiered as part of this year’s Fantasia…

  When the COVID-19 pandemic began, people lamented the anticipated deluge of television and films that were to follow in its wake, expecting the usual lazy exploitation of a worldwide event. Now over a year into the crisis (with, unfortunately, no obvious end in sight), the initial rush to capitalize…

    On the surface, GIVING BIRTH TO A BUTTERFLY is a film about stolen identities and navigating the curveballs that life throws at you. When the surface quickly wears off, it leaves a pastel-smeared reflection on wasted life, poor choices, and the false security of a new start.  …

  DISTRICT 9, released on this date back in 2009, which was a low-key strong year for movies, is the feature-film debut of Neill Blomkamp, the South African filmmaker who with his wife and co-writer, the Canadian screenwriter Terri Tatchell, expanded it from his 2006 short film ALIVE IN JOBURG….

I’m usually the last person to suggest remaking a horror film. There are some remakes I love, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not someone who automatically thinks that newer equals better. With that said, the pre-Code proto-slasher THIRTEEN WOMEN seems particularly ripe for a remake. The film examines racism…

Given current events, Terry Gilliam’s oddball science fiction tale 12 MONKEYS (1995) now qualifies as all-too-plausible horror. Granted, we’re mostly only shown the aftermath of a deadly pandemic, when most humans are gone and zoo animals run wild in the streets like a child’s nightmare fantasy, but one can assume…