Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

Rest stop bathrooms are always a bit sketchy. Whether it’s mirrors made from a piece of dented metal, overflowing trash, lack of ventilation, or simply the buildup that comes from years of hard use, they are never a place one wishes to spend any extended amount of time. And yet,…

  1970s horror in America has long been championed as the genre’s definitive golden era, if only for the sheer diversity you’re bound to find when a movement comes to a crossroads. As the last remnants of gothic horror lingered on in the final days of Amicus and Hammer Films,…

  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:…

    Literary minds have been breaching the outer limits of space well before humans have even touched the stars, with some considering Johann Valentin Andreae’s The Chemical Wedding – first published in 1616 and thought to be written by the allegorical German aristocrat, Christian Rosenkreuz – as readers’ first…

Tis the season for holiday decorations, festive music playing nonstop on the radio, and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE airing on a loop on a variety of cable stations. The holiday season is a time for joy, bringing people together, and the hope of a new year around the corner. The…

While trauma is a basic tenet of the horror genre as a whole, the purest expression of it within the genre has got to be the ghost. Psychologically, trauma is something that follows an individual throughout their lives, so the ghost is the eternal spiritual manifestation of that, a trauma…

Directed by John Farrow from a screenplay written by Barré Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, and based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich, the 1948 supernatural noir film NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES is a remarkably intriguing melding of genres. “When heiress Jean Courtland (Gail Russell, CALCUTTA) attempts suicide, her fiancé Elliott…

Andrzej Zulawski’s English-language classic POSSESSION has been subjected to a rocky release history. Part of this has to do with the fact that the film was originally considered a flop after being widely distributed. Thankfully, it has since reached a cult following for its nightmarish direction and mad performances by stars…

      I don’t have enough money to gamble, but if I did, I’d be willing to bet that WEREWOLVES WITHIN is the only horror-comedy whodunnit video game adaptation that opens with an ironically spooky Mr. Rogers quote. The television icon’s emphasis on being neighborly permeates director Josh Ruben…

As someone who’s been writing about movies for almost a decade now, I’m often asked what’s the worst film I’ve ever seen. The question isn’t necessarily asked to get my honest opinion: The pastime of watching bad movies is so widespread now, and so many even casual filmgoers have an…

There were a lot of conversations/debates about subverting expectations when THE LAST JEDI came out—some praised the sequel for taking bold strides while others were frustrated by its anticlimactic curveballs. PAUL DOOD’S DEADLY LUNCH BREAK is built on subversion, finding new ways to zig at every opportunity to zag. The…

   One of the best things about SXSW Online 2021– and all previous SXSW Film Festivals– is that it puts human faces on issues the audience may not necessarily know about. Reading statistics, seeing the names of the dead, footage of the aftermath—these acts all inform people but do very…

Despite centuries of societal change, intellectual evolution, and untold numbers of permutations, there’s still a lot of specific imagery and assumed elements when discussing families. There are, of course, certain basic ingredients of biology shared in producing a baby, but everything else but those few (literally tiny) building blocks varies…

It’s no secret that true crime is booming. An ever popular genre, the advent of streaming moved it from a niche on cable networks and HBO specials to a worldwide phenomenon with such titles as Netflix’s Making a Murderer, Tiger King, and Don’t F**k With Cats. Now, streaming giant Hulu…

Director Eric Power’s ATTACK OF THE DEMONS (written by Andres Petersen) is incredibly frustrating to watch. Not because it is bad or derivative or anything—but because it keeps taking one step forward and one step backward.

The home invasion subgenre has never been one of my favorites, but when we are talking movies where the home invasion goes sideways on the invaders, I’m all in (give me YOU’RE NEXT over THE STRANGERS any day of the week). It was for this reason that THE OWNERS piqued…

  Horror fans of a certain age fondly remember a time, long ago, when they would wander the isles of video stores as children, their eyes popping at the lurid, ghastly cover art, beckoning impressionable minds into a netherworld of sex and violence, seducing them with images of torn flesh…

  Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the 2020 version of the Chattanooga Film Festival went virtual, running from May 22-25. But even though all films and events had to be moved online, the programmers of one of the best genre film festivals in the U.S. managed to put together an…

  Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the 2020 version of the Chattanooga Film Festival went virtual, running from May 22-25. But even though all films and events had to be moved online, the programmers of one of the best genre film festivals in the U.S. managed to put together an…

  Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the 2020 version of the Chattanooga Film Festival went virtual, running from May 22-25. But even though all films and events had to be moved online, the programmers of one of the best genre film festivals in the U.S. managed to put together an…

You can find stuff like PRIMER or PI, and other indie delights that reveal true talents and outsiders’ perspectives. DON’T RUN isn’t a revelation mostly because it’s technical issues and storytelling problems bog it down, but it is clearly a passion project with some legitimately good ideas and moments of strong execution. Hopefully writer/director/producer Ben Rood is able to take this movie and use it as a way to another project, while learning from the pitfalls of DON’T RUN and constantly improving (as all artists must).

In a field as crowded as the “prostitutes and killer pimps” subgenre of exploitation movies, sometimes its takes decades for the better entries to rise to the top. Critically reviled when it was released in 1982, VICE SQUAD is now considered a classic with an all-timer performance by Wings Hauser….

Growing up, I loved spoofs. Having a satellite dish in the early ’80s was a wondrous time for a kid who feasted on movies like AIRPLANE!, TOP SECRET!, and raunchy comedies like REVENGE OF THE NERDS and POLICE ACADEMY. At the same time, because my dad controlled the TV remote…

Give the makers of HUMAN ZOO this: they do manage to capture the soulcrushing, brain-numbing ennui of the situation their characters find themselves in. We’ve all seen this kind of SAW-a-like before, multiple times over, in the past couple decades: a diverse group of folks attend a casting call for…