Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

    IT opens with a young boy making a paper boat, one that will sail down a rainy street on a voyage that will ultimately plunge seven children into a nightmare that forever alters their lives. But those opening shots, poring over the piece of paper as it is…

JACKALS starts in POV, as we creep along an alleyway into a normal suburban house and into the bedroom of a middle aged couple — who we see brutally slaughtered in front of our eyes.We then move into the bedroom of a teenage girl, who clearly knows who we are…before…

    2017 has been a banner year for clowns in popular horror culture, thanks to the massively anticipated film adaptation of Stephen King’s IT and smaller-scale scares like “Gags, The Green Bay Clown.” To provide some context for the current craze and a look at cinematic clowns present and…

The horror community was dealt another sad blow with the death of Tobe Hooper. He will always be synonymous with THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and the way that film revolutionized the horror genre and still influences movies to this day, and rightfully so. CHAINSAW is a singular work and it…

      “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/ Gang aft agley,” said the giant cat with his mouth full of both.   When Tippi Hedren married a producer named Noel Marshall, the two of them decided to make a film about their shared passion of conservation, using the nature…

    Alejandro Jodorowsky has lived a long and storied life. At 88, he’s become one of the giants of arthouse cinema, his surreal visions echoing through the filmic landscape. His 1970 film EL TOPO is often credited as the first midnight movie, it’s outre, subversive visions attracting the likes…

  I have had a ton of affection for SLITHER ever since its borderline disastrous theatrical release. I first saw the film on its opening day in 2006. I went to a mainstream multiplex in Chicago where it was showing in one of the largest auditoriums. I was one of…

      There are products of the ’90s that really show their age when revisiting nowadays, and SPECIES is one of those products. While the movie is without a doubt still just as entertaining as ever, the CGI really shows its cartoonish effect and the HD conversion Scream Factory…

  [DAVE MADE A MAZE has been previously reviewed briefly in DG’s coverage of the Chattanooga Film Festival and its coverage of the Boston Underground Film Festival]     Many filmmakers are intent on pursuing the feelings and experiences they had when they were children. Whether it’s in massive projects…

          If nothing else, KUSO can be seen as a unfiltered peek into Flying Lotus’s pure, diseased id. There is no good or bad here, no standard qualifier, no use for the usual critical metrics applied to reviewing movies. For better and worse, this is an…

When the era of the superhero film is judged fifteen years from now, Marvel and DC’s output will be looked upon as pretty good—if bland—summer blockbusters. The STAR WARS franchise will be perceived as welcome diversions, but never truly be equal to the stellar filmmaking of the first trilogy, particularly…

Shortly after the screening of A GHOST STORY, the new film by writer/director David Lowery opening wide this weekend, attended by myself and some of my friends, a conversation emerged about how the film appeared to viewers who’d seen the trailer.  One friend remarked that he didn’t want to see…

When a horror film works, it should be either scary enough to frighten you or silly enough to entertain you and in a perfect world, both. Sometimes a good horror movie does both. John R. Leonetti’s WISH UPON does neither. The film begins with a young mother placing something enclosed…

The summer box office is always crowded with big studio tentpoles, blockbusters designed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, so it’s rare to see a studio taking a chance on something very different. It’s tough not to admire distributor Broadgreen’s ambition for releasing WISH UPON, a small teen…

It’s hard to watch a SPIDER-MAN film without thinking of, and being reminded of, the five previous Spidey pictures. Opinions of those preceding iterations aside, there’s only so many ways to show Peter Parker shoot webs and swing around New York. Fans, including this author, had grown tired of the same…

  THE BEGUILED is a refreshingly old-fashioned film. Sofia Coppola’s stylishly erotic take on Thomas P. Culinan’s novel, A Painted Devil features lurid storytelling and period drama that make the film feel like the kind of movie that our parents’ generation would have talked about in hushed whispers. It’s appropriate…

  I don’t hang out with the same crowd I hung out with twenty years ago. Nothing wrong with those old friends, but people change. Some got married and had kids. Some got married and didn’t have kids. Some just had kids. Some got divorced. A few people died. I…

  In the mid to late ‘90s, there was a glut of films featuring wiseass criminal types, non-linear storytelling, and of course, an abundance of pop culture references and retro tunage. This era of Quentinsploitation came about due to the success of both RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION and while…

        Noomi Rapace (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) is the perfect choice to play the heroine in this action-packed sci-fi horror film. Her emotive face expresses both her relationship with son and ex-husband in the establishing scenes in the beginning of the film, and then outright…

  The Fifth Chicago Critics Film Festival ran from May 12-18, 2017 at the historic Music Box Theatre.   This was my third year attending the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Unlike previous years, I no longer live in that great city so I was only able to make it back…

Paranoia is powerful. At its grandest, it can bring down entire empires and nations and more intimately, it can also destroy friendships and families. It has also been a helpful seed in many a horror and sci-fi screenplays. Both Howard Hawks THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and John Carpenter’s reimagining…

“I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see is not so nice, and is certainly not God. I’d love to explore where she goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise cannot be what you…

        Title: CONTAMINATION Other Titles: ALIEN CONTAMINATION; ALIEN ON EARTH; TOXIC SPAWN Year: 1980 Director: Luigi Cozzi, a.k.a. Lewis Coates Cast: Ian McCulloch, Louise Marleau, Marino Mase, Sigfried Rauch   Nasties: Slo-mo exploding torsos Exploding rat Point-blank gunshot to the head Man-eating avocado cyclops Machine gun killing…

    FRANKENSTEIN CREATED BIKERS is a depraved, sick, and twisted film that takes the concept of good taste, drags it out back, and beats it savagely with fists. So in other words, it’s a great piece of grindhouse cinema, and is perfect for people who love their movies ridiculously…