Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

        Letterboxd can build some bad habits. Sure, it can be a great tool for keeping track of what you watch and your immediate thoughts and what your friends are watching, but its gamified interface prioritizes immediacy over anything else. It’s why we get so many pithy,…

  Most characters don’t make it out alive in horror movies. Some survive until the final reel if they’re lucky, while others become bodies on the slab before the titles have even run! They are sacrifices for us bloodthirsty fans, but there’s more to them than that. They have wants…

    There’s a brilliant and tragic idea in an essay by Carlee Gomes in Lo Specchio Scuro. She argues that the reason people are so precious and defensive about the the ethics of their consumption is that we have reached a point in capitalism that the only way know…

      Serial killers scare the bejeezus out of me. This has been the case ever since a probably-a-little-bit-too-young viewing of SE7EN, and has been born out time and again through adulthood, whether in reading American Psycho and 300,000,000, or in watching MAN BITES DOG and THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, or…

        Who doesn’t love a great hero? Whether you’re an Indiana Jones fan, or one who roots for James Bond — or both, like me — those movies just wouldn’t carry the same impact if the heroes weren’t as wonderfully bold as they are. But, while these…

    With Thanksgiving ahead and the loss of genre-film titan Roger Corman not far behind us, Daily Grindhouse got together to remember Roger Corman and to give our thanks for just some of his accomplishments, which were all wonderful gifts to anyone who loves the medium of film.  …

    It feels necessary to say this up front: I’m not sure GLADIATOR II is a movie meant for me. I am a rare breed in that I’m a Roman history nerd who’s actually read the histories. I’m conversant in Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Tacitus, and Gibbon, to say nothing…

    I don’t know what you call this thing, but it isn’t “a movie.” CITIZEN KANE, that’s a movie. CASABLANCA, that’s a movie. BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, that’s a goddamned movie. This thing… This is a bukkake party of intellectual properties (IP), but that’s not a movie. Also,…

    True crime has historically focused on middle-class and wealthy white women. Examining crime statistics in the US, one sees that queer people, women and men of color, trans people, sex workers, and the homeless are at substantially more risk than white women of means. True crime, and drama…

      I look at MGM’s 2024 slate and I am frustrated. THE BEEKEEPER got dumped in January in a decision that seemed mystifying. It ended up doing 150 million against a budget of 40 million, but critics and audiences adored the Statham actioner. What if it had been…

  There are two ways for films to handle time travel. The first is to firmly establish rules which are tightly wound like a pocket watch and let us marvel at how everything fits together and how every rule is obeyed. The second treats time travel as a sauce to…

  How far are you willing to go to stick by the ones you love? Would you stay when it got really hard? Job insecurity hard? Body dysmorphia hard? What about possession at the hands of a demon? Writer/director Jason Yu’s debut feature, SLEEP, asks and answers such questions to remarkable…

  Not every horror film aims to be a thoughtful examination of trauma. Some just want to party. Enter writer/director Steven Kostanski’s FRANKIE FREAKO — having just played at Fantastic Fest — a nostalgic play on the mini-monster movies that populated the ’80s as welcoming gateways into the horror genre…

        Divorce sucks. It represents the unimaginable horror that the person who you thought knew you best is now your adversary. POSSESSION absolutely nailed the mechanics of divorce. There’s a different horror that comes in the wake of separation or divorce, the horror of “getting back out…

  Human body as spectacle has been around for centuries. With the advent of carnival freak shows, the everyday member of the public was provided an avenue to ogle bodies different from their own in a way that was, somehow, socially acceptable exploitation. There is, however, some grey area. There’s…

I doubt that I’m dropping any sort of revelation here, but never trust a group that prefers you silent. The voices of the masses are the sword and shield against authoritarianism. An organization that deems its message as the only one that matters isn’t looking out for the betterment of…

“God can’t save you. You have to save yourself.” Religious horror—and it’s intertwining with feminine rage—is having a resurgence, of late. Even beyond the confines of festival throughlines, this particular thematic trend is on the upswing, and for obvious reasons. With everything imaginable being challenged, threatened, and/or constrained right now,…

  2024 is, unsurprisingly, the year of film’s reckoning with the crisis on bodily autonomy. The horror of losing agency over your own body is only growing more real, and the frequency and viciousness of abortion bans across the country are putting into stark relief the truth of how those…

    As I sit here writing this, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed a federal district court decision blocking enforcement of Florida laws banning gender affirming care for minors and severely limiting it for adults. The fight over Florida’s SB 254 is winding its way toward a…

    Like the movie’s villains foolishly do with its protagonist, I almost could have underestimated REBEL RIDGE. When last I heard about the movie, it was set to star John Boyega. I’m a fan, and I was disappointed to hear he dropped out. Would have loved to see Boyega…

    Here in the future, we live in a moviemaking age of sequels, remakes, reboots, “re-imaginings,” and in the case of ALIEN: ROMULUS, “interquels.” An interquel means this is a film set between two films in the franchise. ALIEN: ROMULUS is set some time between the events of ALIEN…

        Spencer Charnas’ renowned horror convention Silver Scream Con hits Worcester, Massachusetts, this weekend — and it’s truly a horror fan’s dream.   Hosted by the DCU Center and taking place from September 13th through September 15th, this extreme celebration of the macabre oozes with gut-churning terror….

I’ve never seen anything quite like writer/director Pascal Plante’s RED ROOMS. There is perhaps no better place to start than with that. On its face it is a simple, straightforward nightmare about obsession, spectatorship, and casual violence. A testament to the harrowing potential of simplicity, RED ROOMS is far more…

  Nature shows us who we really are. That’s a notion filmmaker Adam MacDonald understands well. His debut feature, BACKCOUNTRY—which features the most ferocious bear attack on film, sorry, THE REVENANT—expressed the primal viciousness of the wilderness. The brutality of it. The cruelty. His latest, OUT COME THE WOLVES, cements…