By Elias Savada. A piece of the infamous “Gooble Gobble” carnival communal wedding chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) isn’t the only ditty from that horror classic paid homage to in Aaron Schimberg’s wicked movie-within-a-horror-movie, social satire Chained for Life, which world premiered recently at BAMcinemaFest. In fact, performers emit the […]
Political and Literary Exile: Nicolas Pariser’s The Great Game
By Thomas Puhr. Is the pen indeed mightier than the sword, as Bulwer-Lytton’s adage would have us believe? This ever-prescient question drives writer-director Nicolas Pariser’s 2015 feature debut, The Great Game (Le grand jeu; now on DVD from Icarus Films). At the film’s start, disillusioned French novelist Pierre Blum (Melvil Poupaud) […]
Forgotten “Final Girls”: The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle by Alexandra West
A Book Review by Alex Brannan. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Carol J. Clover takes a critical look at horror and exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s that were written off by most other critics as a trashy B-movie affair. The allusion to Clover’s most famous contribution to horror […]
The First Purge: State of the Nation
By Christopher Sharrett. One would think that the fascination with apocalypse in cinema peaked, perhaps, in the late 70s-early 80s, with the disaster films of the era, or the Mad Max cycle, and Blade Runner and its knock-offs. Alternately, Robin Wood remarked that genre cinema reached its “apocalypse phase” in the late […]
The Lodgers: The Specter of History
By Alex Brannan. “Be in bed by midnight’s bell. Never let a stranger through your door. Never leave each other all alone.” These are the rules that define the lives of twin siblings Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) in Brian O’Malley’s period horror The Lodgers. Orphaned after the tragic […]
Wake Up at the Back There! It’s Jimmy Edwards by Anthony Slide
A Book Review by Tony Williams. The name of Jimmy Edwards (1920-1988) may not be familiar to American audiences, let alone contemporary British ones, except for those tuning in to the “Talking Pictures” cable stations and others running archive film and television series that put many contemporary examples on broadcast […]
Follow That Dream: Eugene Jarecki’s The King
July 12, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. Embracing a road trip structure, which is always conducive to a film concerning self-reflective journeys of the soul, Eugene Jarecki’s The King takes as its meditative subject not just the meteoritic rise and catastrophic fall of Elvis Presley, but also the corresponding character of the United States, through […]
They Feud (Again): Under the Tree
By Thomas Puhr. One may argue that the “feuding neighbors” subgenre is overdone, having been explored in films like John G. Avildsen’s Neighbors (1981), Danny DeVito’s Duplex (2003), and Nicholas Stoller’s Neighbors (2014) and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (2016). This trend is not limited to movie theaters, either; nearly every […]
Between Fantasy and Reality: A Matter of Life and Death (1946) from the Criterion Collection
July 12, 2018
By Tony Williams. One can never have too much of a good thing and the successful works of The Archers defines this cinematically. After the long overdue recognition delivered to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger while they were still around to receive it, acclaim by a later generation of directors […]
Conflict, Dissension, and Collaboration – Nope, Nothing Wrong Here: The Making of Cujo, Written and Edited by Lee Gambin
July 10, 2018
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This book is an excellent addition to the Bear Manor Media repertoire. Written by an independent film historian as a tribute to a film he finds of exceptional value, the book’s subtitle could also be renamed “Everything You Need to Know about Cujo – […]