A pair of Jonathan Demme features and several box sets are among my Fall movie watching, featuring various genre titles ranging from the Hollywood prestige of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to the cheap regional horror of Doug Robertson’s HauntedWeen (1991), early ’70s Brit exploitation including Jack Palance sacrificing women to an African idol in Freddie Francis’ Craze (1974) and four Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi made-for-television ghost stories in Cauldron’s Houses of Doom collection.
The new MUBI seven-disk set of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom provides an opportunity to re-visit the original two seasons from 1994 and 1997 and finally see the elaborate blend of satire, soap opera and ghost story reach some kind of conclusion with the third season made in 2022; while it proves impossible to attain the unique energy of the original, which achieved a perfect balance between horror and comedy, The Kingdom: Exodus does tie up many of the loose ends left dangling for twenty-five years. An even stranger piece of experimental horror has been restored by Le Chat Qui Fume with their 4K edition of Leslie Stevens’ Incubus (1966) in which a pre-Kirk William Shatner confronts demons while speaking Esperanto.
Something for everyone this week – killer clowns, sea monsters, Gothic horrors, a high-speed ambulance and haunted buildings, werewolves, Nazi cannibals and anatomical abnormalities, murder and madness.
I’ve recently been binging a lot of Vinegar Syndrome releases, including a box set of made-for-TV mysteries, an odd bit of exploitation-horror made in Florida by a French director, and one of the most brain-bendingly bad movies I’ve ever seen.
Kino Lorber’s prolific slate of releases is making a wide range of genre of genre titles available, some for the first time in decades – including some from the golden age of made-for-television movies like Paul Wendkos’ Fear No Evil (1968) and Jerry London’s Killdozer (1974)
In 1993, back when I was working at the Winnipeg Film Group, I was offered a few days work as an extra on a TV movie being shot here: which is how I became the least convincing state trooper ever to appear on screen in Paul Shapiro’s serial killer comedy Heads, starring Jon Cryer, Ed Asner and Jennifer Tilly.
Although radio broadcasting arrived more than two decades after the birth of cinema – and movies were the dominant form of entertainment in North America for the first half of the century – radio was in some ways a far more important and influential medium. Looking back from the perspective of our wired (and wireless) […]
I recently came across a comment (can’t recall where) that it’s wrong to binge on TV series now that we can get whole seasons on disk. The art form is designed to be watched and appreciated in installments and watching many episodes back to back prevents absorbing each one individually. I do see the point, […]
A while back, I signed up with BlogCritics. The idea was that writing regular reviews for them would keep me from getting lazy; in addition, cross-linking with my blog would, I hoped, boost traffic for my own site. But I’ve only posted four reviews with them since February, while keeping up a regular weekly schedule […]
I find that my viewing habits in recent years have become so random and eclectic that the idea of coming up with a “year’s best” list is not only difficult – it borders on the arbitrary and meaningless. Much of what I watch these days consists of older films either just caught up with, or […]