Tag: review
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Perfect Movies: American Psycho
“You like Huey Lewis & The News?” I sure do, and Patrick Bateman makes a great argument for the strengths of their 1983 breakthrough album, Sports. It would be a great moment in any retro film for the main character to espouse his love of mainstream contemporary music, but becoming a counterpoint to the action…
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Sleepaway Camp
I never went to camp as a kid. Growing up in Missouri, there was plenty of available open space and fresh air right where I lived, and besides that, my folks were never the type to want to ship their kids off for extended periods (also, I was a real sweety pie). After watching Sleepaway…
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Tourist Trap
Bibbidi-bobbidi-BOO! It’s another horror movie recap and live review. I’m going in blind, so buckle up, chuckle nuts: It’s 1979’s Tourist Trap. Ancient-sounding music begins and it’s right to the goddamn point by rolling credits immediately. Maybe it thinks it’s a Woody Allen movie, because the credits are black and white typeface adorned by old…
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The Ghost of Frankenstein
Here comes the the horror classic(?) The Ghost of Frankenstein. I’m not very familiar with the original Universal horror film library in general, but since Frankie’s story has been made over and over again literally hundreds of times, due to cultural osmosis its tropes, basic story outline, and visual rhetoric is well-known enough to be…
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
In 1974, a horror movie came out that forged a divergent path for the entire horror genre to follow and has since been so widely imitated that if you had never watched it before by now, you may wonder what the big deal is about it in the first place. This is a somewhat unavoidable…
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Worst to Best Gus Van Sant Films
A sort of American Andrei Tarkovsky, Gus Van Sant’s films are characterized by long tracking shots, stretches of unbroken silence, and drifting dream-like cinematography that makes seemingly everyday events something unique and special. Often depicting characters that live on the edge of society–either due to their sexual orientation, a purposeful defiance of norms, or from…
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Cult Classics: Jesus’ Son
Over the course of a lifetime, you may often find yourself in the company of a strange coterie of people—weird frenemies and loose associates you don’t fully trust but often rely on for one thing or another. More so, your association with these people can find you in odd situations, ones you could have never…
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Cult Classics: Forbidden Zone
One of the central tenets that defines a cult film is its inaccessibility to a general audience. Great cult films have gained their notoriety for being exceedingly difficult works for many people to understand or appreciate. Meanwhile, they are also films that obviously strike a chord in many viewers, particularly those who have become somewhat…
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Cult Classics: Meet The Hollowheads
How do you even begin to describe a movie like Meet The Hollowheads? Is it a satire or sci-fi? Comedy or demented horror? How can one express what witnessing the truly bizarre is? There’s simply no reference point for the movie or the world it inhabits, and the film doesn’t help shepherd you to any…
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Goldfinger
BA-NAH! (BUH!) BAH NAH! (BUH!). We’re back to watch Goldfinger, widely recognized as one of the best James Bond films, if not the best. But we’ll see about all that. Anyway, it opens with Bond snorkeling his way onto a facility, complete with a fake bird(?) on his head, and the first thing he does…
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Dr. No
Right into a swingin’ take on the classic theme, with the iconic “barrel of a gun that tracks Bond, but blammo! Take that, barrel!” opening. We get nifty-looking typography that lets us know (hah) that this is Ian Fleming’s Dr. No. There’s no cold open action sequence, which would become standard to Bond films, but…
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31 Days of Horror Concluded
So I spent much of October 2016 watching horror movies and writing glib little reviews about them. It was an exercise in writing that I gave myself (initially much more ambitious than what transpired, but that explanation will come later), and it has been a lot of fun writing them. To keep my chops up,…
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