Body Horror · Horror · Mumblecore · Romance
Not only does May challenge the tropes of mumblecore and indie-rom com movies, but it also retells elements of Frankenstein, offering a female protagonist who is both monster and monster-maker.[…]
“You just can’t beat wild imagination.” – Bob Bottin * * * It took decades for John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) to find an audience, on home video and cable.[…]
Myth and Archetype · SF & Fantasy
“Look at the stars,” the genius of Trumbull’s movie finally seems to be saying, but also know the stars within. * * * Often, it’s the throwaway scenes that click.[…]
Eco · Horror · SF & Fantasy
In his creation of a nonhuman cinematic world that mines horror from its confrontation of human fear of irrelevance and inadaptability, Bouwer ultimately suggests that survival in the era following[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · TV & Streaming · War
This is the first piece of a multi-part, long-form series entitled “The Twilight Zone and the Culture Wars.” The series spotlights several episodes from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and[…]
Activist & Political · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy
I can’t believe it took me almost four decades and living through a global pandemic to realize it, but in E.T., Elliott and his motley crew of rascals might well[…]
SF & Fantasy · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
A Boy and His Dog’s promotional advertisements also reveal how the novella was adapted and modified to suit the tastes of the American popular film-going public. The movie’s promo posters[…]
Drama · Literature and Film · Russia · SF & Fantasy
While there can be no doubt Solyaris is no artistic masterpiece, the idea that it isn’t a product of its time is more complicated. To the extent that the film[…]
Uncharacteristically, The Martian and Arrival do not present us with a problematic dystopian future with which to grapple; a future in which everything has always already gone wrong. Instead, they[…]
Now anyone who can scrape together a few hundred dollars can load up on enough movie streams and DV-R and giant LCD screens to never leave the house, so who needs a nice house?
Though last December’s lack of promised Mayan doomsday never panned out, December 2013 is laden with new DVDs and theatrical revivals that allow us to pretend the world ended as far back as 1979. Oh if only… we might all be rolling with Humongous by now, or Bane, or what’s the difference?
DVD & Blu-ray · Exploitation & Erotica
With Scream! it’s now possible to realize that the 80s as the best decade ever for schlock movies; grindhouses and drive-ins still lured us in like evil aunts. And best of all, we could still be genuinely scared.
We don’t want to see dead people, but we damn sure want them to see us.
A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like[…]
Even within the notoriously cheese-ridden genre of science fiction, few films can rival the alien visitation picture in terms of how much suspicion they arouse. Rare is the film that[…]
