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Author Archives: Ross Birks
Aenigma (1987)
Basically Carrie by way of Patrick, Lucio Fulci’s Aenigma is in no way as bad as late-career Fulci led me to believe. Despite taking influence from many better films (Argento’s Phenomena also come to mind), this story of a girl in … Continue reading
Schlock (1973)
Schlock is John Landis’ first film. Made on a shoestring budget while he was in his early twenties, in many ways it provides you with a roadmap that his subsequent career would rarely stray from. Concerning a prehistoric apeman – … Continue reading
Body Snatchers (1993)
Ferrara is something of a master of lean, mean genre machines that also contain a meaty dose of socio-political spit and furore. Even here, working on a mainstream property for a major studio, he manages to create something that feels … Continue reading
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Tagged 1993, Abel Ferrara, Forrest Whittaker, Meg Tilly, R. Lee Ermey
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mother! (2017) – Take 2
The first and last line of mother! is “Baby?” Darren Aronofsky is a sick son of a bitch. For real though, I have not stopped thinking about this movie since seeing it last Friday, so I had to go back for round two. A … Continue reading
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mother! (2017)
So much of modern movie marketing is crazy hyperbole so I might as well get with the times: mother! might just be the best horror film of the century so far, by going exactly where it threatens to with zero fucks given. … Continue reading
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Psycho II (1983)
Making sequels to movies over twenty years old might be pretty commonplace today but back in the early 1980’s, when Universal decided to produce a follow up to Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal Psycho, it was practically unheard of. Originally conceived as … Continue reading
Posted in Reviews, Rewatch
Tagged 1983, Anthony Perkins, Dennis Farina, Meg Tilly, Richard Franklin, Vera Miles
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Colossal (2017)
You want to know how inventive this movie is? It gets to a point where a shot of Jason Sudeikis’ feet slamming on a playground equates to the deaths of thousands of people in your imagination with just a gentle … Continue reading
Strange Days (1995)
“Okay. Ready? Boot it.” And so begins Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, which proceeds in the form of a dizzying and glitchy POV shot that plunges you head-first into a high-wire robbery sequence before dropping you off the top of a building. … Continue reading
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Roadracers (1994)
I can’t be the only one who assumed Desperado was Robert Rodriguez’s second movie following El Mariachi, making the existence of this giddy little made-for-TV movie a nice surprise. Conceived of and shot in the interim between his breakthrough movies, Roadracers was intended as a … Continue reading
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Spectre (2015)
As much as I loved Skyfall the film’s insistence on slowly undoing all of Casino Royale‘s franchise retooling – bringing Q and Moneypenny back into the game as well as a curmudgeon old white guy into the M role and re-injecting more of … Continue reading
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"This Film Should Be Played Loud" 