A Birth in Grief and Ashes: Thoughts on The Road

"All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." (74) "He walked out into the gray light and stood and saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the interstate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like gorundfoxes in their cover....

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Summer of Slash: Visiting Hours

Visiting Hours is an odd entry into the over-satiated slasher subgenre of the 1980's. This import from Canada directed by Jean-Claude Lord feels different than other slashers. Probably because it deals with adults rather than teens, and the plot seems like something out of the type of scary scenario that DePalma made famous in films like Dressed to Kill rather than some boring stalk and slash. The film definitely feels like a Canadian production as the horror is far more cerebral here than anything...

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Summer of Slash: City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell, aka Fear in the City of the Living Dead)

[This is a re-post of something I wrote back in October for the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon I hosted.  Today I am re-posting it because the invaluable and unmatchable horror blog Final Girl has selected this for her May entry for her Final Girl Film Club. And I figured I would use that as an excuse to post it again for my summer horror series.  Enjoy.] City of the Living Dead is typical 80's Fulci as the plot is one nonsensical moment after another; however, in typical Italian horror...

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MacGruber

Parody only works when the people doing the jabbing have a genuine love for the very thing they're ripping apart. Often with parody you either get mean spiritedness; awful self-aware, wink-wink comedy; or a bad a mixture of both that just leaves a bad, snarky taste in one's mouth. Too often the entity that is Saturday Night Live produces failed attempts at catching lightening in a bottle with their over extended TV-parody-to-film adaptations that often leave the viewer wondering why they didn't...

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Thanks, whoever you are...

Browsing the blogosphere today I noticed that the LAMB blog is doing their annual Lammy's.  I knew this was coming down the pike, and yet I just don't care enough about nominating myself for these kinds of things.  Oh, that doesn't mean I think they aren't fun and cool rewards for hard working bloggers...they're just not for me; or, let me put it another way: as goddamn cheesy as it sounds I don't do this for things like Lammy's.  That being said, I read the nominations today, and...

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Summer of Slash: Just Before Dawn

In what will be an ongoing feature this summer I will be reviewing horror films (some with more 'slashing' than others) of varying ilks. All of this will culminate and coalesce into a much larger format/project that myself and other bloggers will unveil at a later time. My thanks to Tim Brayton, who, most likely unbeknownst to him, allowed me to completely rip off his Summer of Blood idea at his blog Antagony & Ecstasy. See what I did there: I replaced 'blood' with 'slash' so not to be too...

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Quick Thoughts on Iron Man 2

The summer movie season has officially begun now that the much anticipated sequel Iron Man 2 is out. I wasn't expecting a lot from the movie because I wasn't expecting a lot from the first film…so why go in with any other kind of expectations? I've never read a single panel of the Iron Man franchise, but two years ago when I watched the original Iron Man I was stunned at how witty and fun the film was with its classic action film aesthetic. I was shocked at how much I liked Iron Man, and even...

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The Descent: Part 2

Elegiac and poignant are not adjectives one expects to read in a review for a horror film, but the sequel to Neil Marshall's brilliant 2005 horror film The Descent does something interesting in playing off the events of the first film in order to evoke these emotions. Sure the film is a fun, often flawed Friday-night horror flick, but it's also trying to be something more than that – and even though there's not quite the same amount of character development as the original to give weight to the...

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