Latest Posts
Crumb Catcher
In Crumb Catcher a doorstep salesman makes his big pitch in a revenge-of-the-nerd thriller with a comic edge, served straight-up with no messing about. Bloody and funny, it’s not bad for a debut at all, though director Chris Skotchdopole did co-write the story with Larry Fessenden (who’s also a producer), one of the stalwarts of low-budget horror. None of the relationships in it are quite right and Skotchdopole and Fessenden get us straight onto that trail with opening scenes set at the wedding of Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck). A street guy, possibly the son of a gangbanger, Shane is also a writer and is currently in the middle of … Read more
The House of Laughing Windows
Pupi Avati isn’t one of the big names of giallo and yet The House of Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) easily stands alongside or even ahead of the best of Argento, Bava and Fulci. It’s a triumph not of concept or style, though it has both of those, but of a thousand careful craft decisions. It is simply a beautifully made film with a fabulous gothic eloquence, luxuriating in old places and odd faces as it tells a story about a picture restorer in 1950s Italy being menaced by characters from the church fresco he is working on. There’s a hint of Don’t Look Now in the idea, but really … Read more
Thunderbolts*
What is that little asterisk doing at the end of Thunderbolts*? Yes, that one there. By the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 36th adventure all has been revealed. Or maybe not. Thunderbolts is both a sequel and an origin story tonally harking back to the MCU when Joss Whedon had a hand in it. It’s not quite as quippy and doesn’t reference popular culture as much as Whedon would, but it’s on his spectrum, and the film is full of actors who do that sort of thing well. Like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Harbour and Geraldine Viswanathan (underused, word of her upstaging superpower obviously having got out). Florence Pugh, though, Florence Pugh. She … Read more
Szindbád
“One of the unsung masters of Hungarian cinema,” says the press blurb about Zoltán Huszárik, director of Szindbád. Full disclosure: I’d never heard of him before a review copy of the Blu-ray boxset fell onto my doormat. It contains Huszárik’s entire collected output, two films and a handful of shorts. Hungary is quite a source of “masters” of cinema, from Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi to Michael Curtiz, Vilmos Zsigmond, Béla Tarr and György Fehér. Having now watched Szindbád (with Csontváry and the shorts still to come), I’d happily add Huszárik to that list. He’s clearly a remarkable talent, with a visual style all his own and a confidence to match. His film … Read more
Hell of a Summer
Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard met as actors on the Ghostbusters: Afterlife shoot, realised they had similar tastes and decided to write a movie together. Hell of a Summer is the result. It’s an “everyone dies” slasher set at a summer camp where counsellors have assembled before the kids arrive to have some bongs’n’beers before settling down to their more serious duties. Gruesome comic death is the idea, which Bryk and Wolfhard establish in a pre-credits sequence in which a guitar played around a camp fire ends up where campfire guitars should probably end up more often, and both the senior counsellors at this remote place take a one-way journey to eternity. After … Read more
Vampyr
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr was the first psychological vampire movie, or so some of the books say. Cut to FW Murnau in the wings asking forlornly, “So what was Nosferatu?” made ten whole years earlier in 1922. How about Vampyr being the great Dreyer’s first sound movie? There is no doubt about that, even though Dreyer is working as if he’s still making a silent movie, right down to the use of intertitle cards. Really, this is a silent movie with added sound. Murnau stole the Dracula story from Bram Stoker but Dreyer bases his film on In a Glass Darkly, an earlier collection of gothic shockers by another Irish author, Sheridan Le … Read more
Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire
So this is how it ended. The 2005 TV movie Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire was meant to be a reboot for Chuck Norris and co. Instead poor ratings turned it into a swansong for Norris’s most famous character, the taciturn tough-but-fair cop who over an eight-year run on TV (1993-2001) had always had a martial-arts roundhouse kick at the ready for anyone who wouldn’t come quietly. Norris borrowed most of his shtick from Clint Eastwood in his Man with No Name days. Just stand there and look enigmatic is a sound choice if you can’t really act, which Norris can’t. That lack of basic chops – he’s a beat behind even … Read more
Wooden Crosses
1932’s Wooden Crosses (Les croix de bois) is more death, less glory than your average drama about the First World War. That might explain why it doesn’t always make it onto the “best of” lists, where The Big Parade, 1917, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory and Westfront usually jostle for a place on the podium. It’s more about the collective experience of warfare than individual heroics, which might also explain that absence, though there is a lead character, in the shape of Gilbert Demachy (Pierre Blanchar). Constructed in classic style, it starts with war being declared to scenes of national jubilation in France. Men eagerly signing up. Trains loaded … Read more
The Shrouds
The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago. Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works … Read more
I Wake Up Screaming
Twentieth Century-Fox didn’t do much in the way of noir. Betty Grable wasn’t much of a one for straight roles. So 1941’s I Wake Up Screaming is unusual for two reasons, not to mention a title making no sense at all. It’s a whodunit about people who are off their turf, so those deviations from the norm chime with what’s happening on screen, a murder mystery with a few wayward contenders for the killer of Vicky Lyn (Carole Landis), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The man who obviously didn’t do it is Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature), who we meet being sweated by the cops for the young woman’s murder. … Read more
Best Wishes to All
What is the price of living an OK life? Best Wishes to All offers a bleak answer to a question few ever really ask. Whether it’s also a funny answer depends on how much grim you can tolerate. Takashi Shimizu, director of Ju On: The Grudge, is its producer, which might give you an inkling as to which way things are going. J-horror: the next generation. All is peace and light initially. A Japanese family eating dinner around a low table. Young parents with their parents and their daughter, who wakes up in the night to go to the bathroom and thinks she sees something – what though? – peering around a door. … Read more
Sweet Smell of Success
Sweet Smell of Success flopped at the box office on its debut in 1957, much as its producer, Burt Lancaster, feared it might. A dirty-underbelly-of-showbiz tale, like Sunset Blvd. and In a Lonely Place, it’s been redeemed by posterity, which often marks it as one of the finest noirs ever made, even though it doesn’t tick all the genre boxes. One reason for the failure was the casting of its star. Not top-billed Lancaster, who put his name at the head of the credits not just out of ego, but also to deflect attention from the real star. Tony Curtis was best known at this point for playing a series of pretty boys … Read more
