Film diary

Having cut his teeth producing Stuart Gordon’s celebrated H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, Brian Yuzna aims for the same audience with Society, his directorial debut. Its turbo-charged sex drive and comic body horror will be familiar to fans of Re-Animator and From Beyond, but unlike his work with Gordon, with Society Yuzna appears to have giddily assembled a special effects crew before he even hired screenwriters.

The plot, such as it is, follows a high school basketball… See more →

On the surface, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò seems like it requires some unpacking, at least for those of us without graduate degrees. Relocating the Marquis de Sade’s depraved novel The 120 Days of Sodom to Mussolini’s northern Italy in 1943, it name-drops Nietzsche, Proust, Ezra Pound, and others as it systematically humiliates and tortures a group of eighteen captive adolescents. But Salò’s goal is not opaque intellectualism for its own sake. Its poetic and… See more →

After reading up on Black Sabbath a bit, I wish I had sought out the original Italian version, rather than settling for the sanitized English version released by American International Pictures (which is the one currently available on Netflix in the States). Of the film’s three short stories, one (“The Telephone”) is edited severely enough to completely change its meaning, but thankfully, a discerning eye can still spot traces of its more lurid giallo origins… See more →

There’s not a single original moment in this vengeful ghost story, but the care it puts into presenting its collection of haunted house tropes makes it surprisingly enjoyable. Soaked in atmosphere, The Woman in Black’s familiarity doesn’t prevent it from being frequently chilling.

In The Mist, a few dozen townspeople are trapped in a Maine grocery store enveloped in a thick fog which is inhabited by mysterious, deadly creatures, and order dissolves at roughly the same rate as the hope of rescue. Conceptually, the film’s central interest in humanity as its own biggest enemy is intriguing (á la The Twilight Zone’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), but its expression of that theme is somewhat ham-fisted. Marcia… See more →

In its assessment of how a small town in Alabama came to be a recording destination for discerning musicians and a hotbed of hit singles, Muscle Shoals spends a little too much time indulging New Age mysticism and Native American fables about the region’s supernatural gifts. Thankfully, it spends considerably more time peeling back the layers of Fame Studios founder Rick Hall, whose vision and prodigious talent as a producer is the unquestionable nucleus of… See more →

Slint was a short-lived indie rock band from Louisville, KY whose second and final album, Spiderland, is one of underground music’s most revered recordings. The album’s cryptic, distinctively uneasy aura, coupled with the group’s decision to disband without promoting it or touring, has granted Slint a rare mythic quality. Breadcrumb Trail, a documentary named after Spiderland’s opening track, somehow manages to be an informative and compelling account of the band’s story without really demystifying… See more →

Comic strips were what made me want to be an artist. There’s no straight line to be drawn between them and my graphic design career, but few people have influenced me creatively as much as Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) and Gary Larson (The Far Side) did in my formative years. So I had hoped that Stripped, a documentary about comic strips and the people who make them, would give me a new angle from… See more →

As a fan of the sort of slapstick gore found in movies like Dead Alive and Re-Animator, I had long looked forward to seeing Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. It delivers several gems of cartoon violence, and the over-the-top acting and inept dialogue are frequently funny, but the almost total lack of an actual story makes the scenes between the action too much of a slog.

The Mexican drug war has claimed over 100,000 lives since 2006, and much of the violence has taken place in the city of Juarez, just across the US/Mexico border from El Paso, TX. Narco Cultura examines the conflict chiefly through two sets of eyes: those of Richi Soto, a crime scene investigator who works an endless procession of homicides in Juarez, and those of Edgar Quintero, a Mexican-American in LA who is making a burgeoning… See more →