Category: FILM REVIEWS
Canada's Top Ten on DVD (sort of)
Whenever a list of nominated or winning titles in a best-of or industry awards tally is revealed, there’s a curiosity among some (me) as to what’s currently out or will be out on DVD…
Dark Sunday
Today marks two tragic anniversaries in Canada: the collision of a French munitions ship with a Norwegian vessel in 1917 that essentially flattened a whole swathe of the city of Halifax, and killed a thousand, and maimed nine thousand more; and the tenth anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, where nutbar Marc Lepine set out to kill women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique because he blamed women for all of his woes…
(First) Horror Efforts
Although Robbie Bryan had written and starred in The Stand-In (1999), iMurders marks his feature directorial debut, as well as his first effort in the horror – a genre that many filmmakers use to make a commercial mark as well as learn the ropes of feature filmmaking before moving on to more personal or riskier projects…
Arrabal, Jodorowsky, Makavejev… and Brass?
Before his decadent switch to sexploitation and erotica, Tinto Brass made a pair of films wherein he experimented with sophisticated editing concepts (visually and aurally) to create narratives from loosely drawn concepts, as well as inject some commentary on the political and social turmoil of the times…
Killer Kiddies
As it happens, over the past two weeks a quartet of killer kiddie films came out on DVD, some possessing variable levels of good, weak, or downright awful qualities…
Berlin's Cold War Heat
Back in September, I posted reviews of Robert Siodmak’s Escape from East Berlin (1962) and the documentary/travel video Mauerflug (‘flight over the Berlin Wall’) as the first in a series tied to the giant reverse-chastity belt that was designed to prevent East Germans from penetrating the west.
Here in Part Two…
The Spectre of Royalty
Hey! What about me? With 2009 marking the 20th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution that ousted the Shah and replaced the monarchy with a theocratic regime, it’s fitting Mongrel Media released Queen and I, The / Drottningen och jag this month, Nahid Persson Sarvestani’s 2008 documentary on Empress Farah, Iran’s exiled Queen, now living in Paris, […]
Flowing Through Nostalgic Horror
I’ve been sick with a wretched head cold for the past few days, hence the delay, but the time in bed (and dizzy spells) allowed me to gather a handful of films for this update which collectively illustrate the levels of originality, imitation, and nostalgia in contemporary horror. That’s a big statement, but it can be distilled into something very simple, if not streamlined.
Why screenwriters should always ask "Why?"
One of the toughest nuts for screenwriters and directors to crack is making a story set in a post-apocalyptic world work. It sounds relatively easy: you start the tale when the landscape is eerily peaceful, and a handful of normal human survivors have decided to wander out into the open because they’re bored, some need companionship, a few have run out of food, or have acclimatized themselves to running around with a shotgun and extra ammo with a new daily goal of some sort.
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