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Avenger of Whatever: KILL LIST, QUEEN KONG
I started to write about KILL LIST (2011) and how British cinema's so edgy and America's so lamely safe. But if I think about KILL LIST I start to write about the Illuminati and mind control and then I...
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Shrooms, for Remembrance: Mel Gibson's HAMLET (1990) in Psychedelic Context
The recent discovery of cannabis traces in Shakespeare's old pipes only confirms it: Shakespeare was 'experienced.' It takes weird alchemical magic to write as potently as he did, which means mind...
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Tantrums and Tarantulas: THE EDITOR, DEATH LAID AN EGG, EVE OF DESTRUCTION
Ā In the beginning there was just a simple poster, with a lot of strange fake names like Ally Gunning and Ahab Bricks and an image of a moviola running a reel of segmented human intestine or spine or...
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Ten Reasons THE LEGACY (1978)
In interviews Sam Elliott called the weird 30s old dark house 70s devil movie hybrid "fifteen years behind it's time." Well, as so often happens, 30 years later and we're all the way around again to...
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Butterfly Moanin': DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2015), MOTHLIGHT
DUKE OF BURGUNDY(2015) Dir. Peter Strickland****"The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility." - Georges BataillesĀ "Duke...
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Quaff this kind Nepenthe: THE RAVEN, WEREWOLF OF LONDON
October is here so I may as well confess I recently got the Universal Horror Classics Blu-ray box (avail. for $40 if you know how to look): Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein, The...
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A Carpenter Kind of Hushedness: SOLE SURVIVOR, IT FOLLOWS
I love the ominousness of October, the ever-earlier darkness catching me off guard, as if God was wiping the world away with a black eraser, saving me for last. Hurrying inside like a napping sunbather...
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You'll Never Unsee: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) is Tomorrow's Bugs Bunny
I recently caught the originalĀ TexasĀ after work, 5:30 PM on Showtime. Whoever's idea it was over at Showtime to put on super bizarre past classics of angry Kafka-esque alienation and prolonged terror...
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New Blood In the Old Bottles: GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X, EL MONSTRO DEL MAR,...
Two weird, wild and wooly films that pay homage to the thrilling drive-in fodder of yesteryear have shimmied up my ladder the last few weeks: one finds the middle ground between the 50s juvenile...
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Hauntology for a De-New America!
The rise of the retro-analog synth soundtrack in recent horror and science fiction films--both in and out of the mainstream--has brought us into a weird wondrous future alternate reality where perhaps,...
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Halloween Special Edition: 10 Quintessential List + 13 More on Bright Lights
As a lifelong classic horror fan it gets my arse all in a tether when channels like IFC figure what we need are marathons of crappy HALLOWEEN sequels, or that horror means only three names: Freddy,...
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Takin' it Bond by Bond
November is the second cruelest month, after April: all my autumnal October ghoulish cheer slides off like a Bond villain off a continental shelf during an underwater chase scene. Glug glug. Down he...
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An Acidemic Nic Cage Reader
So many actors mistake genuine wild man edge for just being a dick or bugging their eyes, but ever since he won our hearts by shouting "bring me a knife so I can cut my FROAT" in MOONSTRUCK Nic Cage...
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Midlife Crisis Month: Best of the Beards #1: Kristofferson
Do they still do that thing of growing mustached for prostate cancer awareness in November? My sober anniversary month, November 17th, stained with the rainy teardrops of shaking and quaking and the...
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A Tale of Three M*A*S*Hes
M*A*S*H, for three seasons you were maybe the best thing on TV, ever.We never saw him leave, but at the dawn of season four, the mighty Trapper was gone. And the third and final MASH of the three...
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White Woman Waterloo: WEST OF SHANGHAI, JAMAICA INN, SKYSCRAPER SOULS
It's been my experience that European and South American women are how American women are only on Halloween and New Year's Eve, and if that makes no sense to you, then you've never watched rom-coms or...
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Camille Paglia Defends Charlie's Angels! + Guide to First Three Seasons (Links)
Camille Paglia was writing about Taylor Swift's "obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine" of "exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied in her scathing viral video "Please Welcome...
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Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression vs. American Dogma
According to some wide mean streak in American pop criticism--stretching from bourgeois Academy voters all the way to Ā the soured douchebags of the comments sections--gorgeous sexy young girl artists...
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BEST OF 2015
What a year. Is this the one where time broke? Critics best of are divided and prejudiced by what amongst the zillion new movies out in all media including screen, they can absorb. Whether a movie is...
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Notes from the Class and Alcoholic Struggle in a THIN MAN Marathon
TCM screened the entirety of the alcoholically fluent Thin Man seriesĀ for New Year's Rawkin' Eve 2016. Naturally I hung around for it, glued, as one is, by the ever-deft blend of comedy and mystery,...
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