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Shatner on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, DEVIL'S RAIN
William Shatner, the Hawksian organizer of men in a future without currency, determined player of crisis-bound priests and rock-like teachers, and an Arizona sheriff named 'Dances with Tarantulas.' In...
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BLACK MIRROR: Handle with Care
I'm a big fan of 70s-80s sci fi dystopia films because they show a world of space age outfits, modular furniture, free love, gigantic computers--which is reassuring as none of that happened --maybe...
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Tales of the Retrofuturist Pharmacy Part III: ASCENSION, THE VENTURE BROS.
While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs, a Hollywood comedy about killing a dictator vs. that dictator, whose constructed his own fantasy, and kept his country in such a...
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Samara Morgan presents "Your Virtual is My Real' (or Save us SWEET EXORCIST)
"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world." ---Jean BaudrillardOh those naive French. If...
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Best of 2014 (Movies and TV)
Here's the future I read in the blood spatter from my Herculean hacks at the digital hydra of 2014 film-TV-video: even the most lovable pop culture icons--the ones with whom I spent some considerable...
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10 Great Hangover-Recovery Movies
Damn but you made a mess of things, waking up now in late afternoon, bleary and a mess, to reach with shaking hand for that warm foam-crusted highball on your nightstand, swilling it down before the...
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2014 Year in Debrief (Erich Writing Roundup)
CNN is excitedly reporting on the Paris comic strip massacre today. Pow! Whiz! But 2014 already had examples of how the media secretly thrills when humorless zealots react violently to satire. Evil has...
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10 Reasons DOOMSDAY (2008)
Every blood moon or so comes a movie I seem to be in the minority of calling great. I'm happy to time and again sacrifice time on the altar of their DVDs. And for them, the ten reasons:Â 10 Reasons...
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The Gummo Marx Way: INHERENT VICE (2014)
The sexy girl was languidly gyrating atop our seated hero when the drugs began to take hold. Her every slow deep rhythmic breath sending electric thin twisty second chakra waves through my senses, me...
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Death to Realism!! eXistenZ + Oculus Rift Vs. Marcel Duchamp + Al Jazeera...
With every passing year, Cronenberg's 1999 mindbender eXistenZ grows in its many-tentacled relevance. Back 1999, lest we forget, the internet was still only five or six years old and dot.com bubble...
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Pre-Code Capsules: THE MAD GENIUS, UNION DEPOT, WATERLOO BRIDGE, THREE FACES...
THE MAD GENIUS1931 - Dir Michael Curtiz***1/2TCM finally showed The Mad Genius (1931), a film I've wanted to see for so many years I all but gave up. I'm a huge Svengali fan (here's the proof) and now...
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William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN
Amnesia is always a great topic for the movies, furnishing a built-in self-reflexivity vis-à -vis the movie watching experience itself. We all start any movie an amnesiac (unless it's a sequel or based...
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10 Reasons DREAMCATCHER (2003)
Whenever it gets super snowy and chilly as it has recently I think of DREAMCATCHER, the unreasonably maligned gonzo sci fi disaster-masterpiece from the minds of Stephen King, William 'Adventures in...
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Young Jack in the Post-Poe Po-Mo Hellman Hole: THE TERROR, THE SHOOTING
The legendarily muddled Roger Corman Poe-ish Gothic horror THE TERROR (1963) famously came together spur of the moment when, supposedly, Corman still had two days on Karloff's shooting schedule on THE...
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The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA (1996)
The American holiday trifecta has already passed its first hurtle, Thanksgiving. Now the sluggish traffic and unruly Wal-Mart tazing begins in earnest and a skittish mummified shamanic Pisces like me...
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Growing up ALIEN: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, THE TERROR WITHIN
I was a young kid when ALIEN(1979) came out, too young to see it in theaters and VHS wasn't out yet and we knew it would be edited to death when it finally came to the ABC Movie of the Week, so it was...
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BLACK MIRROR: Handle with Care
I'm a big fan of 70s-80s sci fi dystopia films because they show a world of space age outfits, modular furniture, free love, gigantic computers--which is reassuring as none of that happened --maybe...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Retrofuturist Pharma III: The "Metatextual Cigar" Edition: ASCENSION, VENTURE...
While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs-- a Hollywood stoner comedy about killing a dictator vs. a dictator whose constructed his own fantasy that's stuck in the past-- we have on...
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Rothrock Rules! YES MADAM!, ABOVE THE LAW, MERCENARIES, BLONDE FURY; Carano...
It seems we're living in an age where feminist worries about the detrimental effects of sexual violence in the media really have proven valid. Popular cinema is awash in white slavery, sexual sickos,...
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FURY, WORLD WAR Z and the Tyler Durden Experience (Great 70s Dads: The Brad...
I started writing this post a few months ago during the 2014 Golden Globes, prepared for the usual mawkish acceptance speeches and self-congratulatory montages, but I was shocked instead by how much...
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