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A true guilty pleasure, Who Dares Wins (released in the US as The Final Option, 1982) makes up for its rough edges with attitude, flair, and a well-staged action climax. Lewis Collins (the UK series The Professionals) stars as Captain Skellen, British soldier in the elite Special Air Service (the title refers to the SAS … Continue reading
As with most of animator Ralph Bakshi’s projects (Fritz the Cat, Wizards, Fire and Ice, Cool World), American Pop (1981) is a flawed but fascinating feature that aims for more than it could reach, and is as messy as it is brilliant. The sprawling and too ambitious story traces about seven decades of American pop music via … Continue reading
Consider it an unabashedly guilty pleasure: Cabin Fever (2002) is a tongue-in-cheek, low-budget indie horror comedy with a wicked sense of humor that was sorely missing from the brainless horror schlock of the early 2000s. While those movies were content to rehash the same slasher tropes ad nauseum with little irony, writer-director Eli Roth made his feature … Continue reading
Josie and the Pussycats hit the big screen with a thud in 2001 and quickly sank without a trace. This wasn’t a surprise, since those involved made the courageous — and ultimately questionable — decision to make a movie that mocked the very people most likely to see it, specifically shallow and easily programmed teenyboppers. Still, … Continue reading
Something best described as the misbegotten offspring of John Waters and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and best watched in an altered state of mind, writer-director Richard Elfman’s 1982 slice of bizarro cinema is masterpiece of, uh, well, something. Equal parts artsy and vulgar, it functions remarkably well along the lines of cartoon logic applied … Continue reading
Alex Proyas followed-up his directorial debut of The Crow with this , inventive, and unabashedly stylish work of sci-fi noir. While The Crow demonstrated that Proyas had the makings of a great director, it was overshadowed by the tragic on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee; Dark City (1998) gave the filmmaker a chance to show what … Continue reading
A young boy witnesses the brutal beating of his father and violent death of his mother one horrible night on an isolated street. Flash forward several years later, and the kid is now a 17-year-old obsessed with finding the killer and extracting vengeance. Any semblance writer-director Michael Morrissey’s harrowing drama Boy Wonder (2010) may have to … Continue reading
Before he turned into a serious filmmaker, Peter Jackson honed his chops by churning out some very funny — and very depraved — genre bending B-grade comedies, making a memorable debut with the aptly named sci-fi satire Bad Taste and re-inventing the zombie flick with Dead Alive decades before it was cool to do so. … Continue reading
One of the best movies about the movies ever made, John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust is an unsettling, unconventional blend of satire, gothic melodrama, and straight-up weirdness with a nerve-rattling, lunatic ending. The movie adapts Nathanael West’s 1939 novel about a talented young art director, Tod (William Atherton), who journeys to Hollywood and instantly … Continue reading
Next week will see the 100th anniversary of the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic, the most notorious maritime disaster in history (it even eclipses Season 5 of The Love Boat). It seems appropriately ironic that one costly disaster spawned by unrestrained hubris lead to another, specifically ITC Entertainment’s adaptation of Clive Cussler’s best-selling novel, Raise the … Continue reading
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