Janet Fitness. Gloria Hole. Audrey Heartburn. Rosebud Cianci. Perhaps you don’t recognize these names yet, but in time you will. Drag culture is packed with over-the-top performances that are just as recognizable in punny names than the appearance of the ...
Read More »Of Tentacles and Teorema: Fatal Eroticism in The Untamed [2016]
Amat Escalante’s recent film The Untamed (La región salvaje, 2016) is a harrowing and beautiful work about fear, revulsion, and sexuality. A number of characters deal with interpersonal problems revolving around a meteorite that hit earth and a dangerous, tentacled ...
Read More »Smooth Kriminal: The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle [1963]
The krimi is synonymous with German adaptations of classic British mystery novelist Edgar Wallace, but it is worth noting that his son Bryan Edgar Wallace was also involved in the 1960s film cycle. In the 1930s he wrote a number ...
Read More »Returning to Gialloville
When watching a giallo, the audience member wants one of two things--either to vicariously live through the upper class excess the characters experience on screen, or to see these rich fools die horrible deaths for the base, solipsistic, grotesque lifestyles they lead.
Read More »Smooth Kriminal: Der Hexer aka The Mysterious Magician [1964]
The 1964 film Der Hexer, known in the US as The Mysterious Magician, is slightly different in structure than the usual German Kriminalfilm of the era. Often times these Edgar Wallace story adaptations include a title referencing the antagonist, usually ...
Read More »Smooth Kriminal: The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, Fritz Lang, and The Krimi
So far in Smooth Kriminal, our column dedicated to German krimi films of the 1960s, we have regularly mentioned how the sub-genre relates to the Italian giallo of the following decade. This is true enough, but an observation we don’t ...
Read More »Smooth Kriminal: The Crimson Circle (1960)
The 1960s is a time in German film history that is not often given close attention. After World War Two there was an understandable lull in rate of production and quality, seeing as how the country was slowly recovering with ...
Read More »Artsploitation brings End of Year Christmas Cheer
There is something about Christmas time and the combination of red/green aesthetics with residual, familial tensions that invite viewings of violent chaos and transgressing virtue.
Read More »Tortured Priests and Femmes Fatales: Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009)
It is difficult for filmmakers to come up with new or original vampire stories, seeing as how it had been done and re-done so many times by about the 1960s. All the tropes have been established and adhered to: blood ...
Read More »30 Days of Night: Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
Audiences of the late 1980s seeking a modern, fresh vampire flick had Vampire’s Kiss (1988) to choose from, to which they were either pleasantly surprised or confused and perturbed. This early Nicolas Cage-starring vehicle put out by HBO turns out ...
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