Although I first became interested in Liquid Sky when I was a teen in the mid-1980s (thanks Night Flight!), I only got the chance to watch it more recently. Waiting three decades to see Slava Tsukerman’s new wave cult masterpiece ...
Read More »I Find You All Around Me: The Shape of Water (2017)
As its title implies, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is an enigmatic film. It’s not a horror movie, though it has elements of the horrific. There are scenes of intense drama, but there are also bits that are ...
Read More »Fear of the Unknown: The Endless (2017)
It seems impossible to discuss The Endless without referencing Resolution, the first feature from the filmmaking duo of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. That movie is also a big part of what makes The Endless so captivating, a film which ...
Read More »Down a Dark Hall: Lois Duncan’s They Never Came Home (1969)
In this ongoing series, I’ll be looking at the Young Adult genre fiction books that impacted my youth. Lois Duncan’s second Young Adult genre novel, They Never Came Home, was published in 1969. Coming just a couple of years after the ...
Read More »Hear the Crushing Steel: Odonis Odonis, ‘No Pop’
No Pop, the fourth album from Odonis Odonis, is the sound of motion. These are songs of speed and machinery: subways, bullet trains, fast cars, highways, treadmills. Despite the album’s reliance on electronic equipment, one can still catch a whiff ...
Read More »An Infinite Universe of Sound: Xordox, ‘Neospection’
After more than 40 years and dozens of albums, pinning down the sound of a composer like JG Thirlwell seems to grow more difficult instead of easier. Those who have followed his career since the early 1980s may have thought ...
Read More »The Devil’s Candy is Deadly and Delicious
Films which fall into the “heavy metal horror” subgenre frequently tell tales where metal is the portal to hell (Trick or Treat (1986), Black Roses (1988), Deathgasm (2015)). In The Devil’s Candy (2015), however, writer/director Sean Byrne has subverted this narrative, resulting in ...
Read More »From Beginning to End and Back Again: The Ghoul (2017)
The Ghoul, Gareth Tunley’s feature debut, is a superb example of a movie that defines the word “genre.” Part detective story, part psychological thriller, it’s a film which also flirts with folk horror and noir as it tells the story ...
Read More »Marvelous Yet Misunderstood: The Hunting Party (1971)
Film fans who have never seen, much less heard of, The Hunting Party are not alone. The 1971 Western – directed by TV veteran Don Medford and starring Gene Hackman, Oliver Reed, and Candice Bergen – was savaged by critics ...
Read More »Aural Histories- “A Year In The Country: The Restless Field” (album review)
A Year In The Country is an extraordinary multimedia project that incorporates a musical collective, record label, website, and physical artwork. It describes its raison d’etre thusly: “It is a wandering amongst work that takes inspiration from the hidden and ...
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