If middle-America had a healthy turnover of weekend double-features at the local flea-pit, here in Australia a kid was more likely introduced to Alan Rafkin’s 1966 The Ghost and Mr. Chicken as a matinee or early-evening feature on black-and-white weekend ...
Read More »Chasing the Manta Diablo: My Quest for a Copy of ‘The Black Pearl’
I’m no stranger to the world of animatronic creatures. I’ve been watching, collecting, and researching nature-runs-amok films and anything inspired by Spielberg’s classic, Jaws (1975), since the late 1990s. If it features something that crawls, swims, or flies, chances are ...
Read More »Sequels from Hell: Jaws: The Revenge (1987) or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept the Fact that Self-Drying Shirts Exist
It goes without saying that sequels are almost never on par with their source material. Continuity isn’t always maintained, actors get replaced, and more often than not they exist to capitalize on the success of the original. If history has ...
Read More »The Cannon Canon: Revisiting ‘Over the Top’ (1987)
Its premise alone is generally enough to evoke laughter and/or derision: A truck driver seeks the funds necessary to secure custody of his young son, and ultimately does so through the winnings earned by arm wrestling. For the chosen few, ...
Read More »Legacies of Sade: The Ages of Lulu (1990) and Juliette’s Spanish Daughters
“I like the idea of putting my life in your hands.” —The Marquis de Sade, Juliette This is the first essay in a new Diabolique column that will concern all things related to the Marquis de Sade: French writer, philosopher, ...
Read More »“Faith Against Faith:” Superstition and Rural Folklore in Salem’s Lot (1979)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula contains many underriding themes, but one of the most obvious, certainly one of the most talked about, is the heavy element of xenophobia that the author injected into the text. Dracula is, after all, about a foreign ...
Read More »‘The Devil’s Well’ (2017) [Film Review]
The Devil’s Well is yet another entry in the paranormal investigator found footage canon. This time we follow husband and wife team Bryan (Bryan Manley Davis) and Karla Marks (Anne-Marie Mueschke) as they head to the town of Woodsfield, Connecticut ...
Read More »A Woman’s Torment: The Films of Roberta Findlay
Pioneering exploitation filmmaker Roberta Findlay was prolific in the male dominated pornographic and horror Grindhouse genres of the 1970s, commanding the shifting roles of cinematographer, actor, director, writer, and distributor on over forty sexploitation and horror films. The anarchic blend ...
Read More »Many (Haunting) Returns to Eel Marsh House: The Persistence of The Woman in Black
If you go to Crythin Gifford on the north east coast of England, walk through the marshes, (never mind the fog and unfriendly silence), you will reach Eel Marsh House; an old gothic mansion standing alone and abandoned. Its last ...
Read More »‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ (1968) 50th Anniversary [Blu-ray Review]
Norman Jewison followed up his 1967 hit, In the Heat of the Night, with the lush, romantic, crime drama The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), starring Steve McQueen (The Getaway, Bullitt, Junior Bonner) and Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Barfly). McQueen plays ...
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