Tag Archives: Fantasy

Conan the Barbarian lit the fuse for an explosion of cheaply-made, scummy knock-offs that found their way into fleapits and (mostly) video rental stores for the next half-decade.

In the latter half of the 1970s, a revolution took place in the Hong Kong film industry. At its anarchic forefront was a shaggy-haired visionary named Tsui Hark.

When I first saw Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come (1998), I was living in California and my mother and I went to a matinee showing. Robin Williams was still alive and although he won the Academy Award for Good ...

Allegory, symbolism, fantasy, and surrealism are often the refuge of artists working under the oppressive thumb of authoritarian regimes. Usually, it works, thanks to the average censor being unable to process art on any but the most literal of levels. ...

Despite finding itself under the thumb of Stalin’s Soviet Union after World War II, grey and miserable Communism never quite took in what was then Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Party or the secret police demanded. There was (and still ...

The Last Unicorn (1982) is a strange, melancholic and deeply unsettling film. Despite its often-vivid colour palate, bold lines and frames busy with marvellous detail, it is at its heart a story of loss and disillusionment. Based on a 1968 ...

Made for TV horror movies from the seventies have an undeniably distinct charm. I mean who can forget the sleek sinister tension that builds from story to story in the wonderful Karen Black vehicle TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975), or the ...

Talk about a bad month for old and new god relations. Besides American Gods premiering soon on Starz, a collected volume of Groo: Fray of the Gods comes out this week from Dark Horse, and Groo’s reach is extending to ...

The late ‘50s saw the first major boom of Italian genre cinema with the emergence of Italian Gothic horror — films about witches, vampires, and ghosts, set in cobweb-choked castles — but these titles by directors like Mario Bava, Riccardo ...

Generally remembered for his contributions to cinematic science fiction, crime, and horror, as well as film noir, with films like Metropolis (1927), M (1931), Ministry of Fear (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and more, director Fritz Lang’s early silent film titles ...