SUMMER OF BLOOD: MEN WHO HATE WOMEN

You tell me how I was supposed to pass this one up: 1982's Visiting Hours is one of just two wholly Canadian-made films to make the British Department of Public Prosecution's legendary Video Nasties list,* and the only one of those starring Canada's favorite son, William Shatner. It's catnip to the right kind of viewer, which makes it all the more disappointing that Visiting Hours isn't terribly exciting as a Nasty or a Shatner vehicle. It's not...

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DISNEY SEQUELS: A TINKER'S DAMN

When John Lasseter was appointed Chief Creative Officer for all animated productions released by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he inherited a pair of movies that were reasonably far along in their development that he found to be so completely unacceptable in all ways that he could enumerate, he demanded they be essentially scrapped and rebuilt from the start, both of them still managing to come out by their targeted release dates in 2008. One...

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TONY SCOTT: BEVERLY HILLS COP II (1987)

NB: At this point in this retrospective, I should be turning to the 1986 film Top Gun, but I have already reviewed it, and have nothing substantial to add to what I said at that time.The 1980s were a sequel-mad decade nearly on par with the present day, so it is no surprise at all that the action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop, the highest-grossing film of 1984 (for there were also some ways in which the '80s were very different) should end up with a sequel....

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ZOMBIES OF THE WORLD UNITE

The first thing to admit is that World War Z is better than I assumed it would have any reason to be, if only because the very phrase "PG-13 zombie movie" is enough to make any True Genre Fan start dry-heaving. On the other hand, World War Z also fails to be as good as it easily could have been, given that it's basically a hybrid of 28 Days Later and Contagion, and all it should have taken was to slavishly replicate the things that those movies did...

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TIM AT TFE: THE DESIRING-IMAGE

This week's essay: I interview occasional contributor to The Film Experience and Friend of Antagony & Ecstasy Nick Davis, on the event of the the publication of his first book, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cine...

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FOR WHICH OF MY BAD PARTS DIDST THOU FIRST FALL IN LOVE WITH ME?

It's an open question whether Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing really deserves to exist at all. Made during post-production on the writer-director's mammoth effects extravaganza The Avengers, and specifically intended to clear his head and wash the taste of green screens and Disney/Marvel's omnipresence out of his mouth, the film is populated with a host of actors from his various TV projects, all goofing around in Whedon's huge (and honestly,...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHO LET THE TROGS OUT

The operating theory behind this year's Summer of Blood is there's a certain something that Canadian horror films have that their southerly neighbors just can't match: that pound for pound, the idiotic, disposable junk made by Canucks is just better than the idiotic, disposable junk made by Yanks - more mature, more psychologically astute. Every broad assumption has its debilitating holes, though and we've come to the first one: The Pit, a Canadian...

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