LAWYER, GUNS, AND MONEY

The primary characteristic of Cormac McCarthy's novels, it has seemed to me, is terseness. His plots and scenes come along bluntly and quickly, like a swift punch to the windpipe, his characters speak barely at all, and frequently only state absolutely essential facts when they do. So why, oh why, is The Counselor, McCarthy's first original screenplay at the pixieish age of 80, so bogged down with scenes packed with characters who Don't. Shut. The...

Read More

TIM AT TFE: HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

This week's column: Three movies that suggest the spirit of "Halloween" to me the most. But not those with "Halloween" in the title, because there is such a thing as trying to be at least a little clev...

Read More

MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: MICHELE SOAVI GOES TO CHURCH

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes MoviesMichele Soavi only made four horror films in a career that wasn't very long (he took many years off to care for his unwell son), which surely explains why his profile isn't higher. There's no good argument, certainly not one based on those of his films which I have seen (which does not include the third, The Sect from 1991), why he shouldn't be spoken of with every bit of the enthusiasm...

Read More

COCKY OLD MAN

Old man boners. Did you laugh? Because if you didn't laugh, I can't think of any reason at all to bother with Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a film for which "old man boners" is very largely the only joke it has up its sleeve. "Old man projectile shits", as well, but that's for just one scene, and like everything else in the movie, it disposes of that joke so quickly that it seems evident the filmmakers were ashamed of it.Now, perhaps you did laugh...

Read More

MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: LUCIO FULCI IS ALL SKIN AND BONES

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes MoviesThere's an argument to be made that Lucio Fulci had the most varied career of any director in history. Certainly, among those filmmakers chiefly known for their contributions to the Italian genre machine, I can think of no-one who directed films in such wildly different styles and registers: sex comedies, Westerns, political satires, gory horror films, and more than a little bit of...

Read More

NOVEMBER 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

No matter what else happens, 2013's Prestigious Drama Season has already paid its dues, to a degree that is virtually unprecedented in recent years. The biggest question is whether anything for the rest of the year will be able to top the 1-2-3 punch of Gravity, Captain Phillips, and 12 Years a Slave, a trio hitting that rarest sweet spot of being terrific cinema that's also mainstream enough to win consensus approval. I rather doubt it; it's a treat to get just one movie in the heat of Oscar season that turns out that well, three is flat-out astonishing,...

Read More

MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: RICCARDO FREDA'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes MoviesThe phrase that I have chosen, "Masters of Italian horror", doesn't entirely describe the work of Riccardo Freda, surely not a name spoken of in the same breath as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci. But his historical importance is such that he's worthy of elevation to the status of, if not Master, then at least Father. Freda, you see, was the director of the first Italian...

Read More

LET'S HAVE A BIG HAND FOR THE MUMMY

How would you suppose that a film titled Blood from the Mummy's Tomb would begin? Would you guess that it would be with resolutely generic sans-serif titles over a starfield, all space movie-like? If so, congratulations on your insight, and also, what the hell, because I, for one, was so thrown by the opening title that I fast-forwarded a bit to make sure the suspiciously generic DVD I got from Netflix wasn't just some lousy bootleg thing. But no,...

Read More

MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: MARIO BAVA, BEHIND THE MASK

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes MoviesI don't imagine that Black Sunday - to give the film its standard English title, though strictly speaking that name only appears on the version released by American International Pictures in the 1960s, now thoroughly superseded - needs any help from me in getting the word out, but as I have elected to spend some time investigating key works by the biggest names in Italian horror, it...

Read More

BEYOND THE VEIL OF MUMMY

The Mummy's Shroud, Hammer Films' 1967 entry into their continuity-free mummy franchise, is typically regarded as pretty damn bad - or at least, pretty damn run-of-the-mill and boring, which is surely worse. I can't help but feel like that's a pretty unfair way of looking at it; if we want to compare to Hammer's earlier The Mummy, then no, it's patently inferior, but there are between 0 and 1 mummy films in all history better than Hammer's The Mummy....

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE BIG G GETS YANKED AROUND

I do not know, and I doubt anyone could say for certain, when the first movie was recut for foreign distribution. Certainly, it is not a remotely new practice. The last twenty-odd years of Harvey Weinstein holding court and chopping movies apart frequently for no more apparent reason than to make sure everyone was talking about him have resulted in a lot of attention paid to this somewhat dubious practice, but the single best-known re-edit of a film...

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - BAPTISED IN THE FIRE OF THE H-BOMB

There are many ways to begin speaking about 1954's Godzilla, the film that introduced one of the most iconic figures ever put to celluloid, but I shall chose to start the same way that the movie does: over black, with the sound of crashing noise and something that sounds like the scream of an elephant raping a lion. As the titles appear, this repetitious cacophony is replaced by a throbbing bass line, that ushers in the sawing, martial strings of...

Read More