SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 11 POLL: SLASHER-ADJACENT FILMS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: THE HITCHERThanks to everyone who voted!Film producers, a cunning and savvy lot, are never prone to ignore a bandwagon to jump on if there's money to be made in it. This is, of course, the reason for the massive glut of slasher movies released between 1980 and 1984 (they were cheap and had enough of a steady fanbase that it was hard to lose money on them) but the impulse spread beyond the limits of the genre at its purest. Slasher-like storytelling and slasher tropes became depressingly prominent in all horror subgenres...

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THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS

To begin with, Lucy is dumb as all hell. It's quite impossible to lose sight of that fact. It's easily the dumbest movie of the summer of 2014, and there was a Transformers picture and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the running for that title, so y'know, it's not a little achievement.If Lucy is somehow still more palatable than those are - and I think it is, but I haven't the slightest inclination towards changing the minds of anyone who thinks otherwise,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1963: In which so much money is spent

Having arrived in 1963, our Hollywood Century project now completes its first half. And it pleases me greatly that such a milestone should be commemorated with one of the quintessential Hollywood films of all time - maybe the single best example of the grand, epic, stupid indulgence that only Hollywood filmmakers could ever fully enjoy. A legendary sinkhole of money (there's never been a completely reliable figure offered up, but it's still among...

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AUGUST 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

I think it's official, at this point: this has been a pretty solid (in some ways very surprisingly so) summer movie season. I don't believe I've ever said that in all my years of blogging. So hurrah for all the good films that have been, and let's hope that we can add one or two titles to that pile before fall comes and brings with it all the burn-off movies of September.1.8.2014The implacable march of Marvel Studios to dominate all popcorn cinema continues with Guardians of the Galaxy, which achieved something that not a single Marvel picture...

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EPPURGE SI MUOVE

And now for Fun with Cognitive Dissonance: it is possible for a sequel to to be a lot better than its predecessor, and still end up mostly a huge pile of shit. I give you The Purge: Anarchy, which takes the concept laid out in last year's The Purge - every March 21, the government of the United States permits any and all crime for twelve hours overnight, without any fear of punishment - and manages to do something considerably more interesting with...

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BEST SHOT: CRIES & WHISPERS

It's 1973 month at the Film Experience, so for this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel has assigned us that year's winner of the Best Cinematography Oscar: the Swedish chamber drama Cries and Whispers, a massively powerful film that's also just about the most depressing thing in the career of director Ingmar Bergman. Who might well be the most depressing major filmmaker in history, so "the most depressing Bergman film" isn't...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1962: In which an appreciation for film history shades into outright grotesquerie

There has never been a time anywhere in the history of commercial cinema that was terribly easy on aging women, but for a stretch of the 1960s it was perhaps slightly easier. For that decade bore witness to the brief flowering of the dubious genre of "hagsploitation" in which famous actresses in their 50s and 60s played psychotic crazy people. It wasn't the most dignified way to wrap up a career, but it was a living, and it's easy to see how it might...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: since the Italian genre film began revving up after the Second World War, filmmakers have been putting Greek hero Heracles into some pretty damn dumb movies anchored by mean noteworthy more for their build than their acting, so at least the newest...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD BONUS: AND ANOTHER THING

1951's The Thing from Another World is one of the weirdest cases that we those of us who generally subscribe to auteur theory will ever have to deal with. It's a Howard Hawks production (Hawks was one of the key names when the Cahiers du cinéma crew began formulating the theory), but not a Howard Hawks film; directorial credit was given to Christian Nyby, an editor who had cut several of Hawks's directorial efforts. But it looks for all the world...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SOME WICKED THING THIS WAY COMES

Considering how much its visceral, rubbery gore effects, electronic score, the niceties of its lighting and film stock, and especially its position in the center of a maelstrom of controversy about these goddamn violence-driven horror pictures with no characterisations beyond "this guy dies then that guy dies" all mark it out as a quintessential product of the early 1980s, it's going to sound like I'm being deliberately contrary when I say that John...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1961: In which things start to get out of hand

The one thing that can never be claimed of the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks is that it's like other movies. Lumbering and bloated, often compelling, always gorgeous, and at times astonishingly bizarre in its attempt to force the psychological impulses of mid-century naturalist theater acting into the framework of a bog-standard Western revenge thriller, I haven't decided whether or not it "works", though I am inclined to say it does. But this is the...

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