Thriller

Dirty Weekend (1993)

By Adam Lippe

When you’ve made silly movies all your life and you suddenly want to be taken seriously, where do you go? Director Russ Meyer (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen!, Cherry, Harry, and Raquel) made quickly edited, campy movies filled with irony, with the stories often about women with large breasts using their sexuality to the best […]

The Adjustment Bureau/Unknown/The Eagle

By Adam Lippe

In 2004, there was a surprisingly competent thriller released to theaters. Unfortunately it had a title that was not all that memorable, The Forgotten, and it was amidst a glut of “my child is missing” films, one of which also starred Julianne Moore, Freedomland. It had a premise that sounded familiar, Moore remembers her child, […]

Drive Angry/Faster/My Soul to Take/I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When will disreputable nihilism become boring? Hopefully never. But there comes a point where self-satisfied nastiness taken to an extreme needs a little bit of flavor to distinguish itself. Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry tries to spice things up with its effective use of 3D and by cobbling together as many exploitation clichés as possible: the […]

A podcast with Rolf De Heer, director of Bad Boy Bubby, The Tracker, and The Quiet Room

By Adam Lippe

Here’s a podcast with Australian director Rolf De Heer. It was originally recorded in August of 2008 and there was even an unedited and intro-free version on the site before. I’ve cleaned it up significantly, trimming 20 minutes and tightening it up to the point where it flows considerably better than it did before. Now […]

The Mechanic (2011)

By Adam Lippe

Oh straight-faced stupidity, how I adore thee! While you’ve recently taken a hit with the advent of ironic violence and such confused projects as The Green Hornet which can’t decide if it means business or is only kidding (how about a 9 minute fight between our heroes that’s preoccupied primarily with property destruction), I sense […]

Unstoppable

By Adam Lippe

If you tend to dislike a filmmaker’s work, if he puts less effort into doing those things that annoy you, either because he can’t afford to or is unable to, does that mean you’ve learned to enjoy his films, or just that you’ve convinced yourself that he’s suddenly tolerable? With Tony Scott, who made Top […]

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.