Horror

Willard

By Adam Lippe

The biggest mistake made in 2003’s Willard was not in remaking a mediocre movie that’s mostly remembered for the sequel’s use of a Michael Jackson love song for a rat, but because they went with a PG-13. The tone is R rated, the violence seems overly toned down (and indeed was), the language is awkwardly […]

Visitor Q

By Adam Lippe

The difference between the Farrelly brothers movies and Visitor Q is the difference between the necessity involved in slapstick gross out humor and darker black humor. Gross out humor requires that the characters have no self awareness of their situation, if they know exactly what’s going on, if Ben Stiller knew he had cum on […]

The Toolbox Murders (Tobe Hooper remake)

By Adam Lippe

If there was ever a bit of trivia hanging over a movie: “2/3 of the way through filming, the production ran out of money. The movie was put together from what footage was already filmed, resulting in 1/3 of the script never being made.” Watching The Toolbox Murders, this issue is pretty evident throughout, whole […]

The Exorcist

By Adam Lippe

Most people are brainwashed into thinking The Exorcist is scary and makes you think, when I find it (along with a majority of my friends) to be a pretentious bore that takes itself way too seriously, and to interrupt the boredom, there is an occasional shock cut of something “disturbing,” although I would describe them […]

Saw

By Adam Lippe

Lions Gate is choosing to release Saw with an R rating, though what they cut for it to initially receive an NC-17, I couldn’t tell you. It’s more gruesome in tone than anything else, in the same way that Seven doesn’t actually have much onscreen violence. But Saw is abysmal and gets worse the more […]

In My Skin

By Adam Lippe

One of the few times I’ve had to cringe while watching a movie, and not because it was so terrible, was while watching the DVD of In My Skin. Ostensibly about a woman who becomes so fascinated with a very nasty accidental wound on her leg that she can hardly think about anything else, her […]

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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.