Action/Adventure

A Trifecta of Rape and Revenge: I Spit on Your Grave/Last House on the Left/Thriller: A Cruel Picture

By Adam Lippe

I Spit on Your Grave My first viewing of I Spit on Your Grave was in high school. I felt it was a terrible movie that followed no logic and the endless rape scenes were effective only in that they didn’t shy away from brutality. However, the movie was very poorly made and written, and […]

Full Contact

By Adam Lippe

The combination of the transfer of Hong Kong back into the hands of the Chinese and the Chow Yun-Fat/John Woo films like The Killer and Hard Boiled caused Hollywood to take notice of these foreign directors and actors wanting to cross over and establish themselves in a new venue. Producer Moshe Diamant, who had specialized […]

Crying Freeman

By Adam Lippe

The fact that Brotherhood of the Wolf was such a huge success overseas and has an enormous cult following in the US (and did receive a surprisingly large push from Universal for a foreign film) has renewed interest in Christophe Gans’ first film, the adaptation of the anime/comic book of Crying Freeman. The film never […]

Azumi

By Adam Lippe

Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus was a huge cult hit that secured him a following all over the world. It was a down and dirty zombie-fu movie that mixed Evil Dead II with John Woo and Takashi Miike, and while it had much to amuse and entertain it suffered from the same problems that plague Kitamura’s Azumi. […]

Year of the Dragon

By Adam Lippe

Year of the Dragon, Michael Cimino’s first film after Heaven’s Gate, was probably a dream project, seeing as he got to work with Mickey Rourke, one of the biggest and ballsiest stars of that era, and Oliver Stone (who co-wrote the script), whose sensibilities, especially at the time, were almost identical to Cimino’s. Both heavy […]

Transporter 2

By Adam Lippe

After watching Transporter 2, a movie so non-sensical and ridiculous, that you can’t help but laugh every few minutes as it piles up the absurdities, I couldn’t help but think about what a friend of mine once said about action movies. “80% of it has to be believable; they can have the other 20%. Anything […]

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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.