Tag Archive

Dream Lover: Uncut

By Adam Lippe

Trends are rarely more than coincidences. Sure, there are always going to be imitators of success, such as Madonna making Body of Evidence to capitalize on the trend of the erotic thriller genre that goes back to Basic Instinct a year earlier (though the genre existed before, it just didn’t have a name). But realize […]

Rad

By Adam Lippe

If Reckless, the Romeo and Juliet-style vehicle for Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah contains the most overtly sexual high school dance sequence in all 1980s teen films (with the pair ogling each other to the sound of Romeo Void’s Never Say Never featuring the all too subtle lyric, “I Might Like You Better if We […]

The Brain

By Adam Lippe

In the history of fantastic bad ideas, none may seem as foolhardy as the fact that Ed Hunt, the director of the schlocky Canadian horror film The Brain, originally intended for the titular character, an alien from outer space encased in gelatinous goo who wants to use TV to brainwash the human race, the ability […]

Barbarosa

By Adam Lippe

There’s a very valid reason for Mel Brooks not being particularly visible to the press during the production of two classics of the 1980s. His production company, Brooksfilms, was responsible for both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, but Brooks went uncredited as an executive producer. If you knew that Brooks […]

District 9 Review and Podcast

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a review of Neill Bloomkamp’s Action-Sci-fi hybrid, District 9. I’m also including a podcast about the film which I conducted with the official mascot for Hamburger Helper, Helping Hand. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…) The downside of […]

Moon

By Adam Lippe

A sterile home is just plain creepy. It suggests something unlived in, frozen in time, free from human connection. David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners) knows this, which is why he’s always setting sections of his movies in hospitals, the most antiseptic place possible. The body that had previously inhabited the room is gone. […]

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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.