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Ninja Assassin

By Adam Lippe

The big-budget version of an exploitation movie is fool’s gold. Sure, the filmmaker who could have used some more money to make his action sequences more convincing or get more than one take of any given shot is a worthy cause. But there’s scrappy charm in low-budget films and you forgive the mistakes as part […]

The Men Who Stare At Goats

By Adam Lippe

No matter what you think of Saw as a film, it’s hard to deny that the guys who made it, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, are geniuses. Not that they’re all that talented, as a feature film Saw is derivative, badly acted, and needlessly convoluted. What differentiates Wan and Whannell from standard exploitation filmmakers (torture […]

Whiteout

By Adam Lippe

Do you ever wonder what goes on during meetings about theatrical release dates for movies? Well, I know you don’t, but just whose idea was it to open the violent 3 hour exploitation pastiche/parody Grindhouse on Easter weekend? “We have an opening in April; do we have anything to fill it?” “Which weekend?” “Easter.” “Hmmm. […]

Inglourious Basterds Podcast, with special guest Benji

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a podcast about Quentin Tarantino’s  Inglourious Basterds, which I conducted with the famed star of 30 years worth of films, Benji. You can read a review of the film here. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…)

Inglourious Basterds

By Adam Lippe

The male psyche is such a fragile animal that virtually any questioning of it will result in either an abundance of defensive mechanisms kicking in or a complete melt-down. This is why men need to be right about everything and asking for help on any matter is considered a mortal sin of the ego. That’s […]

The Last House on the Left (2009)

By Adam Lippe

In 2002, there was a fascinatingly stupid idea given the green light, attempting to create a star vehicle for Madonna. Directed by then-husband Guy Ritchie, Swept Away is as bad as you may have heard, but interesting for a few reasons such as the fact that the movie is so impatient and jittery that it […]

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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.