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In a Glass Cage

By Adam Lippe

How do you keep an audience in a state of shock for an entire film? It’s probably a delicate balance and part of that balance is making sure you don’t push it too far. There are many extreme gore or rape/revenge movies that try so hard to offend and alienate that they just become laughable. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Angel

By Adam Lippe

The 1980’s was a decade that often had conflicting values, which were morally conservative, yet socially irresponsible. Nowhere was this better exemplified than with the way that the Grindhouse exploitation movies of the 70’s became unsubtly repressed in the 80’s, mixing beloved trash with fearful cautionary tales that punished pleasure.

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 […]

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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.