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Cruising

By Adam Lippe

Cruising is the ultimate should-have-been movie. Director William Friedkin, free from the ego involved in making The Exorcist, where he took a trashy book and pretended it wasn’t (notice how he now spends a lot of his time claiming it isn’t a horror movie), and then rubbed your nose in the trashy elements he left […]

The Many Face(s) of Liv Tyler

By Adam Lippe

There is no reason, ever, to cast Liv Tyler as a scientist. Less convincing than even Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough or Tara Reid as a genius anthropologist in Alone in the Dark, Liv Tyler is better suited to play a beleaguered girlfriend, trapped in a house while […]

Wrong Turn

By Adam Lippe

Routine slasher movie with a bunch pf parts taken from Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, and any other crazed hillbillies with puzzlingly extensive Stan Winston makeup on. Boring for the first 45 minutes, but then there’s an excellent scene that takes place in a tree, that more suspenseful than anything that follows it. It also […]

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 […]

Critical opinion in the horror genre

By Adam Lippe

What you’ll find from genre fans is forgiveness for the limitations and sloppiness of most horror movies, and no acknowledgment of the glass ceiling in slasher movies. Which would you prefer? Someone who tries to take the genre seriously and criticizes a movie for its shortcomings and doesn’t lend a curve to horror movies? Or […]

The award movies you’ll miss and the lowbrow fun you should have instead

By Adam Lippe

It appears that Vagina Dentata is all the rage. With 2007’s Teeth, and the recent Parasite Killer Pussy (not porn, but an incredible simulation!), as well as Penetration Angst, male paranoia mixed with misogyny is making a very welcome comeback. Tokyo Gore Police, from the same team that brought us last year’s whirlwind of wonderfully […]

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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.