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Case 39

By Adam Lippe

In baseball terminology, the shift refers to when a left-handed power hitter who tends to pull the ball (in other words, hits the ball to right field, the shift is almost never used against right-handed batters) comes to the plate (such as Ryan Howard, David Ortiz, Adam Dunn, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, etc.) the infielders […]

Forgotten Silver

By Adam Lippe

Forgotten Silver is an extraordinary and sadly unappreciated document that reveals the career of the great unheralded New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie. Co-directors Costa Botes and Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings and Heavenly Creatures fame, give us as yet untold history in their discovery of McKenzie, the creator of the first feature length […]

Necronomicon: Book of the Dead

By Adam Lippe

A Lovecraft anthology bookended by Jeffrey Combs playing Lovecraft himself penning 3 different “horror” tales. The first, directed by Christoph Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) is boring and confused, the second is fun, in a silly, gory, goopy, totally gratuitous nudity way, and has a telegraphed Twilight Zone ending, and the third is basically nonsensical […]

Beyond Re-Animator

By Adam Lippe

Very disappointing. The charm of the first two films is in the humor and the amusingly low budget effects that “interact” with the cast. There is one creature in the opening sequence of Beyond Re-Animator, a rather uninspired one at that, and nothing else for about 75 more minutes after having to suffer through a […]

Bubba Ho-Tep

By Adam Lippe

  Sometimes you go into a movie really wanting to like it and hoping and praying that it lives up to the hype. It’s really hard not to like Bruce Campbell and you root for the movie to build into a grand horror-comedy masterpiece. The humongous 3-D lettering of the title card implies something that […]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

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.