News and Opinions

Greatness can be aspired to. Its achievement can be the driving goal behind a film. But its realization comes down so often to the kinds of intangibles that frustrate efforts to control or create. And this applies to greatness whether the work is good or not. That’s right, today, we’re musing about greatness in the negative (but therefore curiously positive sense): the films that are so bad they’re great.

I don’t think anything more clearly illustrates the difficulty in reaching this special kind of greatne…
Read More

William Peter Blatty might seem a slightly odd candidate for discussion in this space. After all, he wrote and produced The Exorcist, whose enormous mainstream success makes it rather suspect as a cult film. Ditto for another of Blatty’s screenplays: A Shot in the Dark, which is arguably the best of the Pink Panther movies. But as a director, ah, there we start getting closer to cult status. He has made two films. The Exorcist III (1990) is his best-known effort, and is debatably a cult movie. Ve…
Read More

The serial is an extinct form of movie-going experience. Right up to the fifties, your movie ticket got you not only the main feature, a B-feature, cartoons, a newsreel and other shorts, but an episode of a serial. Usually running 12 or 15 chapters, the serial would unspool in 15-20-minute units, each ending in a cliffhanger (often quite literally so, with the hero or heroine plunging off a cliff in a runaway car, for instance). George Lucas pays tribute to the serials in his Star Wars films, which begin with …
Read More

Well, it’s that festive time of the year, and what could be more appropriate than the remake of Black Christmas hitting the theatres on December 25? Now, I haven’t seen this film, of course, but the advance word is not encouraging. Head on over to www.dreadcentral.com and you’ll see that it seems that directors Glen Morgan and James Wong know how to do comedic horror (Final Destination), but have no idea how to play things straight. Sounds like we have another fine mess on our hands. But the remake has …
Read More

Old fogey time. When I first encountered Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K, don’t you know), it was an authentically viral phenomenon. This would have been circa 1993. It was still on the Comedy Network, a station that very few of us in the Great White North had access to. But the closing credits ordered, “Keep Circulating Those Tapes,” and people did. Often, this meant viewing the episodes in multi-duped EP versions so muzzy the dialogue was barely audible, but enough was discernible to know that we were w…
Read More

I’ve danced around the subject a few times already, but I haven’t directly dealt with Edward D. Wood Jr. in this column yet. Frankly, to do so seems rather superfluous. If you’re reading these words, you are in all likelihood intimately familiar with the great man’s work. So I’m not going to do any kind of survey or intro here. Instead, this is something of a plea.

Cult film fans have long been used to having to view their faves under conditions that are often less than ideal. Ten or fifteen years ago, befo…
Read More

A few weeks ago, I profiled Cult Epics, which has become the reigning king when it comes to DVD companies specializing in vintage sexploitation, erotica, and the like. That position is likely to remain pretty secure for some time, what with the release of such treasures as The Irving Klaw Classics box set, but there are a couple of recent contenders for the throne that have just come to my attention, so I thought I’d say a few words about them. These are Private Screening Collection and Severin Films.

< ...
Read More

If the exploitation film is the dark underbelly of mainstream cinema, then the rape revenge movie is the dark underbelly (or one of those dark underbellies) of the exploitation film. It is a form that has more exemplars than many would like to think, and has extended its tendrils into the mainstream, whether that be in the form of made-for-TV movies or theatrical ones. Carol Clover, in her excellent study Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film sees a direct link between the most notorious o…
Read More

The Quatermass series I wrote about last week were based, as I said, on television mini-series written by Nigel Kneale. They were not the only Kneale adaptations, nor were they the only SF films from that period to turn to television for source material. A six-part series aired in 1956 under the title of “The Trollenberg Terror.” This was written by Peter Key, doing his best to be Nigel Kneale. A film version duly followed in 1958, retaining the original title in Great Britain, but seeing light in the States under th…
Read More