I freely admit that I didn’t quite enjoy “Birdboy” when it was titled “Psychonauts, The Forgotten Children” back in 2016 for the Fantasia Film Festival. While typically I’m a big fan of animation of most kinds, “Birdboy” failed to click with me. I just could not find any real reason to recommend it when I’d finished it, and struggled to even finish it, when all was said and done.
Tag Archives: Crime
Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (Lycanthropus) (1961) [Blu-ray/CD]
There’s a ghoul in school! And “Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory” is one of the weirdest and darkest werewolf movies I’ve ever seen. It’s tough to believe a movie from the early sixties is filled with such dread, violence, and sexual implications that becomes the backdrop for the narrative. Despite being a werewolf movie, Paolo Heusch’s movie carries with it a lot of giallo vibes, focusing on a mostly obscured villain that stalks and strangles their victims. Although there is the stalk and chase of the sub-genre, Heusch relies on a whodunit mystery that feels much in the vein of Argento.
TNT’s “Snowpiercer” is An Ambitious, But Problematic Adaptation
TNT undergoes a massive task with “Snowpiercer.” After coming to the big screen as a massively underrated and underseen 2013 science fiction masterpiece from Bong Joon Ho, their next phase is taking the graphic novels by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, and transforming it in to a weekly series that puts us on board the Snowpiercer once again. This series’ newest aim is to take us so much deeper in to the lore and world of Snowpiercer, as while the central setting is a train, it’s a massive train that houses its own ecosystems, as well as its own turmoil that threatens the entirety of the haul including the bubble that many passengers have built for themselves.
Blood & Flesh – The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (2019) [Blu-Ray]
Severin Films has done an amazing job showing movie fans and collectors the generally colorful and interesting body of cinematic work that Al Adamson left behind. While he’s more generally known for his unfortunately terrible murder, Adamson was also, by all accounts, a very nice man who was creative, innovative and had a genuine love for filmmaking and the people he worked with. “Blood & Flesh” successfully takes us inside the life of the man who had a sincere love for entertaining people, and then digs in to how sometimes our good hearts can put us in the company of the wrong people.
Very Bad Things (1998) [Blu-Ray]
Director Peter Berg is a man of varying flavors of cinematic outputs. He’s been a working man’s director more than an artist, but some of his work has been very good, while his other films have been complete dreck. Falling squarely in the “dreck” peg, there’s one of his earlier efforts, 1998’s “Very Bad Things.” It’s pitch black confused mess that takes us through a spiraling vortex of violence, as a group of emasculated men struggle to maintain their lives after a bad night involving a prostitute, a bachelor party, and disturbing murder. Continue reading
Arkansas (2020)
Two men who became friends out of need end up dealing drugs for the mysterious Frog while under the cover of being apprentice-rangers. Soon things take a turn that leads then down a dark path.
Klute (1971): Criterion Collection [Blu-Ray]
When you get down to it, you can examine “Klute” as something of a neo-noir set in the darkness of New York City where society shifted out of the Free Love era and in to much dimmer years. But deep down “Klute” manages to be a rather fantastic character study about a woman who is hopelessly and probably forever exploited by the world. Throughout “Klute” she struggles with whether she wants to have what she perceives as an easy ride and allow herself to become exploited, or resist, and try to carve out a better world for her that’s more respectable, but so much tougher than she’s prepared to handle.