The idea that Roar was even made blows my mind because of the fact that there was a surplus of dangerous animals among the cast and crew while it was being filmed.
Continue reading ‘SXSW Movie Review: Roar (1981)’
I’m a sucker for awkward, low-key relationship dramas. Lamb is one of those films that is easy to fall in love with. It is beautiful, heart-breaking, and just brutally uncomfortable at times.
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I’ve been obsessed with horror films all my life. Early on I had a fascination with 1970s and British horror films. This was mainly because our local video store stocked a lot of the Hammer titles and those caught my eye first before I discovered the nitty gritty SOV horror films from the ’80s.
That is one of the main reasons why I absolutely loved We Are Still Here. It feels like it was pulled right out of 1976 and thrown into our laps with modern gore and special effects. Virtually everything shown in the film uses practical effects and there is minimal CGI. This made it much more enjoyable and gave it that old school feel.
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Dinner party movies are becoming a favorite of mine. I love the premise of a dinner party because most of time we are dealing with a group of friends and usually the characters are relatively close to one another. These past few years I’ve seen films like Would You Rather, The Perfect Host, Coherence, and now, The Invitation. Each time I’m surprised at the routes the films take and how different each film is in its own way.
Continue reading ‘SXSW Movie Review: The Invitation‘
At the beginning of the Deathgasm screening Sam Zimmerman from Shock Till You Drop asked the audience, “Have you ever seen a movie and thought, ‘Yes, that film was made for me’?” I truly feel that the filmmakers of Deathgasm somehow knew that I love and cherish heavy metal horror and decided to bring me their movie. Heavy metal and horror movies are similar in many ways and they work even better when they are blended together.
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Most horror parodies aren’t smart and in recent years they have gotten really tedious and boring. Towards the beginning we had films like Pandemonium, Student Bodies, and Saturday The 14th. Then the craze died down but came back with a huge bang due to the success of Scary Movie. Ever since then we’ve had a few films pop up here and there (Cabin In The Woods, Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, and Scream) and more serious filmmakers even started making these kinds of movies. With the newer flicks, parody was thrown out of the window and they turned into horror comedy throwbacks. The Final Girls will give a new meaning to these kinds of comical throwback flicks.
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The story of Connie Converse is both fascinating and distressingly common. After leaving college and heading to New York City in 1949, she wrote and recorded poetic, wry, revealing songs accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. Despite intervention and best intentions of friends (animator Gene Deitch and colleague Bill Bernal) who worked to get Converse’s music heard by a wider audience, she abandoned everything. She wrote a series of goodbye notes to friends, packed up her Volkswagen, and disappeared in 1974. No one has heard from her since. She would be 90 now.
Continue reading ‘Music Review: Connie Converse, How Sad, How Lovely‘
The earlier Game Theory EPs gave us a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Band. As the band tried on and discarded aesthetic approaches and made basement recordings on less than ideal equipment, a musical persona began to emerge: sunny Californian pop with fillips of experimentation and flashes of intelligence, pitting melancholy lyrics against jangly melodies. On Real Nighttime, the band’s first official LP, Game Theory’s sound comes into sharper focus.
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March 7, 2015
Toronto, ON
If you haven’t heard Montreal’s Gutter Demons, and you have even a passing interest in rockabilly, psychobilly, old skool punk rock, or just damn good music, you must rectify this situation immediately. I had never heard this incredible trio until last week, but at The Rockpile on Saturday night, I got schooled.
Continue reading ‘Concert Review: The Gutter Demons At The Rockpile’
As any regular reader of this site knows, especially if you follow Brad Henderson’s reviews, ’80s throwback horror and action films are a hot commodity right now. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. The ones that do have two things in common: enthusiasm and commitment. Even when these films aren’t total successes, there are usually enough enjoyable elements to make them well worth watching. Which brings me to Wolfcop.
Continue reading ‘DVD Review: Wolfcop‘