“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” –Samuel Johnson If you had to be either a mushroom or nothing, which would you choose? This is what famed Japanese director Ishirô Honda asks his audience by the climax of Matango. Granted, a...
Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (still with me?), attempts to fashion another version of the classic gothic novel to little argumentative point aside from theatricality (verses cinematically) painting a gothic canvas. The work posits everything including...
Not unsurprisingly, the latest balls-to-the-wall, unflinchingly graphic horror film to emerge from France (following IRREVERSIBLE, INSIDE, FRONTIERES, et al) originated from its writer-director’s own deep depression, though a final dedication to Dario Argento suggests...
For some reason I could not get into this film at all, In fact looking beyond all the gore and cool looking effects of this film I found the story to be quite boring. It’s kind of like the Asian version “House of Wax” in a way. the story are not that...
Tim Burton’s major sin in Mars Attacks! is that at every turn he is busy parodying something. Yes, he is attempting to make a bad film in the vein of Ed Wood (whose comic cinematic biography he’d recently finished). Yet, a parody of such B-movie fare doesn’t mean the...
Shot in only eight days–in-between Ju-on and its American remake, The Grudge–Takashi Shimizu created a surrealistic, existential love story which, much like life and love itself, is forced to content itself with its own ambiguities, as the work–as...