“‘Challenge the Devil’ Is A Challenge To See”

And yet: It’s a pleasure to watch. Lee bless. Continue reading →

“Scream Factory’s New ‘The Kiss of the Vampire’ Blu-Ray Revisits a Morbid, Kinky Classic”

It’s more of a bite than a kiss, but when the end result is you become a bloodsucking fiend, who’s keeping count? Continue reading →

Review: Extraordinary Tales, 2015, dir. Raul Garcia

“Extraordinary Tales, a seasonal piece of spookery by Raul Garcia, means well but haunts only half-heartedly. The film is a meta-monument to the works of Boston-born, Baltimore-dead Gothic-Romantic wunderkind Edgar Allan Poe, chiefly his short stories but with a side helping of poems: “Annabel Lee” and “A Dream Within a Dream” start us off alongside … Continue reading →

A Half Day of Horror

“Watching more than one movie in a single day is a tall order. Watching six movies in half that amount of time, then, is as daunting as any Herculean labor. So why, you may ask, did I drag myself out to that beloved repertory shrine of Brookline, the Coolidge Corner Theater, this past Saturday for … Continue reading →

Go, See, Talk! Review: The Hobbit, 2012, dir. Peter Jackson

This all seems awfully familiar: it’s December, and a big-scale fantasy epic based on one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s essential landmark novels has been adapted to the screen by the man who directed Dead Alive. Forget that we’re trekking back to Middle Earth, the arrival of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is itself a return to a status quo … Continue reading →

Review: Hugo, 2011, dir. Martin Scorsese

Another year, another film about films and the spirit of filmmaking itself. Leave it to the legendary Martin Scorsese, though, to take the opportunity to fuse together a picture of that persuasion on a grand, macro scale which spans more than a century instead of honing in on a more intimate examination of the craft. … Continue reading →

Groovers and Mobsters Present: Horror

The Wicker Man (1973) “Do sit down, Sergeant. Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent.” Let me ask a simple question: What scares you? Masked psychos lurking in the shadows, stalking you in your house or through dark and foreboding woods? Alien invasions, full-scale or otherwise, staged by extraterrestrial races with less-than-benevolent … Continue reading →