What Have You Done to Solange (1972) is celebrated as one of the masterpieces of giallo, the distinctive Italian take on horror that combines a poetic, haunting beauty with Grand Guignol gore and a bent of sexual perversity. It’s also one of the most disturbing entries in the genre, and not for the reasons you […]
Bill Paxton left a great legacy of screen characters behind when he passed away earlier this year. What isn’t as well known is that Paxton also directed films. Frailty (2001) is his directorial debut and it is marvelously off-balance and under-the-skin creepy from the first few minutes. It’s a southern gothic take on the serial […]
Phantom of the Theatre (2016) – The Phantom of the Opera looms large in this Hong Kong haunted theater / romantic melodrama set in 1930s Shanghai, where a grand show palace is reopened for the first time since a troupe of acrobats died in a fire 13 years before. An ambitious filmmaker (Yo Yang) wants […]
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) opens with the attempted escape from an asylum, and then jumps ahead to the patient’s (demonstrably premature) freedom. Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen) is a handsome widower living in a run-down mansion in the countryside haunted by memories of his dead wife. To deal with the […]
Re-Animator (1985), Stuart Gordon’s cult horror classic from the gory eighties, is a mix of metaphysics, medicine, zombies, and Frankenstein loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Re-Animator.” Bruce Abbot is ostensibly the hero, a nice-guy medical graduate student in love with the dean’s daughter (the frequently naked Barbara Crampton), but Jeffrey Combs steals the […]
Laurie Anderson would be proud: language is a virus in Pontypool (2008), a zombie(-esque) thriller set almost entirely within the walls of a basement radio station. Stephen McHattie is brilliant as a frustrated former shock-jock now picking up a paycheck as the morning DJ in a rural radio station on the Ontario plain, where the […]
Andrew Currie’s spirited zom-com Fido (2007) drops the flesh-eating undead into a warped mirror of fifties suburban conformity and hollow appearances. In this alternate history/fantasy America, the Zombie Wars replaced the Cold War and the result is a nation of gated communities served by a stumbling underclass of enslaved zombies and policed by Zomcon, the […]
Don’t Look Now (1973), Nicolas Roeg’s mosaic of a thriller, remains a mystery to the end. Set largely in Venice, where the labyrinth of canals and tunnels creates a claustrophobic maze, it’s less about the elliptical story (adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s short tale) than the texture of loss, obsession, and emotional remove. Donald Sutherland […]
Bates Motel: Season 3 continues the story of Norman Bates: the early years. The “prequel” story to Psycho, about the teenage Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his mother Norma (Vera Farmiga), takes Norman from awkward high school boy to psychologically troubled kid with murderous blackouts and hallucinations that blossoms into a full-blown split personality. Along […]
Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1 (2015), the prequel series to AMC’s hit zombie apocalypse drama, begins at ground zero, or at least time zero. Set in Los Angeles at the moment of the outbreak of the zombie plague, it launched with a brief six-episode debut season in late 2015. Kim Dickens is a high […]
