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Category: Review

The title card for Invaders for Mars, featuring the text of the title over some planets and stars

Dreams & Nightmares: Invaders from Mars (1953) Painstakingly Restored on 4K

By Orrin Grey • January 26th, 2023

Ignite Films has planted their flag as a company to watch for what their own logline calls “classics for the future.”

A still from the trailer of Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, where the three young adults are dressed in their 70s weirdo finest, in front of some wood paneled walls, caressing a corpse and laughing at their hijinks

It’s a Boneyard: Revisiting Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) on 4K

By Orrin Grey • January 19th, 2023

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is a fairly accurate portrait of what macabre weirdos like us got up to – or imagined ourselves getting up to – in the days before we had the internet to distract us.

screenshot from Nightmare at noon, with four characters hiding out in a starkly lit police office. A giant framed collection of patched leans against the wall, while the officers lean on various bits of furniture and look forlorn

Meat and Potatoes Country: Nightmare at Noon (1988) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • December 23rd, 2022

To an enormous extent, your enjoyment of (and even tolerance for) Nightmare at Noon will rely largely on how much affection you have for these actors, since they’re the beating heart of the film.

Title card for Silent Running, with a beaming sun visible just over the top of a spiked geodesic dome floating through space

Everyone Has a Job: The Future of Silent Running (1972)

By Orrin Grey • December 13th, 2022

Anyone who complains that modern movies are too didactic probably shouldn’t watch Silent Running, which puts all its theses into the mouth of Bruce Dern’s space-bound ecologist.

A crop of the cover for No Escape, featuring Vincent's brother looking concerned, a gangster staring down the scope of a rifle launcher, and the reasonable Ghostbuster with a very fierce expression on his face

Not in the World: The Unlikely Precognition of No Escape (1994)

By Orrin Grey • December 8th, 2022

In fact, to the extent that No Escape has anything more novel to say than “prisons are bad” – which they are, and it’s great when movies say so, but like “war is hell” it may be true but it’s also a bit of a cliché in pictures like this – it’s probably something to do with its many meditations on guilt, and what guilt should cost us.

A mop-haired Robin Hood places a golden apple atop Maid Marian's head, presumably to shoot off with an arrow. She does not look pleased

The More the Merrier: Two Robin Hoods from Hammer Films

By Orrin Grey • August 30th, 2022

Robin Hood pictures were once big business.

A stoic cop in a suit and sunglasses is walking stoically through some stoic traffic

Lunatic Meets Lunatic: Two Good-Natured Caper Films from Hong Kong Director Johnnie To

By Orrin Grey • August 17th, 2022

A pair of surprisingly lightweight and amiable caper flicks in the vein of more recent thriller confections such as 2013’s Now You See Me.

Gingy's Corner

Spirit Hunter: NG

By Gingy Gibson • August 10th, 2022

Losing your team has weight and pain because you had time to develop attachments to this confused and scared band of kids. The game makes you care before it brings down the ax; you haven’t lost a random Joe, you lost people that mattered. It’s a tactic designed to hurt, and it works.

Keifer Sutherland is sidding criss-cross-apple-sauce in a room with high arched windows and afternoon yellow light with a lone lamp for company

Today’s a Good Day to Die: Reliving the Past with Flatliners (1990)

By Orrin Grey • August 9th, 2022

It’s no surprise that Schumacher made the campiest of Batman movies, because there’s an extravagance to the production design here that would have been right at home in Burton’s Gotham City.

Gingy’s Corner
A cast shot of the crew from Ghostwire Tokyo: Prelude, including detective fingerguns, young headache, teenager and child, and thinking guy

Ghostwire: Tokyo – Prelude – Some Half-Baked Bread to Start

By Gingy Gibson • June 8th, 2022

Ghostwire: Tokyo – Prelude is an appetizer that fails to entice players to return for the main course.

A still from the trailer of The 8-Diagram Pole Fighter, featuring the lead monk standing with a bloodied lip next to his praying companion and a fellow fighter

Carnage and Blood: Two Kung Fu Movies from Opposite Ends of the Genre’s Heyday, Both with Numbers in the Titles

By Orrin Grey • June 2nd, 2022

One is a bloody Saturday morning cartoon that barely bothers to connect its interminable fight scenes with any kind of story, the other an elegiac lament about the inadequacy of heroism in the face of death.

Four portraits of the lead characters from the cover of the 4K version of the film Wild Things

Something Bad Might Happen: Wild Things (1998) on Unrated 4K

By Orrin Grey • May 26th, 2022

Wild Things is a product of its time in so many ways.

Gingy's Corner
two horses facing off against each other. image from IMDB.

Body Image and Self-Loathing in Centaurworld

By Gingy Gibson • May 23rd, 2022

Or, How Horse Learned to Stop Fearing and Love Her Bod

A still from the trailer for Red Angel, where a spooked and unclothed nurse has a tense conversation with a doctor in a warzone

Hell Couldn’t Be Much Worse: The Grim Anti-War Message of Red Angel (1966)

By Orrin Grey • April 28th, 2022

“If people at home saw me, they’d realize how terrible war was and hate it.”

Vincent Price canoodles in fear with a lab skeleton.

Gimmicks Aside, The Tingler is Fucking Fantastic

By Ciara Moloney • January 21st, 2022

The Tingler is a gimmick movie: not (just) a campy bit of fun, but a genuinely scary, inventive and clever film.

Gingy's Corner
The Neighbor from Hello Neighbor looking menacing with a shovel

Goodbye and Good Riddance to Hello Neighbor

By Gingy Gibson • January 21st, 2022

A miserable slog through a broken platformer that utterly fails to deliver on any of its promises.

Gingy's Corner
An illustrataed girl with blue hair and blue eyes.

Speak Lies

By Gingy Gibson • January 14th, 2022

Speak Lies is a story about a probably cursed school and the band of students investigating its mysteries; one of which is you, the player.

The key art for Catsperience, which features the head of a black and white cat wearing a crown and a ruff. Behind the cat is a rich pattern consisting of cat heads, paw prints and leaves as well as a scratch mark in the center. In front of the cat is the title “Catsperience” in a fun, fancy and yellow font.

The Full Catsperience

By Melissa King • November 3rd, 2021

Everybody gets to be a cat in this charming 3D puzzler.

Performers from the David Lynch Dune movie, specifically Sting and Patrick Stewart are visible.

The Sleeper Has Awakened: Watching the David Lynch Dune for the First Time in this, the Second Year of the Plague

By Orrin Grey • October 14th, 2021

So, nearly forty years later, in a world with a very different cinematic landscape, on the cusp of a new, much bigger-budget adaptation, did I come out knowing that I’ve seen Dune?

Goldie Hawn in Overboard, laying on a deck chair in a red swim suit with one foot up in the lap of a man who is doing her toenails.

A Distinctive Experience: Overboard (1987) on Blu-ray in 2021

By Orrin Grey • October 7th, 2021

Overboard must be saved from itself.

Casting Deep Meteo
two characters fighting a skeleton monster on a lit ledge.

Greak and the Deft Power of Short Stories

By Levi Rubeck • September 21st, 2021

Greak doesn’t overstay its welcome, and is clearsighted in its goals from the beginning.

a brightly colorful daruma doll with eyes stapled open, in front of a chalkboard. Bright red marbles are around him as if shot up in the air.

1000 words on As the Gods Will

By Amanda Hudgins • August 17th, 2021

As the Gods Will is a very gif-able film.

Chinese lyrical dancer Gai Gai stands in the middle of a brightly lit room full of dancers, her arms posed in front of her body.

1600 words on Street Dance of China

By Amanda Hudgins • August 3rd, 2021

Street Dance of China Season 3 starts with a two minute cinematic about isolation and community, at once apocalyptic and familiar

A woman and her daughter, clinging to her shoulder, looking up at something off screen on a wooded beach.

sinning with old

By Amanda Hudgins • July 28th, 2021

Old is a weird movie in that it invites thought and immediately falls apart if you think about it too hard.

Eyeing Elsewhere
A creature that looks a bit like a mutated red panda/raccoon holding an over large sword over its shoulder and looking out over a rainforest.

Feeding The Chimera

By Phillip Russell • June 11th, 2021

I’m stuck on this feeling I have while playing Biomutant where I want to like it. I want it to succeed, and I want it to figure out its own voice.

A white faced woman in the back of a van, her hands pressed to the glass.

Unholy Blood: Santa Sangre (1989) on 4K Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • June 1st, 2021

Whatever really happened on the set of El Topo, Jodorowsky is, at best, a guy who bragged about raping someone for publicity, and this is what I knew about the director of Santa Sangre.

A detail shot from Xiran Jay Zhao's book Iron Widow showing a black armor clad woman with her hair in an elaborate updo posing in front of images of flames

#AsianReadathon 2021

By Amanda Hudgins • May 31st, 2021

This year, I decided to once again participate in #AsianReadathon, an event run by YouTuber withCindy focused on getting participants to read books written by Asian authors.

A blonde woman reclining in a wicker chair with a drink in her hand and an eyepatch over her left eye.

Black-Hearted Women: Switchblade Sisters (1975) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • May 27th, 2021

Does it always work? Naturally not, this is Switchblade Sisters, after all, not whatever venerated classic movie title you want to put here that, in your mind, always works.

an Asian man whose body is invisible except for his head and his hand, which is holding a banana.

Evil Washes Out Evil: A Daiei Invisible Man Double-Feature

By Orrin Grey • May 20th, 2021

It’s something of a homecoming to be tackling The Invisible Man Appears and The Invisible Man vs. the Human Fly on Arrow Video Blu here

a man with long hair and short bangs, his eyes made so that you can only see the whites of his eyes.

Days of Beasts and Cocaine: An Alex de la Iglesia Double-Feature

By Orrin Grey • April 15th, 2021

That’s what I did; two-fisting this particular double-feature with a shot of Day of the Beast and a chaser of Perdita Durango.

two men sitting in an old car with the text "we kill all sizes" above their head.

No Bright Side: Crimewave (1985) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • April 7th, 2021

In many ways, Crimewave is the kind of movie I live for: a bonkers, underseen, early-career flick from legendary filmmakers who went on to much bigger things.

Detail from the cover art for We are Always Alone of a girl in a schoolgirl outfit, a purple and red light above her head.

portrayal of guilt’s Anthems Against False Hope

By Levi Rubeck • April 5th, 2021

Anthems for sinking ships, as if the tide itself was a choleric spirit drawing you down to a lightless ocean floor.

In a field of bifurcated blue is the cover for Jim Davidson's book The Next Everest, which has a picture of the mountain itself.

2600 Words on The Next Everest

By Amanda Hudgins • March 15th, 2021

When Davidson brings up the idea of returning to the mountain to his wife he writes: “how unlike other husbands, I didn’t spend money on boats, motorcycles or fancy cars” as though there is anything more midlife crisis than spending over $50,000 on the chance to die on a very tall mountain.

A detail from the cover art for The Valley and the Flood: A womans face in profile, the sun beaming down on it. in her blue hair is the remains of a town.

The Valley and the Flood Review

By Amanda Hudgins • March 8th, 2021

The novel The Valley and the Flood is Welcome to Nightvale meets Kentucky Route Zero meets Big Fish.

Gingy's Corner

Huniepop 2

By Gingy Gibson • February 26th, 2021

A disappointing sequel actively working to quash any joy the player may attempt to derive from it.

A piano with two small children looking at it. This is a still from Little Nightmares II.

Little Nightmares II and the Case of Weak Imagery

By Amanda Hudgins • February 15th, 2021

Not every game has to say something with its imagery, but it’s clear that Little Nightmares II wants desperately to be saying something.

Try Reading...

50 Years Later, Superman Defeats the Klan Again

By Harry Rabinowitz • February 10th, 2021

Superman punching Nazis, chucking Klansmen and standing up for diversity has never been this good.

Two star filled silhouettes with text between that reads "one match light up an empire"

Winter’s Orbit, Fireheart Tiger, and the Empire

By Amanda Hudgins • February 5th, 2021

I started reading Aliette de Bodard’s Fireheart Tiger around the same time as I started finishing Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit and found overlap in both the temporal and literal sense.

Casting Deep Meteo

El Hijo, the Solid Snake of Tag

By Levi Rubeck • February 4th, 2021

In stealth games, I always aspire to be the ghost.

the cover art for Everybody Has a Podcast Except You

Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You) Review

By Amanda Hudgins • January 25th, 2021

Advice books need to hit a sweet spot of giving the right amount of advice for the audience of course, but again I’m not sure who Everybody Has a Podcast is for.

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