Review
The Stars Can’t Hurt You: Fighting the Future in Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)
Even if you’re pretty sure you know going in – it is difficult, after all, to not have been spoiled at least a little bit on a movie that is three-quarters of a century old – the unspooling of the film does a good job of keeping you on your toes,
I Don’t Get Nightmares: Scaring Yourself with Talk to Me (2023)
Talk to Me may be the most credible supernatural teen horror movie ever made, simply by dint of the way that the kids in the film turn the medium-istic hand into a party game, heedless of the larger questions it raises, or the possible consequences of their actions.
Entering the Kingdom of the Supernatural: The Mexico Macabre Collection from Indicator
Mexican horror films from the ’60s feel like someone attempting to remake the classic horror films of the ‘30s and ‘40s from memory. Which, given that we were still decades ahead of the advent of home video, was probably almost literally the case.
Not in the World: The Unlikely Precognition of No Escape (1994)
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.
Spirit Hunter: NG
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.
Carnage and Blood: Two Kung Fu Movies from Opposite Ends of the Genre’s Heyday, Both with Numbers in the Titles
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.