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On first encountering the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man drugged and kidnapped from an educated, domestic life by opportunistic slave-traders in Washington D.C., director Steve McQueen felt he had read the “[American version of the Anne Frank story]” – two historical people fated to represent institutionalized evils through very personal words and experiences. Northup, as embodie...[Read More]

Mindwarp, a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi gore film produced by Fangoria Magazine in 1992, is a cup half-full, cup half-empty proposition. In the plus column, it stars Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead) and Angus Scrimm (Phantasm), two genre icons who give it their all no matter how low-budget or poorly conceived the film around them happens to be. And despite being the brainchild of a publication dedicate...[Read More]

Ostensibly The Other (1972) could be lumped in with several other “bad seed” movies that popped up during the 1970s like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. But writer Thomas Tryon’s screenplay (based on his own novel) differs from those successful films in two very significant ways: 1) It’s told almost exclusively from a child’s perspective and 2) The guy with the pointy horns and forked...[Read More]

It’s safe to say that people already have a preconceived notion about Escape Plan. With its two main stars each in their late sixties, it’s easy to poke fun at this movie – especially when those two stars are 1980s action heroes Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you walk into Escape Plan expecting a cinematic masterpiece, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If, on the o...[Read More]

Among the myriad filmmakers working in Hollywood today, Robert Rodriguez truly stands out as unique and fascinating. Much like his friend and frequent collaborator Quentin Tarantino, Rodriguez has made his career by celebrating the kind of films he grew up loving, mainly the genres of action, crime, and exploitation, and mashing them up with his own artistic sensibilities. The film of his that per...[Read More]

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. I felt it in the new film Gravity; I knew what it was like to be set adrift in outer space. Not the series of half-understood, embellished images in a century of movies and books, but the foreign physical nature of muscle-free tumbling, crucially aided by instruments carefully calibrated by human brains and fashioned by other machines – devices to he...[Read More]