Train to Busan (2016)
Life-or-death survival begins.
Filmmaker(s): Yeon Sang-ho
When a zombie virus pushes Korea into a state of emergency, those trapped on an express train to Busan must fight for their own survival.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)
Alive... without a body... fed by an unspeakable horror from hell!
Filmmaker(s): Joseph Green
Dr. Bill Cortner and his fiancée, Jan Compton, are driving to his lab when they get into a horrible car accident. Compton is decapitated. But Cortner is not fazed by this seemingly insurmountable hurdle. His expertise is in transplants, and he is excited to perform the first head transplant. Keeping Compton's head alive in his lab, Cortner plans the groundbreaking yet unorthodox surgery. First, however, he needs a body.
20 Apr The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)
Brainy I’m a little annoyed at the folks that poke fun at this. Sure, all the production values are poor, but this is just a matter of degree. If perfected imagination is defined as the images you dream and you set that at 100, well...
Bottles (1936)
Filmmaker(s): Hugh Harman
A dark and stormy night in a drugstore. The druggist mixes a potion and falls asleep. The skull-and-crossbones on the bottle comes to life and drips the potion on the druggist.
02 Apr Bottles (1936)
A Mind Ajar It seems that one major theology of animation concerns the animating (meaning coming to life) of normally inanimate objects. It is one strain worth tracing, because with today’s film technologies, animals can easily be seen to talk and even wear clothes and...
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Pass the warning.
Filmmaker(s): Nicolas Roeg
While grieving a terrible loss, a married couple meet two mysterious sisters, one of whom gives them a message sent from the afterlife.
23 Feb Don’t Look Now (1973)
Red Riding Hood Restoration I just saw ‘Black Swan,‘ one of the most successful cinematic seductions of the inner worlds of madness. It prompted me to go to this rather than ‘Red Shoes‘ or ‘Nostalghia.‘ What makes this film — indeed this filmmaker — valuable...
Let the Right One In (2008)
Eli is 12 years old. She's been 12 for over 200 years and she just moved in next door.
Filmmaker(s): Tomas Alfredson
Set in 1982 in the suburb of Blackeberg, Stockholm, twelve-year-old Oskar is a lonely outsider, bullied at school by his classmates; at home, Oskar dreams of revenge against a trio of bullies. He befriends his twelve-year-old, next-door neighbor Eli, who only appears at night in the snow-covered playground outside their building.
22 Feb Let the Right One In (2008)
Choosing Vampire (and werewolf) films have always been built on a foundation of sex, some approach to sex. Often the reference is blunt and the sexual issues unsophisticated, as in the ‘Twilight‘ franchise. Here we have something rather extraordinary, a well made film with a...
22 Feb The Machine Girl (2008)
Borrowing There’s something disturbing about American filmmakers going to other cultures to borrow porn tropes. ‘Kill Bill‘ just never seemed right, like a traditional Jewish grandmother making Tacos for her goyim daughter-in-law‘s brownie troop because she thought that’s what it was all about. Today, when...
Troll Hunter (2010)
You'll believe it when you see it!
Filmmaker(s): André Øvredal
A group of students investigates a series of mysterious bear killings, but learns that there are much more dangerous things going on. They start to follow a mysterious hunter, learning that he is actually a troll hunter.
10 Feb Troll Hunter (2010)
Petrified and Exploding Legacy Wow. This is yet another folding of a movie being made into the movie we see, but with the deliberate dissonance of ‘Blair Witch.‘ The game in such things is to play off the difference among layers. Blair did that well,...
Rubber (2010)
Are you TIRED of the expected?
Filmmaker(s): Quentin Dupieux
A group of people gather in the California desert to watch a "film" set in the late 1990s featuring a sentient, homicidal car tire named Robert. The assembled crowd of onlookers watch as Robert becomes obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious woman and goes on a rampage through a desert town.
09 Feb Rubber (2010)
Erasure I have a hard time with films like this. On the one hand, it explicitly deals with concepts that attract me. It is very clever and well enough put together. But there is balance between art meant to affect you and essays about the...
Phantoms (1998)
For centuries they told us the terror would come from above. We've been looking the wrong way.
Filmmaker(s): Joe Chappelle
In the peaceful town of Snowfield, Colorado something evil has wiped out the community. And now, its up to a group of people to stop it, or at least get out of Snowfield alive.
09 Feb Phantoms (1998)
Primeval Roles Whatever confluence of forces that were at work, when I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia‘ I was dumbstruck. The sweep of the desert and its lonely complexities mapped thoroughly with the internal landscape this man revealed. Lonely, sexually obsessed but incompetent, determined to press...
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Horror has a face.
Filmmaker(s): Roger Corman
A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land.
