Cellar Dweller

January 16, 2012 | Reviews

When a dose of disposable income comes my way I consistently find myself grappling with the same dilemma. Should I piggy bank those few extra cents? Should I don my pragmatist’s hat and work on those pesky student loans? Do I feed my caffeine and alcohol addictions? Should I branch out to the good lunch [...]

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The Manitou

January 09, 2012 | Reviews

The Manitou movie IS fun, delivering chills, gonzo visuals, and scenery chewing performances. A weird, politically-incorrect, gross, action-adventure movie.

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TrollHunter

May 12, 2011 | Reviews

André Øvredal’s TrollHunter is a movie that relies on your expectations of movies like it, meets those expectations, and surpasses them with surprising wit, heart, and craft. Filmed in the handheld digital camera cinéma vérité style of The Blair Witch Project (but thankfully not as nausea-inducing) the film follows three college students attempting to document a series [...]

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ThanksKilling

November 25, 2010 | Reviews

Ah the holidays. Tensions flair during the 20-hour bake-a-thon leading up to the gorge session. Whose pumpkin pie is going to win the coveted affections of Grandma? How drunk will Auntie Grizelda get and what nuggets of family wisdom will she spill? Uncle Mortichi naps early so that he’ll have a more passing shot at [...]

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Virus – A documentary on homelessness by Neil Corbin

June 14, 2010 | Reviews

This past Saturday, I forwent a tube-laden morning with talking sea sponges, cutsey Latina explorers, and stop-motion architect dynamos in favor of a screening of something darker, truer, and vastly more important. The Art Theatre, Long Beach’s staple independent cinema, was making up for recent gaffs in programming like Sex and the City 2 and [...]

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Christmas Evil

January 23, 2010 | Reviews

You can keep your Silent Nights, your Deadly Nights, and your Black Christmas’s; Santa Clause can visit those Martians until the cows come home, and the Governator can jingle all the damn way for all I care; because when the yuletide season rolls around there is only one perennial favorite I want stuffing my stocking. [...]

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Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer

September 24, 2009 | Reviews

On paper, this premise sounds like it could be kind of funny: Joe the Plumber, fresh off the heels of The McCain campaign, is re-invented as a monster ass-kicker, taking on both Harryhausen-esque creatures and Robert Englund as a blobish, tendrilled troll puppet! Even more appealing: the director’s decision to retroactively embrace the camp and [...]

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Cat’s Eye

September 20, 2009 | Reviews

After the successful adaptations of his work by both visionary filmmakers (DePalma, Kubrick) and horror mainstays (Cronenberg, Hooper), and before Mick Garris and his made-for-tv schlockurama’s cornered the market, Stephen King found his novels (and short stories, and beat poetry, and grocery shopping lists) translated to the silver screen by a diverse group of cinephiles [...]

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Looking For Horror’s Pulse…

August 08, 2009 | News

Hollywood in general, and horror in particular, have long been indicted by cultural analysts and civil activists for a voracious un-originality in execution. The former diagnose a narcoleptic inability on the part of the story weavers to awaken from recycled plot structures, and the latter call foul on any damnable stereotype lazily iterated for the [...]

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Breeders

June 07, 2009 | Reviews

Despite it’s sweeping and utter ineptness, it’s failure to illicit scares – or even basic laughter, it’s frighteningly sexist point of view, and the fact that it is more aggravating than listening to Uncle Mortichi’s post dinner sleep apnea fits, Breeders holds a special, squishy, warmishly tepid place in my heart. Why? Pure and simple [...]

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