Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

    I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I have never felt any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze. You know the…

          Since completing his widely-acknowledged masterpiece, Punk Rock Jesus, Sean Murphy (take or leave the Gordon as you please) has divided his time between projects worthy of his talents (The Wake), projects obviously unworthy of it (Chrononauts), and projects that could have been worthy of it had they…

THE DAILY RUNDOWN is a quick look at just a few of the cool screenings and film events happening around the U.S. every day. It is not intended to be an exhaustive, comprehensive list, but a sampling of the terrific genre cinema available to check out at your local art…

    It’s time for a new month of new psychotronic streaming titles!  And what a hell of a month it is – we’ve got literally hundreds of new titles of note, and that’s just on the subscription-based platforms!  We’ll dig into the free platforms next week, but in the…

THE DAILY RUNDOWN is a quick look at just a few of the cool screenings and film events happening around the U.S. every day. It is not intended to be an exhaustive, comprehensive list, but a sampling of the terrific genre cinema available to check out at your local art…

      TOP KNOT DETECTIVE (Australia, dir. Aaron McCann & Dominic Pearce) Briefly aired on Australian television in the early 90s and lost except for VHS recordings from that era, the Japanese TV series TOP KNOT DETECTIVE became a cult sensation among those lucky few who managed to see…

      BEFORE WE VANISH (Japan, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) A confused housewife and a skeptical journalist finds themselves in the midst of a stealth invasion of Earth by aliens who possess the bodies of humans. These aliens choose “guides” to help them while they literally steal concepts from the…

        THE PRINCE OF NOTHINGWOOD (France/Germany, dir. Sonia Kronlund) Salim Shaheen is a filmmaker in Afghanistan who has made over 100 independent films, despite his country’s long history of conflict and strife. Documentary filmmaker Sonia Kronlund travels to Afghanistan to talk to Shaheen and his friends, collaborators,…

  The debut year of Chicago-based Cinepocalypse Film Festival is stacked. The festival announced their final wave of programming today that includes Midwest premieres of APPLECART, PSYCHOPATHS, and SEQUENCE BREAK. In addition, special guest writer/director Joe Carnahan is presenting a series of badass action and horror cinema that includes NEAR…

THE DAILY RUNDOWN is a quick look at just a few of the cool screenings and film events happening around the U.S. every day. It is not intended to be an exhaustive, comprehensive list, but a sampling of the terrific genre cinema available to check out at your local art…

    This year’s Fantastic Fest was held at the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse from September 21st to the 28th, and this year’s programming was excellent. For the first part of my FF coverage, here are write-ups of films that played the festival which I covered for DG at previous…

            Title: FACES OF DEATH Year: 1978 Director: John Alan Schwartz (as “Conan LeCilaire”) Cast: Michael Carr     Nasties: Surgical footage Autopsy footage Newsreel footage of death, disease, famine Mummified bodies Dogfighting Animal slaughter (ritual and farming) Dead children Mauling by alligator Mauling by…

THE DAILY RUNDOWN is a quick look at just a few of the cool screenings and film events happening around the U.S. every day. It is not intended to be an exhaustive, comprehensive list, but a sampling of the terrific genre cinema available to check out at your local art…

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead don’t make horror films like the rest of us do. A sense of cosmic dread infuses every ounce of their work, a tangible flowering of an intangible vastness too big and too strange to comprehend. Though they have yet to adapt an actual story of…

THE DAILY RUNDOWN is a quick look at just a few of the cool screenings and film events happening around the U.S. every day. It is not intended to be an exhaustive, comprehensive list, but a sampling of the terrific genre cinema available to check out at your local art…

        You may as well buckle in, because this one could take awhile —   It doesn’t take a genius to see that Marvel Comics (as opposed to their Hollywood arm, which is really the tail that’s wagging the corporate dog now) is in a bad place…

  Of all of Stephen King’s novels, GERALD’S GAME has to be at or near the top of the list in terms of difficulty to adapt. Not only does it double down on the (largely) single room location of MISERY, it has only one character for a majority of the…

  Darkened corners, perilous modern landscapes, and distorted, threatening figures; these stylistic elements were designed to throw a viewer off balance. To build an emotional response—unease, dread, hate—so deep it stays with you long after the credits have run. It’s the unmistakable look of German Expressionism, and its emotional triggers…

It’s astounding that the shower scene in PSYCHO still hasn’t lost any of its impact. Here is a sequence that has been ripped off, parodied, and paid homage to umpteenth times, but it still has the power to terrify and put the viewer at unease. 78/52 (named for the 78…

  As a lifelong cult film aficionado (and a collector of Steve Puchalski’s mandatory cult film mag “Shock Cinema”), I’ve got a fairly long list of movies that I’m determined to find.  Movies such as 1985’s pro-wrestling sci-fi horror pic BLOOD CIRCUS.  Or THE MILKY LIFE, starring Mickey Rooney as…

  Tracey Birdsall is quickly becoming a powerhouse in the sci-fi realm, largely due to her well-regarded performance in ROGUE WARRIOR: ROBOT FIGHTER. Birdsall tells us how that film came about, her upcoming roles, and… her love of brussels sprouts.       So, a Robot Fighter! C3PO better look…

  James Gunn (SUPER, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT) sets up the story and tone of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, VOL. 2 in the first two scenes. Kurt Russell’s character (Ego, Peter’s father) starts the film with Meredith Quill (Peter’s mother) on Earth before an excellent opening credits fight sequence, featuring a dancing…

    Back in the nineties, I used to watch Star Trek: Voyager somewhat religiously. This had been at least a few years before I had really started to pay attention to film and television beyond just a surface level. A year or so later I would be reading whatever I…

  “It’s a depressingly masculine world we live in, Dolores.”     DOLORES CLAIBORNE has always been the most wrongly unheralded Stephen King adaptation. Despite the immense talent in front of the camera and behind it, for some reason it never became either the box office juggernaut like Stand by Me,…