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All in Essays
Carlo is here, in living color, with a brand new video essay on Shaw Brothers’ The Vengeful Beauty (1978), a proto-girls with guns movie.
Since La Dolce Vita premiered, we've been treated to so many versions and variations of this story, all with varying degrees of glitz and sadness. While there have been no direct remakes, there has been a pretty impressively diverse group of films that have been inspired by it.
Movies spend a lot of time ruminating on how much of who we are is inherent and how much is learned. Yet the films Good Manners, The Woman, and Spring ask us: what if nothing about us is a choice?
“The worst animated feature film of all time.” Argle-bargle or foofooraw? We find out!
There are scores of horror movies that follow formulas, rules, and tropes to the bitter end. Even with the 2018 glut of art house horror, plenty of familiar aspects linger. To really see beyond the rainbow on this one, we need to look to experimental horror.
Back in the ‘90s there was this one guy, a stoic blob who had neither much in terms of discernible charm, nor was he ever willing to show off much of anything he picked up in all his years training under several alleged martial arts masters, but still gained worldwide fame in the world of kicking ass and taking names. Join us, as we take a look at the early works of Steven Seagal, and question his status as a citizen of Earth.
"Girls With Guns" as a sub-genre was an absolute phenomenon in Hong Kong between the ‘80s and ‘90s where the climate for female empowerment in male-dominated exploitation cinema reigned supreme.
Freddy’s Dead is both a deviation from, and constrained by its formula. But I love it because it’s a fascinatingly desperate attempt to re-capture some of the magic that kickstarted Freddy Mania. Join us as we perform a compost-mortem on this universally reviled sequel in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.
Take a dip into the world of Australian cinema’s homoerotic undertones – from Mad Max to The Rover. A country so manly that in some ways it’s like masculinity folded in on itself and emerged as a new beast.
