Never leave revenge off your resume. Improper Conduct (1994), from the director of Hack-O-Lantern and Night Eyes, is a semi-steamy melodrama-laden cavort through the world of high-stakes advertising. It might also have a few things to say about harassment and moral ambiguity, but the execution teeters between provocative social commentary and a prime-time soap. So … Read more
Robocop 3 arrived on home video this week in 1994 – or it may have been April 27th… who the hell knows. It got delayed so often the trade ads were all over the place. But it hit shelves eventually, after a November 1993 theatrical release – which itself was delayed from summer ’92, after … Read more
By the end of 1989, slasher movies were experiencing vastly diminishing returns. To the point where the studios were more than happy to retire (or sell-off) their menagerie of stabby boogeymen. For a brief time, Leatherface and Freddy were making room for more “elevated” psychological thrillers like Misery, Cape Fear or Silence of the Lambs. … Read more
This oh-so-’80s follow-up to the classic ’50s Steve McQueen TV series features Rutger Hauer as the descendant of wild west bounty hunter Josh Randall – and he’s charged with tracking down ruthless terrorist Gene Simmons. The connection to the original series is nominal. A photograph, a surname, a vague suggestion of lineage. What makes it … Read more
“Do you realize she’s twenty years old, that makes her officially an antique.” Neither John Carpenter or Stephen King have looked back at this movie with any real fondness, but it’s always been one of my favourite early-80’s horrors to come off the assembly line. Hell, I still find cherry-red cars from the 50’s unnerving … Read more
Club Paradise is what happens when you gather some of the funniest people of the era, drop them in a tropical setting, and somehow create a movie that barely makes a ripple. Directed by Harold Ramis, starring Robin Williams, Peter O’Toole, and a murderers’ row of SCTV alums, it should be a comedy classic. Instead, … Read more
There’s a brand of slow, deliberate arthouse vagueness that I absolutely love. From David Lynch’s Lost Highway to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, movies that leave you asking questions well after the credits roll rank among my favourites. You’re not meant to interpret each image, you’re meant to live in the gaps they create. But here, … Read more
Joel Coen was an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. The Coens then wrote Crimewave, which Raimi directed. The Coens later hired a young cinematographer named Barry Sonnenfeld to shoot Blood Simple, and he stayed on for Raising Arizona. There was this small circle of filmmakers in the mid-80s who all treated the camera … Read more
We lost Peter David yesterday. He was one of the all-time greats. Writer of comics, Star Trek novels, the Sir Apropos of Nothing books – if you were a certain kind of nerdy kid in the ’80s or ’90s, he was one of the voices that shaped the inside of your head. Barely a week … Read more
“So, do you have any new movies in?” For many of us of a certain age in the mid 90s, Kevin Smith’s seminal Gen-X manifesto helped define our post-graduate slacker ennui. Clerks was released right when indie film was reaching critical mass. For a while, Sundance was the credibility pipeline of choice and every slacker … Read more