In the mid-90s, Hollywood decided that video games were the new comic books, which was ironic considering they hadn’t figured out comic books yet. And while Super Mario Bros. face-planted in 1993 probably because they kept a 10 foot pole’s distance from any of the familiar iconography, later movies tried a little harder to at … Read more
What… Never heard of it? The Road to Wellville? Starring Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda, Matthew Broderick, John Cusack, Dana Carvey, Colm Meaney, Lara Flynn Boyle and John Neville? Still No? Directed by Alan Parker, it tells the fictionalised story of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s (the inventor of Corn Flakes) bizarro health club from the turn … Read more
Brainscan arrived on home video this week in 1995, after an April 22, 1994 theatrical release. Look, I joke that there weren’t many great horror movies in the early 90s because Brainscan used up all the franchise ideas. And pretty much all the 90s. They shotguned every youth-market trend into a single script and hoped … Read more
Sure, Spanking the Monkey looks like it belongs on the “indie” shelf next to Clerks, Glory Daze or Kicking and Screaming. It gives off those flannel-covered low-budget slacker vibes with a touch of post-collegiate angst. Maybe it’s a little darker, and maybe it’s a little more risqué given the title… This looked like my kinda … Read more
One of the best zombie flicks of the 90s… and also one of the few zombie flicks of the 90s. “The living dead and the dying living are all the same.” Cemetery Man (1994) aka Dellamorte Dellamore in the original Italiano. Michele Soavi’s take on the Dylan Dog comic side-character is a sexy, surreal and … Read more
This film was such a big deal. Tarantino took decades of accumulated pop cultural detritus and alchemised it into something that got a standing ovation at Cannes. The film told a generation of overqualified underachievers that their encyclopedic knowledge of blaxploitation flicks and sitcom trivia wasn’t worthless cultural debris – it was a language unto … Read more
That quintessentially 90s underdog sports flick where the misfits take on the mighty, and we all learn a little something about teamwork. Rick Moranis and Ed O’Neill star as brothers Danny and Kevin O’Shea, squaring off in a peewee football showdown that pits the athletically challenged against the annoyingly gifted. For the uninitiated, Danny’s daughter … Read more
Every September for thirty years, I’ve kicked off Halloween season the same way: Tim Burton’s film, the Rhino “Look Back in Angora” documentary by the late, great Ted Newsom, then a marathon of Edward D. Wood Jr’s actual movies. The cardboard tombstones, saucers on strings, Bela Lugosi stumbling through barely coherent stream-of-consciousness dialogue… it’s a … Read more
Nadja is a vampire film, technically. But it’s really a lo-fi, black-and-white art piece where Elina Löwensohn drifts through a grainy, urban twilight while whispering existential poetry that smolders with ennui. That’s my kind of party. Produced by David Lynch – who probably did it just so he could cameo as the morgue attendant – … Read more
Kathy Long, a lonely loner on a lonely road, rolls into a lawless desert town wearing all black and looking to kick all kinds of hell out of anyone who crosses her. That’s The Stranger (1994), and that’s all it needs. This was one of those straight-to-video 90s action movies that looked like it was … Read more