Author: VHS Tracking
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Orpheus (1950)
I knew little of Jean Cocteau (what a cultural barbarian I am!), mainly that he was a poet and an artist, and I’d always heard about his version of Beauty And The Beast with Jean Marais. When Mubi had Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950; aka Orphee) in their library as part of their French Cinema spotlight, also… Read.
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The Sword Of Doom (1966)
All I knew about the Japanese movie The Sword Of Doom (1966) was the iconic image of a samurai in the middle distance of a forest, submerged in fog and surrounded by bodies felled by his sword. I didn’t realise that the film’s main character was an embodiment of evil. Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai) is… Read.
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Knock Off (1998)
Director Tsui Hark’s gift to cinema: a POV shot of a foot going into a shoe. A knock off shoe that we receive extreme close ups of the wear and tear suffered as Jean Claude Van Damme pulls Rob Schneider on a cart in a competitive race through the streets of Hong Kong. And this… Read.
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Conquest (1983)
After listening to the recent Pure Cinema Podcast episode on Fantasy movies, I was keen to submerge myself into some 1980s era sword-and-sorcery flicks. One title they talked highly of, and that I’d heard good word for some time, was Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s entry into the post-Conan genre, Conquest (1983), an Italian-Spanish-Mexican co-production,… Read.
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Last Man Standing (1996)
Last Man Standing (1996), Walter Hill’s remake of Yojimbo (already remade as A Fistful Of Dollars), is almost mythical yet reductively basic. Set in a ghost town named Jericho that nobody else lives in except for two gangs fighting over the same turf, a state of purgatory only destabilised by the arrival of a gun-for-hire… Read.
VHS Tracking 