Godzilla (1954)

I have this vague memory as a kid, reading that the original Godzilla (1954; aka Gojira) was on SBS during the day, maybe a weekend, and trying to watch it, feeling bored by the black and white footage and tired of waiting for the monster to show up. How wrong I was. Watching Godzilla in […]

Nemesis (1992)

Nemesis (1992) is VHS-era low budget cyperpunk sci-fi action that rides off the energy of France’s ‘cinema du look’ and Hong Kong action cinema. It’s all people in shades firing two weapons at one another as they jump out of windows from abandoned buildings out in the middle of picturesque wastelands. Directed by Albert Pyun, […]

Class Of 1999 (1990)

Joanna Gould wrote about Class Of 1999 (1990) for the ‘good bad movies’ issue of VHS Tracking and I’d always been meaning to confront this one. I remember vividly reading about the movie in video store magazines as a kid; the poster and the plot scared the hell out of me, the idea of high […]

Cemetery Of Splendour (2015)

What I most want from an art movie is to be taken to somewhere else. Another part of the world, yes, but also taken to another way of seeing. Cemetery Of Splendour (2015; Rak Ti Khon Kaen) is only my second film that I’ve watched from Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul (after Uncle Boonmee Who Can […]

Replicant (2001)

Journeying further into the world of direct-to-video Jean-Claude Van Damme releases from the late 1990s and early 2000s brings me to watching Replicant (2001) for the first time. Released in the waning years of Van Damme’s box office popularity, where his movies were coming out on DVD rather than cinema screens, I had heard some […]