Tag: 1980s
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Special Effects (1984)
What I enjoy about Larry Cohen is how he approaches things as a writer: the story’s gotta have a hook! Released in the same year as Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Cohen’s film Special Effects (1984) is a comparable twist on a Hitchcockian thriller. The hook: What if a movie director was a murderer? (A… Read.
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Merry-Go-Round (1981)
“… generally considered a failure – but what a failure it is!” A quote from the Mubi “our take” description accompanying Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), and if you do any cursory reading around the film’s making you can understand why even the director himself considered it a “failure”. The third of four planned movies he… Read.
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A Better Tomorrow II (1987)
An action thriller about two brothers on opposite sides of the law, A Better Tomorrow was a smash hit in Hong Kong and helped birth the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre. With Chow-Yun Fat’s performance as the third member of this triangle, the antagonistic but loyal gangster Mark, it was a role that cemented the actor as… Read.
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The Beastmaster (1982)
One tier of fantasy adventure is the kind that everyone knows across different generations – from Star Wars to Lord Of The Rings – while others on the lower tier are tied to a time and place, and probably known more by the one generation that grew up with them on video tape or cable… Read.
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School In The Crosshairs (1981)
I remember seeing Hausu a long time ago (presented by Kenta McGrath at the UWA Film Society) and my memory of it has always been an all-encompassing, wild, super-visual horror dream. Keen to see further films from Hausu’s director Nobuhiko Obayashi, particularly since a few of them are available in HD on the Rarefilmm website.… Read.
