Double Team (1997)

This is one of those movies where I saw the trailer so many times as a teen that the Jean-Claude Van Damme wisecrack to Dennis Rodman, “Who does your hair, Siegfried or Roy?”, was forever burned on my brain. I remember one night out with friends grabbing a kebab after midnight and watching the climax […]

Body Snatchers (1993)

Merging my horror movie viewing in the lead up to Halloween with my on-going retrospective of director Abel Ferrara’s filmography this year, I thought I would revisit Body Snatchers (1993), his sci-fi horror film for Warner Brothers. If it wasn’t for the later box office bomb of the Nicole Kidman starring The Invasion, this was […]

Guilty As Sin (1993)

Next to the 90s erotic thriller is the sexy courtroom thriller, all of which tends to be coated in references to Hitchcock. Guilty As Sin (1993) is scripted by genre stalwart Larry Cohen (The Stuff, Phone Booth) and directed by Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon), and I remember commercials for it at the time, […]

Defending Your Life (1991)

This might be a generalisation, but it felt like the late-1980s/early-1990s were all about high concept comedies, usually involving time travel, reincarnation, body swapping, and the afterlife. I remember the video cover for the Albert Brooks film, Defending Your Life (1991), but watching it had eluded me until the Albert Brooks collection on the Criterion […]

The Funeral (1996)

Continuing my journey through the filmography of director Abel Ferrara, it was time to dust off the DVD and revisit one of my favourite Christopher Walken performances in The Funeral (1996). Set in the 1930s, the film begins with one of its characters watching a Humphrey Bogart movie. From that point, The Funeral feels like […]