Yokohama BJ Blues (1982)

Only after I finished watching Yokohama BJ Blues (1982) did I realise that the lead actor, Yusaku Matsuda, played the role of Sato the villain in the Michael Douglas action flick, Black Rain. I knew Matsuda was a Japanese movie star and was known for action films himself in the 1970s, and yet I just didn’t connect him […]

Pumpkinhead (1988)

Reading a TV Guide description of Pumpkinhead (1988) as a kid, the type of movie that would only be programmed super late at night on a weekend, always intrigued me. A man gets revenge on the bikers who killed his boy by raising up a supernatural creature. Reading that it was directed by Stan Winston, […]

Creepy (2016)

There’s a masterclass sequence in Creepy (2016) that shows off Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s command with visually increasing uneasiness. A retired detective now a college professor Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima from Drive My Car) is working with his former partner Nogami (Masahiro Higashide) on a cold case, a missing family who disappeared five years ago. Within the university […]

The Whip And The Body (1963)

When a film communicates two emotions happening across a character’s face, all in the one shot, the magic trick of that. In the Mario Bava directed film, The Whip and The Body (1963), there’s a tremendous close-up of the character of Nevenka (Dahlia Lavi), walking down a darkened castle hallway, approaching a door where she […]

Four Of The Apocalypse (1975)

Four Of The Apocalypse (1975) is a late-period spaghetti western, as the Italian genre was on the decline in the 1970s, directed by Lucio Fulci. Even though this before Fulci’s ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy, and some of the more gnarlier movies that would make his name as a horror filmmaker (Zombi 2, The New York […]