Venus In Furs (1969)

The meeting point between exploitation demands and arthouse pretensions is ideal cinematic terrain to my mind. Base pleasures that Venus In Furs (1969) – directed by Jess Franco – offers is nudity and sex (well, what accounts for it late 1960s international cinema) with Maria Rohm nude in a fur coat with stockings and a […]

Night Of The Ghouls (1959)

The seance scene. When the camera focuses on Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) – a granite-face middle-aged guy wearing a suit and a “swami” turban – sitting at a table, and the camera moves back so that we can see three people sitting on one side, and three rinky-dink skeletons sitting on the other, I was […]

The Eternal Daughter (2022)

The Eternal Daughter (2022) is not a horror movie, but a ghost story. It’s useful to make that distinction since it’s about eeriness and suggestion, using ghosts as a way of dealing with memory, uncertainty and unresolvable emotions. Joanna Hogg (Unrelated) reunites with Tilda Swinton (after her first short film, Caprice, and The Souvenir Part […]

Winter Kills (1979)

Winter Kills (1979) is the absurdist extension of the conspiracy thriller in vogue during the 1970s. Imagine The Parallax View, a riff on imagined counter narratives to the official record of the JFK assassination, but exaggerated with a strange comedy, not quite spoof or parody. Each scene in Winter Kills is eventually marked by a […]

Mike’s Murder (1984)

We don’t see the murder. Director and writer James Bridges apparently filmed one, and it was part of the negative test screenings that forced him to re-edit and structurally rearrange Mike’s Murder (1984) before its release. The original intention with Mike’s Murder was a film that was subjective with dream sequences and flashbacks; what was […]