Fear Is The Key (1972)

Barry Newman is best known for playing the enigmatic driver in the car chase movie Vanishing Point, and I also know him playing Peter Fonda’s security man several decades later in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey. To see him play a tough guy role like in Fear Is The Key (1972), he is wiry and compact, […]

The Fifth Cord (1971)

The Fifth Cord (1971) is a visually striking giallo thriller from Italy. While there’s plenty of fashionable outfits and stylish interior decorating, there’s an emphasis on figures placed against colossal pieces of architecture, or the use of shadows against lit windows and lamplight reflected by glass. During one sequence where petals drift through the frame […]

The Iron Rose (1973)

The Iron Rose (1973; La Rose de Fer) is the third film I’ve seen from French director Jean Rollin, and along with Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco, their names represent a quintessential arty Euro-horror milieu. Rollin is known for low-budget genre flicks, usually concerning vampires, where there’s nudity and blood, and actors wandering around castles and […]

House Of Wax (2005)

House Of Wax (2005) is a remake in name only, from what I gather of the Vincent Price original (which I have not seen), and seems more inspired by another horror film (that I have seen), Tourist Trap, with a similar plot about a group of teenagers finding themselves in a deserted town off the […]

Cure (1997)

Most horror films shout at you. Cure (1997), directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, never raises its voice. It maintains a steady whisper and is all the more unnerving for it. A Japanese horror film that was part of the ‘J-horror’ wave of the late 1990s, Cure almost stands outside of it by its ordinary, beige-brown palette […]